The Schreierstoren, the Tower Legend Turned Into Weeping

The popular story says the tower's name comes from schreien, the Dutch word for weeping, and pictures generations of sailors' wives gathered here to cry as ships pulled away toward months or years at sea. It is a good story, and it has stuck stubbornly for a very long time.

The more likely truth is quieter and more architectural. In old Dutch, schrey meant a sharp angle, and hoeck meant corner, so the tower's original name most likely described the sharp bend it sits on in the old wall, later softened by pronunciation until it sounded like a word for crying.

A carved gable stone on the tower shows a sorrowful female figure, traditionally read as a personification of the city itself, mourning the difficult position Amsterdam found itself in during the tense years before the revolt against Spanish rule. That single carving may well be the seed from which the entire weeping legend eventually grew.

Whichever version you prefer, the two stories now sit comfortably side by side, the tidier folk tale and the more prosaic linguistic explanation, and most guides tell both rather than choosing definitively between them.

One historical fact about this tower needs no correction at all. In April 1609, the English navigator Henry Hudson set sail from close to this spot aboard the Halve Maen, commissioned by the Dutch East India Company to search for a northern route to Asia. He never found that route, but he charted a river and a harbour that would eventually become New York.

A stone plaque fixed to the tower's outer wall, placed there in the early twentieth century, commemorates that departure, making the Schreierstoren a rare local landmark with a genuinely documented connection to events on the far side of the Atlantic. Few small brick towers anywhere can claim quite so direct a line to the founding of another country's largest city.

In its working years, the Schreierstoren was never alone. Amsterdam's medieval wall carried a whole sequence of similar watchtowers at intervals along its length, each one covering its own stretch of water or road, much as the burgwal canals in the old quarter still trace the inner line of an even earlier fortification.

Almost all of those other towers came down once the city outgrew this ring and newer defences were raised further out, their bricks recycled into whatever the growing town needed next. The Schreierstoren's survival is the exception rather than the rule, which is exactly why it draws so much more attention than a single old tower might otherwise deserve.

Its position at the water's edge probably helped its case. A tower guarding an active harbour entrance kept a practical use as a lookout point for longer than one guarding a redundant stretch of dry rampart, buying it just enough extra time to be spared when the demolition crews eventually came for the rest of the wall.

The Schreierstoren now houses a small café built into its thick brick walls, a fitting modern use for a building that has spent more of its life watching travellers come and go than doing anything else. Its position close to Centraal Station also makes it an easy first landmark for anyone arriving in the city by train.

From here, the walk into the older lanes of the district takes only a few minutes, following roughly the same waterside route sailors and their families would once have taken between the harbour and the town.

American visitors in particular sometimes seek the tower out specifically for its New York connection, treating the plaque almost as a pilgrimage stop, a small reminder of how far a single voyage from this quiet corner of the city eventually travelled.

The tower makes a memorable, easy to find meeting point for an evening that starts with a short walk through Amsterdam Centrum rather than straight from a hotel lobby. Cindy sails whenever the weather allows and has a genuine fondness for the city's maritime corners, while Laura treats any story about travel and old voyages as an invitation to swap a few of her own.

For a trip that carries the evening beyond the city, a travel companion booking picks up the theme nicely. Rates for an evening at your hotel and for longer journeys are explained on the rates page, with everything confirmed on WhatsApp before you set out.