The end of Chaim Ben Atar street, near the Kibbutz Galuyot Road, south Florentin. The painted sign on the door reads “no parking”…
Tag Archives: florentin
lost puppy
There’s a problem with the focus on my lens. Although according to the display the center of the frame is in focus, often it’s not. Mostly, it messes up my pictures. Sometimes the effect is inadvertently interesting, as here. Well, I think so. And as I can’t really afford to fix the lens quite yet…
(Washington Boulevard, Florentin – no flash, natural light)
Like this:
signs of life
A couple more from the same area, Washington Boulevard, an odd mix of new art galleries, a couple of cafe-bars and older working-class businesses, kiosks, really old and huge ficus trees filled with fruit bats, a kids’ play area filled with feral cats.
For a long time, this tiny synagogue was abandoned and falling to pieces and we wondered whether it would be replaced by a housing block. But recently someone restored it and now it’s in use. This is not a religious area – in fact quite the opposite – but there are many tiny synagogues remaining from the neighborhood’s original population of Sephardic Jews from Salonika, and later places like Afghanistan.
Late afternoon sun 
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.
meet the locals
A couple of locals at a neighborhood coffee shop. The dog is a labrador crossed with something larger. He’s aged around 2. The owner found him wandering the streets a year ago, and managed to contact the owners. They didn’t want the dog. So he kept him. The dog wanders around the coffee shop to say hello to everyone.
Dogs are popular here and they are allowed into restaurants, cafes etc. There are a few local characters with dogs. There was one guy – I haven’t seen him lately – who had six huge white dogs. They would travel in a pack. I’d see them – the dogs not the guy – cooling off by splashing around in the fountain near the Hassan Bek Mosque.
saw it on the wall
A couple of weird items of graffiti in south Tel Aviv. This one is on a wall in Neve Sha’anan, on Chelnow Street: if you go here early in the morning you will see lots of foreign workers and refugees waiting (hoping) to be picked up for a day’s work, I guess mostly on construction sites. Anyway this notice is written in Hebrew, English and what I think is Sudanese Arabic (yes, I’m a languages nerd), which would make sense since there are lots of people from Sudan here.
This is on a wall in the ‘garment district’ area of Florentin, a network of small streets lined with small wholesale garment shops owned by Jewish and Arab businesspeople, utterly crowded on weekdays and empty on from Friday lunchtime until Sunday morning.
surrealist supermodels on salomeh street
Tel Aviv’s Salomeh street is where you go to buy mannequins. There are lots of shops selling mannequins and many of them have created their own surreal displays. Check some of them out.
shabbat in florentin
Urban art in Florentin
The next two or three posts are images taken on a walk around Florentin and Neve Sha’anan, adjacent neighbourhoods in south Tel Aviv on Shabbat. These are quite unique neighbourhoods, and Shabbat is a unique time to see them since most shops are closed and everything is quiet (or not).
Even though there are barely any religious people in Florentin and most coffee shops etc here are not kosher, meaning they are open on Shabbat, it is still very quiet because the many small businesses (mostly clothing wholesalers owned by both Jewish and Arab shopkeepers) are closed and so there is hardly any traffic on the tiny streets.
In Israel it’s common for businesses of a particular type to be located in the same area. In this part of Florentin the clothing wholesalers give way to lighting and furniture stores.
There’s so much to like about this sign, which is outside some sort of small warehouse and warns of closed circuit tv cameras in Arabic, Hebrew and Russian (you have to cover all bases). I like the way a tiny TV monitor is reflected in the larger TV monitor, but I especially like the Russian version of the warning, which has an old-style Soviet charm. It translates as: Attention! This sector is controlled by television cameras!
