Ivo Samkalden

Ivo Samkalden was born in Rotterdam on 10 August 1912. He studied colonial administration at Leiden University and earned a doctorate in law there in 1938. That same year he left for the Dutch East Indies as a civil servant. After the Japanese invasion he was interned in camps until September 1945.

Back in the Netherlands his career took off. He worked at the Ministry of Agriculture, became a professor in Wageningen and Leiden, and served twice as Minister of Justice, from 1956 to 1958 and from 1965 to 1966. He was known as a sharp legal mind with a huge capacity for work.

A city on the move

Samkalden became mayor of Amsterdam on 1 August 1967, just as the city was bursting with energy and conflict. Students occupied the Maagdenhuis, the university's administrative building. And in the summer of 1970 Dam Square turned into Europe's open-air dormitory: every night between 600 and 1,000 young people slept in sleeping bags on and around the square. Residents complained about the nuisance, and thefts had doubled.

The city's executive (the mayor and aldermen) banned sleeping on the square from 6 pm on 24 August 1970. That evening about a thousand young people gathered on the Dam and riots broke out. The next day something unplanned happened: sailors and marines from the bases at Den Helder and Doorn cleared the square on their own initiative. The navy's top brass strongly condemned it.

From October 1971 to March 1972 Samkalden was ill. Alderman Wim Polak stood in for him, and five years later Polak would succeed him for good.

The metro and the Nieuwmarkt

Meanwhile the city was growing outward. In November 1968 the first residents moved into the new high-rise district of Bijlmermeer, and a metro line was built to link it to the centre. The tunnel under the Nieuwmarkt neighbourhood meant demolishing homes that residents considered perfectly sound. Evictions on 24 March 1975, later dubbed 'Blue Monday', and on 8 April 1975 turned into fierce riots, with over a hundred city police and five hundred military police facing the protesters. Afterwards the council shelved plans for further metro lines.

Samkalden left office on 1 June 1977. In 1985 he was given the honorary title of Minister of State. He died in Amsterdam on 11 May 1995.