Hotel New York

Hotel New York sits at the very tip of the Wilhelminapier, in the same harbor district that OMA's De Rotterdam now dominates, but its story runs a century deeper. Built in 1901 by architects J. Müller and C.M. Droogleever Fortuyn as the head office of the Holland America Line, it was extended in stages — a second wing in 1908, an octagonal tower in 1916, and a matching tower on the south side in 1919 — giving the building its asymmetrical, twin-towered silhouette. The style is Jugendstil, Dutch Art Nouveau: dark brick, ornamental detailing, and decorative ironwork, with the original "Holland-Amerika Lijn" lettering still fixed to its facade.

For over seventy years, this was the administrative heart of a shipping line that carried hundreds of thousands of European emigrants across the Atlantic to America — the very ships that gave De Rotterdam its name. When Holland America moved its headquarters to Seattle in 1977, the building fell empty, was squatted in the late 1980s, and sat abandoned on an otherwise desolate pier until it reopened in 1992 as Hotel New York, becoming the first sign of life in what would become Rotterdam's redeveloped waterfront district.