The Eastern Docklands (Dutch: Oostelijk Havengebied) is a neighborhood of Amsterdam, Netherlands, located between the IJ and the Nieuwe Vaart in the borough of Amsterdam-Oost.
[1] The area, about 2/3 water and 1/3 land, consists of an extension of the Oostelijke Handelskade, east of the center of town, and four artificial "islands" (peninsulas), all of which were former industrial and harbor locations of the port of Amsterdam.
In the early 2000s, after a large-scale reorganization, the city's biggest post-World War II building project, the Eastern Docklands was de-industrialized and became home to some 17,000 people living in some the highest population densities in the Netherlands.
[3] The development of the Oostelijke Handelskade (1876)[5] gave Amsterdam a deep-water harbor for the first time in its history, and warehouses such as Europa, Azië, and Africa jumpstarted economic activity in 1883.
In 1896 the IJkade was constructed contiguous to the dam, and the closed-in area raised with earth won from dredging the North Sea Canal, the digging of which had started in 1876.
On the western part, one of the occupants was the Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland (SMN), which had reached the limit of its possible expansion on the Oostelijke Handelskade.
In the first half of the 20th century there was ongoing development, including for instance the increasing transport of passengers by ship to the Dutch East Indies, but after World War II harbor activity moved more to the city's Western Docklands[6] and in the 1960s, despite the coming of some new industries such as Mobil,[7] the area became less busy, due to the increase in containerisation and the ever-growing size of cargo ships.
One of its characteristic buildings is the Lloyd Hotel, which was constructed in 1921 by Evert Breman as temporary housing for emigrants to Latin America, many of whom from Eastern Europe.