The van Eesteren family

The entire Alblasserwaard region buzzes with zeal and enterprise. No wonder that Balten van Eesteren (1874-1967) swapped Nieuwe Tonge for Alblasserdam in 1897. In the same year, he registered his first child, Cornelis van Eesteren, at the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. Three more sons and three daughters were to follow.

Starting out as a bricklayer, he switched to contracting in 1896 and was soon awarded large contracts, such as the construction of the office of Smits Shipyards in 1903. In 1906, he joined forces with Leendert Boele to form Boele & Van Eesteren. Even though Leen Boele withdrew from the company in 1918, the company name has survived to this day.

The third son, Jacobus Pieter (1901) joined his father in the business, but left Boele & Van Eesteren in 1930 to start his own business. He did so with his father's approval as long as he settled in the region of The Hague. J.P. van Eesteren's first major project was the construction of Feyenoord Stadium in the mid 1930s.

In the meantime, Balten van Eesteren had also become active in municipal politics in Alblasserdam, from 1913 as a councillor and from 1919 to 1924 as an alderman. In the latter year, he became a member of the provincial council for the CHU in Zuid-Holland. In the early 1920s, when Alblasserdam was faced with a severe housing shortage, Van Eesteren was the driving force behind the Dam expansion plan. His son Cornelis acted as a free urban development advisor.

In 1924 Boele & Van Eesteren settled in The Hague. This also meant that the Van Eesteren family moved there. When the new housing estates were completed after Van Eesteren's departure from Alblasserdam, the municipal council decided to name the new, wide canal that criss-crossed the village like a green strip after him: Van Eesterensingel. It is not inconceivable that Cornelis designed this spacious canal, with its separate traffic routes. This is not known with certainty, because the municipal archives were largely destroyed by acts of war in the May of 1940.

Another tangible reminder of the Van Eesteren family's presence in Alblasserdam is a house that Cornelis van Eesteren designed in 1923 for the widow Van Zessen-Zwartbol: the Huis van Zessen, which is now owned by the EFL Foundation.

Photo: Huub van Eesteren during seminar Mapping the City, 2014, by Roberto Rocco