The 9 Streets

This guide to The 9 Streets in Amsterdam starts with the smell that used to hang over Wolvenstraat and its neighbors: in 1612, city planners handed this canal-side grid to leather tanners, who named each street for the hide worked there — wolf, bear, deer, cattle. You'll hear how skins shipped in from the Baltic and colonial trade routes were cured here and sent across Europe as gloves and boots, and how the district's fortunes shifted across the centuries that followed. Listen for how the old street signs still name a trade the shops below them have long since replaced.