Bakkerbrug

The drawing shows a large screen set up on the left side of the bridge. This screen was used to protect the dairy market from rain and wind and during the summer also from the sun. By the looks of it, other products were also traded there. Farmers and gardeners falso sold fruits and vegetables there. And in the middle of the drawing, there is a woman with a basket of chickens on her head. The gables forming the canal wall on the left belong to the houses Groot and Klein Schorrenburg. In the nineteenth century, those houses disappeared behind one large facade. The house on the left is now part of the warehouse Hema. The lovely little house with the bell gable on the corner of Bakkerstraat and the Hamsteeg next to it has remained almost the same. The houses have different windows: windows with small panes and large sash windows. Those eighteenth-century windows with small panes became old-fashioned in the early nineteenth century. At this time, it had become possible to cast large panes of glass, and so more and more sash windows with large panes appeared in the cityscape. There are also two buildings with shop windows. The windows in the lower facade have been extended outward into a bay window to display merchandise.

A street lamp hans above the street, this is a new phenomenon in the city in the early nineteenth century. The lantern had to be lowered with a rope to be lit by the lanternlighter, a electricity and gas lighting did not yet exist. There must have been an oil lamp in the shade. Only in 1842 did the city of Utrecht get gas-powered street lighting.

The Bakkerbrug is cordoned off with an iron counter and the canal by a wall, as shown in the picture on the right. A staircase leads to the wharf. That part of the yard belongs to the residence above it and is therefore separated from the neighbor's with a fence. Now look at the doorway of the basement, a man walks in. This man is a bag carrier with a white cap on his head, like those worn fifty years ago by coal farmers and meat carriers. In the water lies a boat, as until well into the nineteenth century, the transportation of merchandise was mainly by water.

A dairy market in the open is not ideal. Therefore, in 1864, the municipality built the Butter Hall on the Mariaplaats. Later on, that building became the Handelsbeurs, now known as Bison Bowling.