Westerpark

This guide to Westerpark in Amsterdam starts with what's under the grass: eighty years of coal-gas production that left the ground laced with tar, cyanide, and asbestos before the site shut down in 1967. It follows the decades that Isaac Gosschalk's ornate Victorian gasworks buildings sat abandoned afterward, too handsome to tear down and too toxic to enter. That standoff between the city and its own poisoned ground is where the guide begins.