De Hallen Amsterdam, Cultural center in Oud-West, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
De Hallen Amsterdam is a cultural center in the Oud-West neighborhood of Amsterdam, housed in a series of connected former industrial buildings that contain cinema rooms, exhibition spaces, a library, a hotel, and a covered food market. All sections are reached through a shared interior passage, making the whole complex easy to walk through.
The building was constructed in the late 19th century as a tram depot serving the Amsterdam tramway network and was used for decades as a maintenance and storage facility for the city's trams. After a long period of disuse, the complex reopened in 2015 following major works that kept the original steel structure and brick walls largely intact.
The indoor food market inside the complex, known as Foodhallen, was one of the first covered street food markets in the Netherlands and has since inspired similar concepts in other Dutch cities. During the day, the space draws a mix of neighbors stopping for coffee and visitors moving between the different food stands.
The complex sits in the heart of Oud-West, an area that is easy to reach on foot or by bicycle from the city center, and it is close to Leidseplein. The different parts of the venue, such as the cinema, the market, and the hotel, may keep separate opening times, so it is worth checking what is open before you visit.
One of the cinema rooms inside the complex was fitted with an original Art Deco interior taken from a Paris cinema that dates to the 1920s, which was fully dismantled and rebuilt here. This means that visitors in Amsterdam are sitting in a room whose walls and ceiling physically came from Paris.
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