Adina Hoffman - Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City

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For M/P and D/M

You wont find a new country, wont find another shore.

This city will always pursue you

C. P. Cavafy, The City

Almost every day for the near quarter century that Ive lived in Jerusalem, Ive walked the main street of its western half, Jaffa Road, or the Jaffa Road, as it was known to earlier generations.

At first a pilgrimage and camel route, then a major commercial thoroughfare, its now a busy if bedraggled central artery that stretches from near the Old Citys Jaffa Gate, cuts across the new town, curves west through hills and wadis and across a plain till eventually it reaches the port of Jaffa. From there it once extended, at least in spirit, to the boats that would carry passengers and cargo off to, and in from, various far-flung lands.

As the road opened Jerusalem to the rest of the world and brought the world to it, so the history of the new city unfurled along this street. For all its fame, and its holiness to so many, Jerusalem had been until 1867when the Ottoman sultan ordered the construction of that packed-sand-and-stone carriage track by forcibly conscripted bands of Palestinian peasantslittle more than a hilltop village contained by a wall. A cramped, dark, diseased, and by most accounts foul-smelling place whose gates were locked at night, it had prompted the visiting Herman Melville, for one, to brood in his notebook about the insalubriousness of so small a city pent in by lofty walls obstructing ventilation, postponing the morning & hasting the unwholesome twilight.

With the presence of the toll road that stretched from the city to the sea, however, a new kind of movement into and out of those claustrophobia-inducing fortifications became possible, as did a new sort of freedom. And when a central station for carriages plying the Jaffa Road was established just beyond the Jerusalem gate that bore the same name, the city spilled forth once and for all. Greeks and Germans, Arabs and Armenians, Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews alike opened hotels and kiosks, travel agencies and photo studios, coffeehouses, liquor stores, a telegraph office, souvenir shops, rug dealerships, a pharmacy, a bakery, outlets for carpentry and building supply, even a theater that featured tightrope walkers and performing bears. Foreign consulates, banks, post offices, and eventually the municipality itself also moved past the gate, and within a short while the crowded area just outside the walls had been transformed into a makeshift town square described by one native son as nothing less than The City.

In 1900, in honor of the twenty-fifth year of the reign of Sultan Abd el-Hamid, the authorities erected a red-and-white candy-striped public fountain in the midst of this multilingual, multitudinous crush. An ornate stone clock tower followed seven years later. All self-respecting Ottoman cities featured such clocks in their central squares, and Jerusalems was a point of pride to those who lived there. Forty-five feet tall, perched atop the Jaffa Gate, it was a sign of civic progress, of Ottoman patriotism; it bound Jerusalems citizens to the other citizens of the empire, and in ways both figurative and literal it represented the arrival to this very old place of a new way of telling time. It also functioned as a kind of beacon. Soon after it was built, the municipality strung its high outer walls with glowing gas lamps. Visible even from villages far off, the tower looked, wrote another native son, like a lighthouse.

* * *

What I see, what I see, began the Galician-born Jewish novelist Joseph Roth, using the words as a kind of mantra or incantation as he set out to describe the lazy walk he took around Berlin one May morning in 1921. Attempting to recount a walk through Jerusalem, c. 2015, one needs to vary this slightly and say: What I see, what I dont see.

As I stroll the main street of the city Ive called home for most of my adult lifea city that has held me in its grip, delighting, infuriating, bewildering, surprising me since I first encountered itIm considering both what meets the eye and what doesnt.

While every urban area evolves architecturally with the years, Jerusalem has a funny way of burying much of what it builds. Captured and recaptured some forty-four times by different powers throughout its long history, the city is as renowned for the structures razed there as for those it has retained. And so it is that the current town stands, as one excitable nineteenth-century commentator put it, on 60, 80, or even 100 feet of ruins! You begin digging in the streets of Jerusalem, and you come upon house-tops at all varieties of level under ground! It is probable that we have there traces and remains of older and more numerous generations than in any other city under the sun.

But the archaeological debris isnt all ancient. Almost immediately after General Edmund Allenby dismounted his horse and marched on foot through the Jaffa Gate on December 11, 1917, declaring Jerusalem the Blessed subject to English martial law, for instance, the British authorities began making plans to destroy that lively Turkish town square. The squeamish, pious military governor, Ronald Storrs, found the ramshackle buildings and chaotic scene there distasteful, and he developed a particularly visceral antipathy toward the Ottoman clock and its gewgawed tower. He claimed it disfigured the gate, and arranged for it to be, as he put it, bodily removed. A blockier and more plainly British sort of timepiece and tower, shorn of the more offensive trimmings of the earlier version, was then built at a less fraught though still central spot on the Jaffa Road, just to the northwest of Sultan Suleimans medieval walls. The architectural equivalent of a pair of sensible shoes, this went up in 1924, two years after Britain received a formal Mandate from the League of Nations to govern Palestine, and it served both to tell the hour and to make plain who now controlled the holy citywhich the British had recently declared the countrys capital for the first time since the Crusades. The corner then known as Post Office Square was soon rechristened in the name of Allenby.

After a decade, that English clock tower, too, was knocked over (not because of conquest but to ease traffic flow around the curved prow of the new Barclays Bank and city hall that had just gone up on that corner), but Storrs never did manage to bulldoze the bazaar just outside the Jaffa Gate and replace it, as hed yearned to do, with a pristine garden loop around the Old City. He left town, the British left the country, the Mandate ended, and in 1948 a high concrete and corrugated tin barrier was thrust up right beside Allenby Square, creating a crude but effective border between the new state of Israel and Jordan. That ugly wall was a finger jabbed in the eye of this once integrated and integral site. It was in fact only with the Israeli occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967 that Storrss half-century-old scheme for a greenbelt was realized and, declaring the city united under Israeli rule, the authorities demolished what the Bauhaus-trained chief planner of the project would refer to dismissively as the dilapidated structures, shacks and rubble and the more visually offensive shops around the Old City walls; a national park was set down in their place. Meanwhile, the now clockless spot opposite the walls, so recently redesigned and renamed for its conquering British hero, was redesigned once more. Today the small plaza set on the tense if invisible dividing line between the citys Jewish West and Arab East boasts a dry fountain, several squat olive trees, a line of struggling dwarf cypresses, an unremarkable set of curving stone steps, and a new name: IDF Square.