Few streets have had a longer or more torrid history; until recently known as the Black Hole of Amsterdam (because of its concentration of drug users), the Zeedijk is now on the up-and-up. As the original dam created to keep the sea at bay, Zeedijk has been around since Amsterdam began life as a fishing hamlet. The building of this dike in 1380 probably represented the first twitchings of democracy in these parts as individual fishing and farming folks were united to make battle with that pesky sea. Less noble democratic forces saw it quickly specialize in the entertaining of sailors -- a service it ended up providing for centuries. A more bohemian edge came into the mix in the last century when it provided a mecca for world-class jazz musicians who came to jam in its small clubs and cafés after their more official gigs in the Concertgebouw. One of the more popular was the still-existing Casablanca (No. 26), which regularly saw the likes of local heroes such as Kid Dynamite and Teddy Cotton and more international names such as Erroll Garner, Gerry Mulligan, and Count Basie. However, other, more dingy dens began a lucrative sideline in heroin. By the 1970s, the area had become known throughout the country for its concentration of drug traffickers, where the only tourists were those attached to heavily guided "criminal safaris." But recently Zeedijk has gone through a radical gentrification. Although certainly not sterile of its past, it's now much easier to accept the stray, dubious-looking character as merely part of the street's scenery as opposed to its definition.

As if to tell a tale of rebirth, the first building on the right is the Sint Olofskapel (St. Olaf Church), named after the patron saint of dikes, St. Odulphus. This 17th-century structure sports a life-affirming sculpture: grains growing out of a prone skeleton (verily, in times of yore this is what passed for a positive message). After the Altercation, it began a long history of varying functions. Today, it's a convention hall attached by an underground passage to the Golden Tulip Barbizon Palace Hotel on Prins Hendrikkade.

Across the street at No. 1 is one of only two timbered houses left in the city. It does have stone sides -- as law dictated after the great fires of 1421 and 1452, the latter of which destroyed a full three-quarters of the town. Dating from around 1550, in't Aephen ("In the Monkeys") provided bedding to destitute sailors if they promised to return from their next voyage with a monkey. It worked: it was soon filled with monkeys and their accompanying lice. And to this day if someone is caught scratching his head, the folk response is "You've been staying with the monkeys." The way each floor sticks slightly more outward than the one below it accounts for the way most of Amsterdam's brick buildings lean forward: they were built aesthetically to follow this line (to ape the wooden architectural forms that preceded). An added bonus was that goods being hoisted into upper floors would not hit the windows. When you walk onward, note the first alley on the right, Sint Olofssteeg, which looks down on the "House on Three Alleys," and the way it goes -- for Amsterdam's standards anyway -- plummeting downward and hence illustrating Zeedijk's roots as dike.

Café Maandje at No. 65 evokes the 1930s, when the first openly gay drinking and dancing dens in the city began popping up here. Its window maintains a shrine to its former proprietor and the spiritual forebear of lesbian biker babes everywhere: Bet van Beeren (1902-67). Although the café opens only on the rarest of occasions, a model of its interior can be viewed at the Amsterdams Historisch Museum. The rest of the street is a quirky mixture of middle-range Asian restaurants, brown cafés with carpeted tables, specialty shops and galleries, and the occasional Chinese medicinal shop. The Chinese community is in full visual effect at the end of the street, where recently the gloriously colorful pagoda-shape Fo Kuang Shan Buddhist Temple (No. 118) arose.