Marcel van Grunsven was mayor of Heerlen

Heerlen

Heerlen is a city and a municipality in the southeastern Netherlands. The municipality is the second largest in the province of Limburg. It forms part of Parkstad Limburg, , an agglomeration of about 220,000 inhabitants.After its early Roman beginnings and a rather modest medieval period, Heerlen...

from 1926 to 1961. He led Heerlen through the crisis years, the Second World War, and the booming mining years. He didn’t fear personal sacrifice, like salary

Salary

A salary is a form of periodic payment from an employer to an employee, which may be specified in an employment contract. It is contrasted with piece wages, where each job, hour or other unit is paid separately, rather than on a periodic basis....

 cuts. Imminently after his installment he turned Heerlen politics around, also eliminating the cities debt.

Together with city planers and architects, for instance Frits Peutz

Frits Peutz

F.P.J. Peutz was a Dutch architect.Peutz was born in a Catholic family in Uithuizen in Groningen, a mostly Protestant province in the north of the Netherlands. In 1910 he was sent to the Rolduc boarding school in Kerkrade in the Catholic province of Limburg for his higher education. In 1914 he...

, he bettered the infrastructure of Heerlen, trying to fix social-economical problems. He was also a lover of arts and culture stimulating it in the city. He was made honorary citizen of Heerlen and the culture price of Heerlen is named after him (Van Grunsvenprijs).