The Lloyd Hotel: from emigrants to prisoners, and back again

Cycle along the Oostelijke Handelskade and you pass a solid brick building shaped like an H, with a tower in the middle. It looks sturdy and a little stern. That suits its history: few buildings in Amsterdam have had so many different lives.

A hotel as bait

The building went up between 1918 and 1921 for the Koninklijke Hollandsche Lloyd, an Amsterdam shipping line that carried passengers to South America. The architect was Evert Breman. It was completed on 1 June 1921: a hotel for some nine hundred emigrants who waited here a few days for their ship to leave.

You often read that these people were on their way to New York, including in the Bosatlas van Amsterdam. That is not right. The Lloyd ships sailed via Brazil and Montevideo, among other ports, to Buenos Aires, and the national monuments register explicitly calls the building a reminder of the great emigration to South America. The confusion probably comes from Hotel New York in Rotterdam, the former office of the Holland America Line.

The guests came mainly from Eastern Europe: Poland, Romania, Hungary and the Balkans, and many were poor Jewish emigrants. For the shipping line the hotel was also bait: offer people a decent place to wait and they were more likely to book with you.

First the inspection, then the shower

Before anyone could enter the hotel, they went through a medical inspection and a shower in the quarantine building next door. That was not just about care. If a passenger was refused on the other side of the ocean, the shipping line had to bring him back at its own expense. The Amsterdam health service even filmed these inspections in the 1920s.

The company did not enjoy its hotel for long. It cost about eight times the budget, which contributed to the downfall of the Lloyd, which went bankrupt in the mid-1930s. The city bought the building.

Camp and cell

From 1938 Jewish refugees from Germany were housed here. In January 1939 the Lloyd Hotel was on an official list of internment camps for foreigners, but that same year the refugees had to leave: the army needed the building for the mobilisation. During the occupation people were held here, and after the war it remained a prison. From 1963 it held boys: it was then called the State Institution for Boys.

From one to five stars

Around 1989 the youth prison closed and the building fell into disrepair. Artists moved in, as they did in the empty warehouses nearby. In 1996 the city asked for plans, and the idea of Suzanne Oxenaar and Otto Nan won: a hotel with a cultural embassy inside. It opened on 11 November 2004 with 117 rooms rated from one to five stars. The stars were not about luxury but about the size of the room, so the cheapest and one of the most expensive hotel beds in the city were under the same roof.

That concept is gone. The building was sold in 2019, closed at the end of 2021 for renovation and since summer 2023 has been called The Hoxton, Lloyd Amsterdam. The stained glass and old tiles remain, the restaurant is named after the architect Breman, and the cocktail bar is in the former ticket office, where emigrants once arranged their passage.

More about this area? Read on about KNSM Island and the shipping lines.