Just the other day I read an article from the CTV news feed about an Ontario woman who was issued a $110.00 traffic ticket for driving with a green parrot on her shoulder. (You can’t make this stuff up.)
She should move to Tel Aviv.
Here, the parrot would be made welcome in a Tel Aviv bar, as you can see below. Ben met one when he was out recently, perched on a fellow patron’s shoulder, but happy to be sociable with others. No big deal at all.
Ben and friend. Parrots welcome here, and who knows what else.
Throughout the city there are lots of formal art installations, in parks, on street corners and so on, like this mosaic egg.
Mike and the Egg in the Noga Neighbourhood
But there are also what I would call informal, and often eccentric, personal expressions of creativity that pop up when you least expect them.
For example, walking down Frishman, a nearby residential street, there is an apartment building with a rare lower level apartment which has a nice stone patio a few steps down. Populating this little terrace is a whole collection of almost life-size ceramic figures; there is also a small table where regular people can sit. They won’t be lonely.
A bit of the Shire right in the heart of Tel Aviv
…and above them to the left, cats, also ceramic. And why not?
In fact there is something about this whole set-up that says “cat lover” to me.
On a nearby street, a downed tree limb, repurposed, with exposed ends modestly covered.
And in the Yemeni quarter, a lovely wall full of inset ceramic odds and ends, plates, painted tiles, and whatnot, which just popped up out of nowhere.
Ceramic graffiti
On King George, on top of a pink store, a full size yellow car, driven by a mouse…or at least I think that is what it is.
And you’ll notice part of a menorah on the right. It comes down to street level for Hanukkah. The store below is selling Purim costumes.
As you can see, there is plenty of colour in the White City!
A while ago I signed up for a full day tour of Tel Aviv’s archeological museum, The Eretz Israel Museum. This was a bit (very) over-ambitious as I have about 2 hours of “museum stamina” in me. It was a special offer tied to the archeology lectures I have been attending, and featured tours given by the curators of three different collections, Glass, Pottery, and Man and his Work, so I went for it! It was exhausting, but worth it, to listen to the curators, all of whom are practising archeologists, and who were passionate about these collections which they had been instrumental in building.
The storage area of the Pottery Museum. What visitors don’t get to see.A life-size glass crusader!A millstone from the Roman-Byzantine period. Note the menorah etched on the side.
The museum itself is built on the site of an archeological dig, Tel Quasile, (over 3,000 years old), on beautiful grounds overlooking Tel Aviv. As the dynamic curator of the “Man and his Work” pavilion said, it seemed a brilliant idea at the time to put an archeology museum right at a dig site. However, every time they sunk a shovel, the builders would find some new antiquity, everything stopped dead, and so it took quite a while to finish. The site is now home to several individual pavilions, each operating as a separate museum focused on a particular theme, including oddly, a museum of postal history, covering mail-service in the area from the 15 century to 1948! (I may have to go back for that one. I have never really thought about mail service that way.) Interspersed with all of these, are the original dig sites, and subsequent finds such as Byzantine olive presses etc.
The curator of the ethnography museum (Man and his Work), showing us re-created workshops of antiquity.
Of the three museums we toured, the loveliest from a visual standpoint was the Glass Museum, featuring glass from the 15th century BC to the present. It was amazing to see how well preserved these ancient glass items were, especially compared to the pottery museum, where many pots were found in fragments and reassembled. As the curator pointed out, this is because glass items were precious in their day, and were often buried with their owners.
The most striking piece was a remarkable glass mosaic from Caesarea circa late 6th century (Byzantine period) unique in the world for its condition.
The glass mosaic. Gorgeous. Amazing that it survived.
It was a pleasure to finish with some contemporary pieces. I especially like the splashing water.
splashing water in glass from the sideand from the frontand an apple
When it comes to architecture, Tel Aviv is full of surprises.
On the plus side, you can lose yourself in the exoticism of the middle east (the Shuk, Jaffa, or the Yemenite quarter), wander in what looks like a charming European village (Neve Tzedek,), or stroll on a beautiful European style boulevard (Rothschild).
Entry to the Shuk. Classic eclectic style.The Yemenite quarter has the feel of a Greek Island.
Equally, you can find yourself in a modern downtown, in an impressive cultural complex (Habima), or in a charming Bauhaus neighbourhood for which the town is famous. There is even a small neighbourhood of American colonial wood buildings (as far as I know, the only ones in Israel) which were built in 1866 by a group of settlers from Maine. They went so far as to bring their own wood with them, and thought they were coming to the Garden of Eden. (They lasted two years.) For some of this, you need to go looking, and it is worth the effort.
One of the rare wooden houses built by settlers from Maine!Modern Tel Aviv
But this is no architectural paradise, by any stretch of the imagination. Most streets, even in expensive neighbourhoods, are lined with boxy, utilitarian, low-rise flats, covered in stucco that has weathered to a tired tan colour. (Fortunately there are lots of trees that soften the effect.)
There are also plenty of gritty commercial stretches, sometimes right next to, or interspersed with, nicer buildings. (One of the worst of them is right behind the seaside stretch of hotels, which can immediately give tourists the wrong idea about this city). This sort of thing serves to weaken the overall aesthetic considerably. For example, I post two pictures below of once identical buildings across the street from another in the centre of town; one restored, the other not. This is Tel Aviv in a nutshell…be prepared for both.
There are also some very prominent buildings that fall into the “What were they thinking category?” For example, the city hall. When I first saw it, I took it for a shabby office building, or even an apartment building.)
When I say the city hall is brutal, it is not my personal opinion. It is the formal term for pretty much the ugliest building style to afflict the planet, the aptly named “Brutalist” movement; and sadly Tel Aviv has an unfortunate amount of it. (Okay, so it also happens to be my personal opinion…)
Yes, this is the city hall
I had trouble understanding how this happened. Perhaps it was built in a period when money was short? (Surely it wasn’t meant to look like that!) A little research proved me wrong. Brutalist buildings were expensive to build, prominent architects designed them, and the city is full of them. Clearly the planning department in the mid-twentieth century was infatuated with the movement. Most of beachfront hotels are (sadly) also in this style, and many other prominent buildings: the EL Al building, the Dizengoff Tower, the Shalom Tower and so forth. I pass a few of them every day…and they do not add to the pleasure of the walk. (Of course, who has time to look up when dodging bicycles and scooters.)
The El Al buildingThe Dizengoff Tower. The great man would not be amused.
Toronto has its fair share of brutalist architecture as well, (the Robarts Library, being a prime example) , but the look seems less jarring in the concrete jungle of downtown north American cities, than in what was fundamentally a low-rise Mediterranean city. Here they pop up like a bunch of sore thumbs.
View from our apartment. The squat grey building in the middle is the city hall, seen from the side.
And while the City Hall is bad, apparently it pales in comparison with the Central Bus Terminal, a 2.2 million s.f. behemoth, spread over 5 city blocks and originally meant to house 2,300 stores! It is apparently the largest bus terminal in the world and reputedly the most hated structure in Israel. Every so often, planners talk about tearing it down, but apparently that is almost impossible, so thick is the concrete, and the fear is that the resultant dust would choke Tel Aviv for weeks. Needless to say, the architect was a Brutalist, and likely someone who never took a bus anywhere.
I have never been there, and most Tel Avivis avoid it like the plague, but the structure is now so full of so many bizarre things, that at least one enterprising company offers monthly tours…and since it is not in the nicest part of town, that might be the safest way to go. I am trying to persuade Mike to come along, but I may have to lean on Ben for this one. Either way, I think it will deserve its own post! Stay tuned.
