De Zwaanstraat

This photo used to be a postcard from the first half of the 20th depicting the Zwaanstraat with slightly right at the front: Café Rijk-Aarts, a cafeteria and restaurant where an apartment stands nowadays. The Zwaanstraat is named to Johannes Paulus de Zwaan who had been mayor of the village from 1880 until 1896. Together with Heinrich Tappenbeck, a German textile merchant, he turned Wijk aan Zee from a fishing village into a seaside resort. One of their actions were digging up a path from the Zwaanstraat through the dunes that separates the village of the beach so the tourists and villagers have a direct passage to the beach. Today, this street is now the main beach entrance from the village and numerous cafeterias and restaurants are settled here. During summers and hot days, this street is filled with tourists eating, drinking and heading their way to or back from the beach. At the other side of the road, at the terrain of the Dorpskerk (village church), a Commonwealth war grave stands here where fallen British and Canadian forces from WW II lay their rest between the graves of the locals.