This week’s travel dream: Amsterdam’s latest renaissance

Amsterdam is entering its “second golden age,” said Raphael Kadushin in Condé Nast Traveler. Forget the Dutch capital’s image as an amusement park for hash smokers and patrons of prostitution. The beautiful city that I knew as a child still wears a comforting patina, but a spirit of renewal courses through its watery veins. Local pride has surged since the historic Canal District was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010. In the years since, the city has renovated “virtually all” of its major museums, turned the dumpy East Harbor into a showcase of contemporary architecture, and initiated the gentrification of the Red Light District.

“The new mood was obvious” the minute I arrived at my hotel. The Ambassade, created from a string of 17th- and 18th-century canal houses, affords a view all the way down the Herengracht, one of Amsterdam’s three major canals. Just one bridge away sits the Grachtenhuis, a new museum in another restored canal house that “may be the best expression of the city’s epiphany: You can’t reclaim history without telling your own story well.” Inside, projected silhouettes of dairymaids festooned the walls, and models showed how the city grew. The entire Canal District is a “world wonder”: Its 7,000 standing landmarks make it Europe’s largest historic center. Walking the Leidsegracht, a canal whose bridges and gabled homes “epitomize the city’s grace,” is “like diving into the quietude of a Vermeer canvas.” The sun here “turns whole stretches of the canal molten”; the buildings’ brick façades “become almost furry.”

“The sun followed me back to the Nine Streets neighborhood.” Famous for its cafés and boutiques, the district was crowded with visitors checking out the newer restaurants and galleries. On my way to the Noordermarkt flea market, I passed countless single-theme stores, one selling chandeliers, another Moroccan pillows. “The arty tribe” that shops the flea market arrives by bicycle to pick through “the junk of their ancestors”: chipped Delft tiles and vintage dolls. I strolled back to my hotel carrying a miniature canal house.

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At the Ambassade (ambassade-hotel.nl), doubles start at $244.