WILLEMSTAD - It is a nice walk from Brionplein, with its memories of the struggle for freedom, to the Weg naar Welgelegen, where the carnival parade comes to a climax. Otrobanda, the urban soul of the Caribbean island of Curaçao, is a large neighborhood. Jacob Gelt Dekker was responsible for a part of it.

He could do that literally, because the man trained as a dentist had made a fortune as an entrepreneur. Your photo developed and printed in just one hour? A rental car for a reasonable price? Jaap Dekker, who later put the term "Gelt" in his name, made it all possible together with fellow brothers. And decided at the end of the last century to invest his money in a very different way.

So in Otrobanda, the district whose glory days, about which authors such as Erich Zielinski, Jan Brokken and Boeli van Leeuwen, seemed seriously forgotten. The rhythms of Curaçao composers of classical music no longer sounded here, but rather the sometimes screams of the chollers, the drug addicts who want to wash the car of a visitor, but if the addiction need of the man is high would also steel the wheels of that car.

On a pedestal

"Kaya kaya" is the Papiamento expression for "street life." Around the turn of the century that was no longer the brittle life of teenage girls who, with their school uniforms still on, crept into the alleys to mingle with boys, but a much rougher ghetto life. Gelt Dekker bought a decaying but monumental building there, and then started renovating much more. He said he invested tens of millions of euros in his assets. But that is a bit too big.

"Jacob Gelt Dekker had money, but also advisers, co-financers and of course the Curaçao Monuments Fund, which was already busy taking on historic buildings," says Michael Newton. He is a prominent heritage expert and restoration architect on the island. "He certainly had good intentions with Otrobanda, but you can doubt that he really had a vision for making the neighborhood liveable again."

In any case, Gelt Dekker did not doubt himself. "Everything is vanity," he told the Volkskrant (Dutch Newspaper) in 2006. That a bust of himself had appeared in the meantime did not really surprise him. "He also fixed things because it gave him a kick," Newton believes. "He also liked to place himself on a pedestal. So literally, yes. "Apart from that, around a hundred buildings have been improved nicely in the neighborhood of Breedestraat. One of them, a building with an unclear function, still bears the title "The Jacob Gelt Dekker Institute" on the facade.

Slavery museum

According to Prime Minister Eugene Rhuggenaath, the slavery museum in Otrobanda is "the most beautiful gift to Curaçao" that the Dutch entrepreneur, who has suffered a large part of his life from various forms of cancer, has left behind. It is indeed a very valuable contribution. It is, however, partly ruined by the highly criticized school of thought, which is adhered to by Gelt Dekker, according to which everything of value in the world was conceived long ago in Africa in its purest form.

The entrepreneur-benefactor also wrote columns on Curaçao. In it, he not only worked hard, but sometimes also with an annoying undertone of superiority, on people on the island who were in charge of politics and otherwise, but who, in the eyes of Gelt Dekker, were not yet worthy of a wheelbarrow of cement to push the scaffolding of his renovation buildings. It earned him both mockery and hatred. He left.

In Otrobanda, everything was in danger of being lost again. This time, however, the island residents themselves are giving a new impulse to the livability of this beautiful neighborhood. People like Kurt Schoop, Clayton Lasten and Raygen Zuiverloon. "The involvement of local residents is incredibly important," Zuiverloon summarized their philosophy.

Jacob Gelt Dekker was less satisfied with that. But they will not soon forget him, there in Otrobanda, "on the other side".