Named for its dirty narrow streets and even narrower gabled houses, De Pijp, (The Pipe) began as a low-income nieghborhood for workers. Today it is the up-and-coming bohemian part of town. From his De Pijp grotto, the writer Bordewijk depicted Amsterdam during World War I as a "ramshackle bordello, a wooden shoe made of rock"; Piet Mondriaan began formulating the revolutionary art of De Stijl in an attic studio on Ruysdaelkade (No. 75). From the 1890s through the early 1990s, cheap rents attracted poor families, market hawkers, students, artists, and wacky radicals, causing a common comparison with Paris' Latin Quarter. De Pijp was also dense with brothels, two of which still occupy seedy strips of the Hobbemakade and Ruysdaelkade. Eduard Jacobs sang absurd, sharply polemical sketches of the neighborhood's pimps, prostitutes, and disenfranchised heroes that figure in the typical Dutch form of musical cabaret called "kleinkunst" (small art), made ragingly popular by national icons like Freek de Jonge and Hans Teeuwen.

The Heineken Brewery attracted the first Spanish guest workers to the neighborhood during the early 1960s. Later, waves of guest workers from Turkey and Morocco and immigrants from the former colonies of Suriname and Indonesia began arriving and were fundamental in revitalizing the area around Albert Cuyp Market with shops, restaurants, and cultural diversity. By the 1980s, De Pijp was a truly global village, with more than 126 nationalities. Construction for a new underground Metro line has literally ripped through this area. Due to be completed by 2013, up-market investors and yuppies have already begun taking over parts of the neighborhood. But for now, De Pijp remains a prime spot for cheap international eats and pub-crawling at local bars and cafés. Plus, you won't find many tourists in this central and lively part of Amsterdam.