New Amsterdam's waterfront retains some of the best-preserved examples of Berbice-style colonial wooden architecture in Guyana. The characteristic buildings — raised on stilts, with jalousie shutters, fretwork trim, and pitched roofs — were built by the Dutch and later British colonial administration and the plantocracy they served. Many have been lost over the decades, but enough survive to give a sense of what the colonial capital once looked like.
A walk along the waterfront streets in the morning, before the heat builds, takes in a handful of these surviving structures alongside the river views. The overall atmosphere is of a town that has retained its colonial street pattern but lost many of the buildings that once filled it. New Amsterdam has a quiet, slightly faded dignity that contrasts sharply with Georgetown's more chaotic energy.