geschiedenis24.nl/speler.program.12250984.html A nice movie from 1950, about the royal visit to my town, four years before I was born. This month, like in former years, every Tuesday evening we can enjoy the ringing of the chimes of the Oranjecarillon (Orange Carillon) in the tower of the Grote Kerk (Great Church) in front of my house. In 1950 queen Juliana officially put the carillon into action. Although the queen layed a garland of flowers on the food of the monument that reminds on the fisherman that have lost their lives at sea and a triumphal arch made from herring casks can be seen, the mayer Jan Heusdens not wanted to show the royal visitors an old fishermans settlement, but a modern expanding Industrial town. His dream, a city of 135,000 inhabitants, never came true... Is that a pity? I do not think so. It is more to pity that in those times the town government had a mission and a vision, and nowadays I miss that drive. Not a drive to make the town bigger and bigger, but a drive to make it better. I think quality is more important than quantity, but even the new town hall extention is a miserable mistake. The former extention (by the famous architect Jan Hoogstad) was, seen from the point of urban planning, a failure. They just replaced it by a new failure, only in a more modern coat. A coat that not even strokes the eye. It is an one-in-many-thousands solution with brickwork wallpaper on the façades. It will be outdated in just a few years.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 10:17:04 +0000