The cathedral rises from the warren of gabled houses and cobbled streets like a fantastic medieval rocket poised to explore some unknown realm of faith. As my tram rounds the corner, I lean to one side for a better view of the exquisite trickery in the airy, bone-white belfry; that the spire is actually made of stone would strain anyone’s credulity.
“It’s lovely since they cleaned it,” says the Indian woman sitting next to me in a vermilion sari under a shearling coat. “When I was a girl, the cathedral was black with soot.”
I must have looked puzzled, for she just smiled, as if to remind me that appearances can be deceiving, especially in Antwerp.
Stepping off the tram and windblown under a low, gray sky, I head down Appelmansstraat, a narrow street near the rail station whose random façades of ’50s modern, Deco, Art Nouveau, and other florid 19th-century styles look like so many odd books on a collector’s shelf. Following the aroma of coffee and pastries, I arrive at Del Rey, the most elegant tea salon in this ancient North Sea port. I order a chocolate tart but remain puzzled by the waitress’s disapproving glare until I realize that I’ve tracked flaxseed—bright red and shiny—all across the carpet.
Of course. I’ve just come from the sprawling port, only a few miles away, and remember an enormous ship from Valparaíso unloading flax as I passed its rusty hull. I am vaguely embarrassed until I spot two young women, one with a pierced eyebrow, the other with tattooed hands, taking a seat. Surely their presence in this consummately civilized refuge of European ritual will mitigate my offense. But to my surprise, two grandes dames on their way out make a point of stopping by their table. It seems that one of the younger women is the florist of the moment, very much in favor with the wives of the local diamond merchants who patronize this sublime little salon.
Proudly wearing the mantles of wealth and culture attendant upon European bourgeois society, Belgium’s second city is appropriately epicurean and refined. But Antwerp is also magnificently unsettling, which is why I love it. Tensions and contradictions run just below the surface. Or, sometimes, they are garishly apparent: In the red-light district, one of the largest in Europe, women from Ukraine, Belarus, and Africa strike poses in shop windows that are framed in eerie red neon, before the gaze of swaggering men not used to dry land and so much beer.
The first time I visited, in 1987, the city was just attracting the attention of the fashion world. Outside its glittery center—Antwerp is a very rich city—many of its neighborhoods had the appealing shabbiness of old slippers. There was good, if predictable, classic French food served in formal restaurants whose interiors mimicked the warm scenes of a Flemish painting. But grabbing a plate of mussels and frites on the run proved as much fun as dining out.
More than a decade later, the city has lost none of its homey charm, but now its forlorn 19th-century waterfront has been gentrified, and a lively neighborhood flourishes around the new museums of contemporary art and photography in the Zuid quarter. In the 1960s two dock basins in the Zuid were filled in to become a big square, today surrounded by galleries, shops, restaurants, and cafés. You can stop for a beer or coffee at Cargo, whose cast-concrete décor recalls Santa Monica more than Flanders, or stop by L’Entrepôt du Congo, where the setting is prewar and proletarian, from the antique, cream-colored globe lamps to the shiny chrome spigots running the length of the bar.
As Antwerp booms culturally, signs are everywhere that the city is evolving into the capital of a newly revived and prosperous realm—Flanders—whose rising autonomy jibes with the trend toward decentralization in the ever-unifying Europe. After 170 years, Flemish-speaking Flanders, whose language is similar to Dutch, is finally easing out of its sour, contentious marriage with Wallonia, the historically dissimilar, francophone region of western Belgium. In fact, most of the natives consider themselves Flemish first, then European, and finally Belgian.
The fact that Antwerp is thriving represents a reversal of regional fortunes in Belgium. For a century after the country was founded in 1830, Wallonia was rich, due to its coal and steel industries, and Flanders was poor and agricultural. Now Flanders is home to robust service industries and an emerging high-tech economy.
But the core business of Antwerp, culturally at least, remains confronting the bourgeoisie, which, to its credit, eventually comes around to the newcomers and their new ideas—not for love of change but for a chance to make a profit. This instinct to reach for a calculator rather than a gun is key to the city’s character. “Antwerp is primordially a city of traders,” says Geert Bruloot, a local retail king and PR maestro who was instrumental in orchestrating the rave debut of the city’s first generation of fashion designers at the London Designer Show in 1986. Over lunch at the trendy bistro Hungry Henrietta, he tells me, with a dose of Flemish pride, “I love the mixture of cultures in Antwerp. It’s the reason I couldn’t live anywhere else. Antwerp is to Brussels what Barcelona is to Madrid.”
Linda Loppa, director of the incipient Flanders Fashion Institute, echoes his praise: “People feel free to try something new here. Antwerp has a sense of fantasy you don’t find in the Netherlands or Germany.” Loppa shows me around a huge, derelict electrical-goods factory in the heart of the city that is being converted into a costume museum to open in 2001—a fascinating measure of Antwerp’s future ambitions. The space is rather magical—the perfect spot to stage Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast—and revolves around a soaring central staircase linking four sprawling floors, each with very high ceilings, framing a central atrium. “We want to create a new pole of attraction for visitors to Antwerp,” she says. “I started working on this project in 1996; the breakthrough came when the provincial government of Flanders realized that the institute could be an important addition to the local cultural landscape.”
Pinterest
