People had been living in this area since about A.D. 1100, farming and fishing and building to contain and manage the flow of the water around them.

The land, as with most of The Netherlands, consisted of delta clay and sand overlaid with peat bogs and wet grasslands — all of it occasioned by meandering rivers and lakes of changeable size.

Slotermeer itself wasn't much of a lake. A shallow body that would vary seasonally between small and medium in area, it was often dry in the Summertime — or, as much of natural Holland, dryish. But it was mostly wetland, and a lake in the sense that it was normally covered by water.

Just lower than the surrounding property, Slotermeer was left as wetland until the riches and technology of the Dutch Golden Age -- and its hunger for more arable property — demanded and enabled its reclamation.*

Poldering was an ancient practice by the early 1600's, but drainage of wetlands had only become possible as the technology of the water-pumping windmill had improved. The first large area to be drained was only about a half-century old when Slotermeer fell dry.

The new land, surrounded by dikes and dried — impoldered — became Sloterdijkermeerpolder.

The area was not large as polders go; but was another example of the remarkable new ability to make dry land of a watery area.

But Sloterdijkermeerpolder didn't always keep its inhabitants' feet dry. It flooded six times between 1647 and 1726, due to breaches in the dike system. After each flood, and each repair job, the polder's windmill pumped its land dry; but it was in a dangerous area, and was difficult to maintain.

The district of Sloten, roughly triangular, was endangered on two sides: the Ij, an arm of the sea, was to the north, and the Haarlemmermeer, a big lake, was to the west. The Haarlemmermeer was in a state of growthfulness, and in fact it swallowed a couple of Sloten villages in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The famed engineer Jan Adriaanszoon Leeghwater called in 1641 for the drainage of Haarlemmermeer. It would have been a massive project, requiring 200 windmills, to drain and keep dry a lake that had grown to cover nearly 170 square kilometers. The lake would remain in place for two centuries, and would remain a threat, until the invention of the steam engine.

In the autumn of 1836, a storm overwhelmed the control systems, and the whole of Sloten, up to the edge of Amsterdam, fell under water. This provided incentive and prompted a decision to finally drain the Haarlemmermeer and be done with its danger.

According to an elevation model of the Netherlands, and its comparison between the ground-level at the building where I lived in Osdorp and that of an adjacent historical polder, the level rose during the sand-moving project of the late 1940's and 50's by about three meters.

In 1852 the Haarlemmermeer was dry land. After the completion of the North Sea Canal in 1876, the Ij was largely claimed from water, and its danger greatly diminished. Sloten had become relatively safe.

From 1870, Amsterdam began to grow outside of the Singelgracht, now its inner canal. After expanding southward in 1896 into what is now Amstelveen, the city proceeded to swallow Sloten, officially annexed in 1921.

It was not for nothing that the sparsely-populated Sloten became part of the municipality of Amsterdam, and in 1935 it was an important part of the General Expansion Plan (Algemeen Uitbreidingsplan, the AUP.) The Sloterdijkmeerpolder would be a critical part of the AUP.

The reason for a planning a lake in a residential/commercial zone was not recreational or esthetic, but for the harvest of sand.

The surrounding terrain was considerably below sea-level, and any thought of building large-scale housing would encounter this fact. The plan for the development of Sloten came to include a massive relocation of earth, from the reborn lake to the outlying neighborhoods.

World War II slowed plans for the dredging of the site of the former Slotermeer. But after the war — and with a renewed sense of urgency in its need for new housing — the city proceeded with its expansion plan. Sloterdijkermeerpolder was dredged and its material spread over wide areas of Sloten between 1948 and 1956.

Massive amounts of sand were taken from the ground in what is now Sloterplas, a body of water that, at 30 meters, is deeper than most of the Netherlands is high.

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The Dutch word, landwinning, is more accurate.