Spijker Bar

About

The Spijker has been on the Kerkstraat since the late 1970s, opened in imitation of The Spike in New York and named after it. It started as a leather bar and has kept the bones of one while turning into something more sociable: quality music, cheap enough to stay a while, and a room where people talk to each other.

What is inside is what makes it: vintage porn and cartoons running on screens above the bar, a pool table with a regular weekly competition, and a darkroom at the back with glory holes. The walls carry salvaged wood panelling, posters and forty-odd years of accumulated memorabilia.

Upstairs was an American repertory theatre between 1983 and 1987, which staged some of the earliest plays about AIDS in the Netherlands. Kerkstraat was the city's main gay street before the Reguliersdwarsstraat took over, and the Spijker is one of two venues left on it, the other being Club Church.