Guru Amar Das Ji built a baoli, a stepwell, at Goindwal on the Beas, with 84 steps.
It was a deliberate act of centre-building. The Guru was drawing the early Sikh community away from Hindu tirath sites by giving it a pilgrimage place of its own.
Goindwal predates Amritsar as the Sikh centre.
The baoli descends eighty-four steps, and the number is doctrinal rather than structural: eighty-four lakh is the traditional count of the forms of existence a soul passes through. Reciting the Japji on each step is a practice attached to the site and it is not prescribed anywhere in the Rehat Maryada.
Goindwal sits on the Beas at a ford, which is why it was built there. It was a crossing on the road between Lahore and Delhi, and the sangat coming from either direction had to pass it. Guru Amar Das Ji chose an existing traffic point rather than a retreat, which is the same logic Guru Ram Das Ji applied at Amritsar a generation later.
The town also holds the Goindwal pothis tradition, the earliest Sikh manuscripts, compiled here before the Adi Granth of 1604. Two are held privately by descendants and are seen by almost nobody. Goindwal is therefore the origin point of the Sikh scripture as a written object, and there is nothing on the ground to say so.