17 In the city of Antwerp 63

A townscape like a picture-postcard, although nobody would recognise the city of Antwerp in it. It used to be a common habit to keep the memory of the place of birth or former residence alive. Surnames, for instance, but also many house names bear witness to this.
For instance, in Maastricht one found the city names of towns like Maaseik, Brussels, Nijmegen, Cologne, Den Bosch, Stockholm, Milan, to mention just a few.
It is difficult to pinpoint the original location of IN THE CITY OF ANTWERP. It had been in storage for a long time and was donated to the museum in 1923. Around 1952 it was relocated at Boschstraat 90.

There may have been several gable stones with this image. For example, The Limburg Lion III writes about 'The city of Antwerp' in 1683. Strangely, the date of this gable stone is 1763, but that does not mean that the building did not already have this name, because house names were not automatically depicted as gable stones/signboards or mentioned as texts on the facade. It is interesting to note that in the 'gichtenregister' (=purchase/sales register) of the period 1665-1779, 'The city of Antwerp' is mentioned at least ten times with the neighbouring houses 'the Golden Kettle' and 'the Golden Deer', which are known to be situated at the beginning of Kleine Staat. It seems to concern the compulsory conversion of wooden houses and facades into stone ones for fire safety reasons. In the so-called realisation in the 'gichtregister' of a deed, Guillaume van der Heggen, as the authorised representative of vicar van der Heggen in Aubel, states that he received a loan of 6,700 guilders with an annual interest of 3 guilders and 10 francs from the three Maurissen sisters, a well-known merchant family in Maastricht. The date 1763 might therefore have something to do with this renovation. In the Journal de la Province of 1816 (see clippings newspaper), the building Kleine Staat 603 (now no. 4) is also called 'The City of Antwerp'.

The magazine De Maasgouw of 1923 says that this stone had been found in the cellar of Helstraat  1 (now St. Bernardusstraat), with the annotation that senior citizens remembered that the stone's location had been in the neighbourhood of the Kattenstraat. It is a fact that you come across several houses in Wyck that carry the name of a town, but Antwerp is not one of them. All in all, the original provenance remains unknown.