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Tag Archives: תל אביב
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a window to herzl street
(If you click on the picture you can see a bigger version)
Herzl Street in south Tel Aviv was one of the city’s first streets. There are still plenty of signs of its former glories and it’s also a great place to walk if you want to see a quite different side of the city from the center.
The image on the right is a giant clock with Zodiac signs on the southernmost section of the street. It’s been broken for years (of course it’s still right twice a day). This is the seedy end of the street, near No Name Alley. There are a couple of falling-to-pieces old pre-State houses here with crumbling and bricked in arched Arab-style windows, with phoney for-sale signs on them (if you call to ask the price they tell you some ridiculous sum.) This section of the street is devoted to motorbike and motorscooter shops.
The left image is a toy store in the center of the street – an area devoted to similar stores selling wholesale and retail kid’s toys and costumes. These two guys are employed to stand outside, wear silly hats and blow bubbles all day to attract customers.
The middle image is a dusty lamp and lighting store, from the light fixtures part of the street. If you walk here at the right time – round about the late afternoon as the sun goes down – you can sometimes hear a beautiful jazz trumpet being played. The player works here – he has a music school but he plays right from his light fixtures store and fills the street with music.
Further up are wholesale clothes stores. Lots of the owners are Arabic-speaking Jews and Arabs. There are also plenty of Persian Jews here, many of the older ones were born in Iran and you can hear lots of Persian being spoken if you listen carefully. At lunchtime they congregate at the two Persian restaurants in the vicinity. It’s cool to listen to snatches of Persian here and there.
jaffa women
Jaffa women at the protest march a week ago. The situation in Jaffa is very complicated and the impetus for this march came from many things, but was sparked when local community leaders saw religious Jews from a newly-established yeshiva marching and, so people told me, lobbing stones at a mosque during prayers. So easy to think this march was a simple case of “Jews v. Arabs”. But it’s more complex. Even within Jaffa communities there is enormous diversity of culture, religion and class. Jaffa’s Arabs are Muslims, Eastern Catholics, Orthodox, Maronites; there are Jews from many different cultures and countries, there are secular and all shades of religious people. There is poverty here although there are big gaps between rich and poor. There are conflicts within these societies as well as between them but there is much consensus within and between them too, and a lot of work has been done by local people to improve community relations in Jaffa. A lot of the public anger is about people from outside Jaffa moving into the area and threatening that delicate balance.
clothes
Clothes belonging to refugee children from Sudan and Eritrea hanging out to dry in south Tel Aviv. About 500 homeless refugees sleep rough every night in south Tel Aviv, mostly in Levinsky park, although because it is cold people are now sleeping in Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station or in half-built homes on construction sites, anyplace that is warm.
Copycat Bauhaus on Nameless Alley
Perhaps one of the most surprising things about this part of south Tel Aviv – and this is about as south as you can get, right on the blurry pseudo-border with Jaffa that sort of begins at the Kibbutz Galuyot (“Ingathering of the Exiles”) road – are the Bauhaus buildings. Tel Aviv, of course, is famous for its collection of Bauhaus architecture. Brought here by German architects fleeing the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s, Bauhaus gave Tel Aviv its nickname ‘the White City‘ and its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But the White City part of Tel Aviv certainly doesn’t extend this far south and this building isn’t as old as the 1930s. This is copycat Bauhaus on Nameless Alley. Who knows what it was built for originally, but now it’s a factory and factory shop for children’s clothes.
community outreach
Washington Boulevard and Rehov Abulafya, Florentin, south Tel Aviv.
For those fond of maps (like me) here’s one showing where this is.
Storms
After the very hot weather of the past weeks – which contributed to the terrible fire in the North – the winter is now here with a powerful storm, including 100km/h winds, heavy rains, flooding, waves up to 10 metres high, and very severe sandstorms in the Negev desert. We had a sandstorm in Tel Aviv today – the picture isn’t coloured and it’s not blurred either – that’s the visibility from the amount of sand in the air, plus wind and torrential rain.
The rest of the pictures are taken yesterday on Ajami beach, Jaffa. Quite hard taking pictures when you’re trying not to be blown away by strong gales!
urban decay, urban renewal
The next few posts are photos taken around the southern part of Florentin, which is decidedly seedier than the northern half. I should know, because I lived there when I first moved to Israel – in the ground floor part of a renovated factory, on a muddy alley with no name, sandwiched between a nightclub, a Russian karaoke bar and two dodgy gambling joints.
These shots are on or around Abulafia Street, which is gradually being transformed from a slum (which it still is) to a trendy place for designers including Kastiel
This is a typical scene – an apartment block in the Bauhaus style, left to decay.
House sign, “Abulafia 7a” hand made in Hebrew and Arabic. Abulafia is both an Arabic and a Jewish name. It’s a prominent name in Tel Aviv-Jaffa because of the famous Abulafia Arab bakery on Yefet street that draws huge crowds every day.
on kishon street
I think this old apartment epitomizes a sense of Florentin quirkiness – something that is disappearing rapidly as this neighbourhood grows and packs in more people into newly-built “built for rental investment” apartment blocks.
