The City Crane

Look for the marker on the wharf below you. The city crane stood there for four hundred and thirty-seven years.

Anything too heavy to be carried up the slope on a man's back went up on that crane: building material, barrels, millstones. It was made of wood, driven by men walking inside a treadwheel, and it belonged to the look of the city as much as the cathedral did.

On the ninth of September 1837 a shipment arrived from England for the building next door. Four cast-iron women, each over two metres tall, ordered to carry the front of Anton Sinkel's new shop. Three went up without trouble. On the fourth the crane snapped and the whole thing went into the water.

It was never rebuilt. The statues were fished out, took their place on the facade, and are still standing there. The people of Utrecht had a nickname for them straight away, and it was not a kind one: the English whores.

The building they stand on is the next stop.