Dappermarkt on a Saturday Morning

Eight-thirty on a Saturday. The Dappermarkt is already in full swing.

I’ve been coming here my whole life — first with my mother, then alone, now still alone but with twenty more years of context. The stalls haven’t moved. The man who sells Indonesian spices has been in the same spot since before I was born. The cheese stall with the too-loud samples. The flower sellers who set up before dawn.

What has changed is everything around the edges.

The Dapperstraat itself — the street the market runs along — is unrecognisable from what it was ten years ago. The old bruine kroeg on the corner is a specialty coffee bar now. The Surinamese snackbar my father used to stop at after the market is a natural wine shop. I don’t say this to be dramatic. I say it because it’s true, and because the market itself somehow holds.

There’s a reason for that. The Dappermarkt (dappermarkt.nl, Dapperstraat, 1093 BS Amsterdam, open Monday–Saturday 9:00–17:00, Google Maps) is one of the oldest street markets in Amsterdam — over a hundred years. It has a protected status of sorts, not legal but social. The neighbourhood uses it. Not just the people who have been here forever, but also the Moroccan families, the Ghanaian families, the Turkish families who’ve been here thirty years and are now as much Oost as anyone. The market belongs to all of them.

This Saturday I bought: a bunch of tulips (€2,50), half a kilo of okra, a bag of dried limes from the spice stall, and a stroopwafel from the man who makes them fresh. I talked to the woman at the vegetable stall who always asks about my mother. I watched a toddler systematically knock over a display of onions while his father pretended not to notice.

The gentrification has not reached the Dappermarkt. Not yet. Maybe not ever — the economics of a street market are different from a building. You can’t flip a market stall the way you flip a flat.

But I notice things. More people with tote bags from expensive grocery stores, buying the same vegetables for less. More people photographing the market for Instagram. The market as aesthetic, not as necessity.

I’m not sure what to do with that observation. The market is still the market. The okra is still good. The stroopwafel is still warm.

For now, that’s enough.