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The Jerusalem Post

'Jerusalem That Once Was': An architect's look at the history of Israel's capital - review

 
 Images from 'Jerusalem That Once Was' by David Kroyanker. (photo credit: Shuki Duchovni)
Images from 'Jerusalem That Once Was' by David Kroyanker.
(photo credit: Shuki Duchovni)

A new book by famed architect and former Jerusalemite David Kroyanker shines a penetrative loving light on the capital’s fading beauty.

David Kroyanker comes across as the quintessential dedicated professional, even if his full bloom of sterling activity as an architect and town planner in Jerusalem are some years behind him. Now, at the age of 85, and resident of Ramat Aviv (several years ago, he and his wife, Leora, decamped from Kroyanker’s city of birth, to which he devoted his long career, to live near their grandchildren), he recently published what he says is his swan song.

“I won’t be putting out any more books,” he declares when we meet at his spacious, airy fifth-floor apartment.

The title of the tome, Jerusalem That Once Was, clearly spells out the spirit of the content. And if that wasn’t enough to convey the palpable sense of nostalgia behind the project, the subhead hammers that home: Urban Memories Saved from Oblivion.

If anyone has the street cred to compile a eulogy to a Jerusalem that has all but vanished from the scene, it is Kroyanker. He started out on his professional path in 1969 with an impassioned purview to preserve and, if possible, breathe new life into the city’s historic neighborhoods and buildings.

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The Jerusalem native mined the capital’s sumptuously layered timeline, and delved into the developmental passages and styles that left their ostensibly indelible imprint on its physical aesthetics and dynamics. He cast a loving and increasingly sagacious eye over its urban-architectural heritage, both within the walled confines of the Old City and the more contemporary sprawl to the west.

  Images from 'Jerusalem That Once Was' by David Kroyanker. (credit: Shuki Duchovni)
Images from 'Jerusalem That Once Was' by David Kroyanker. (credit: Shuki Duchovni)

With much fewer years of firsthand experience of Jerusalem and – certainly without any professional involvement in its evolutionary facelift – I can recall quite a few buildings that have either been demolished and replaced with far less attractive or harmonious edifices, or have had their appearance revamped to the point where their original design has been distorted beyond recognition or summarily buried behind a modern utilitarian façade.

With a bibliography of over 30 titles about Jerusalem’s architectural and urban layout, numerous articles, and a slew of official pats on the back – including the Teddy Kollek Lifetime Achievement Award, presented to him in the Knesset in 2006, and Yakir Yerushalayim (“Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem”) in 2010 – where does Kroyanker stand on the way things are panning out in the city of his birth?

Is he nostalgic about the “Jerusalem that once was”? Does he pine for the cityscape of his younger years? Is the new Hebrew-language book, his published finale, in fact a lament? Clearly, I had ventured a little far on the emotional side of the tracks.


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“Any city that develops, whose areas change during the course of history, its demographics change, there are technological advancements, things change radically,” he deadpans back at me.

New, more functional Jerusalem

They certainly do. If I think back to the Jerusalem I first encountered 50 years ago – downtown spots such as large tracts of Jaffa Road and King George Street – the metamorphosis is nothing short of, well, radical.

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True, there is the odd grille, doorway, or balcony of yesteryear still on view, say, in the nether reaches of King George Street, but in general you have to really train your eye on them to catch some of the architectural fixtures and fittings of far more beauty-oriented early to mid-20th-century Jerusalem.

And these are often cramped by all manner of functional addenda such as air conditioners, neon strips, electric wiring, and other eyesores that get the practical business done but hardly serve to put a spring in your step as you scurry along the street.

 That naturally finds its way into Kroyanker’s new volume, published by Keter Books. The graphics, as with all Kroyanker’s offerings, features sketches of buildings and various urban locations rather than photographs.

“You can see all the details so much better in black and white,” the author observes. He got that one spot-on, and there are, indeed, so many minutiae to catch and appreciate in many of the edifices featured in the book.

Quirky anecdotes

This may be a very personal and heartfelt – albeit professionally based – overview of bricks-and-mortar Jerusalem, but the writer is not past a dash of humor here and there.

The first chapter of the book, which Kroyanker deliciously named “Slaying Three Holy Cows from the Mandate Era,” features an evocative sketch of Halbreich House at the top end of King George Street. Built in 1935, it was the sole local “skyscraper” until 1967.

“It has seven floors at the street front, and nine at the back,” says Kroyanker. “It was also known as the suicide spot. People who were tired of life would go there to jump off the roof,” he says.

It is unclear just how many folk who wanted to end it all took advantage of the block’s “dizzying” height, but that preceded mass construction that took off in the wake of the Six Day War and the unification of Jerusalem. Kroyanker comes up with some more anecdotal insight, of a surprising nature.

It seems that before the dust had settled on Israel’s whirlwind victory in 1967, David Ben-Gurion feverishly called for the Old City walls to be demolished. The country’s first premier declared that Jerusalem should be physically conjoined, as a place where Jews and Arabs can live side by side in harmony. In any case, Ben-Gurion pointed out that the wall was not “a Jewish wall,” having been built “by a Turkish sultan in the 14th century.”

A CLIPPING of an article by Uzi Benziman, which ran in the June 20, 1967, edition of Haaretz, reported that Ben-Gurion’s audience was initially stunned into silence, followed by rapturous applause. Kroyanker puts that down to the heat of the moment.

“It was politically motivated. He didn’t want the walls to be knocked down. He didn’t really mean it. When he said that, he didn’t appreciate the ramifications.”

Thankfully, that idea was nipped in the bud, and the book cites several more wacky schemes for Jerusalem over the years: some with menacing ulterior motives, others simply hare-brained. That appears in a chapter called “Architectural Ventures That Faded before They Became a Reality,” which also mentions an ambitious-whimsical proposal by French-born American sculptor René Shapshak to build an international peace university block in Armon Hanatziv in the shape of an 11-story dove, complete with olive twig in its beak.

“That idea was rejected in the early 1970s, thus Jerusalem was spared an architectural Disneyland,” Kroyanker states soberly.

That may be consigned to the showbiz side of urban development, but there were some darker architectural moves afoot. “There were some projects that greatly endangered Jerusalem. In 1931, the Muslim Waqf wanted to build Al-Aqsa University in Independence Park, on top of the Muslim cemetery there. The whole of the park was a cemetery.”

In view of opposition to the construction of the Museum of Tolerance at the time, due to its intrusion onto the Mamilla Muslim cemetery, that is quite a surprise. In the book, Kroyanker calls that initiative “a political nightmare.”

There was even a proposal for a complete makeover of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City in 1949. That, Kroyanker notes, would have caused quite a ruckus in the Christian world as, no doubt, the various orders with claims on the sacred spot would have tussled to ensure that their patch was preserved, if not actually expanded.

‘Out of control’

The chapter titles spell out a litany of mismanagement of the city’s aesthetics and heritage. Consider headings such as “Entire Neighborhoods and Stretches of Buildings That Were Decimated,” “The Physical Erosion of Older Neighborhoods,” or “Non-acceptance of the Other – Visual-Physical Expositions.”

“Slaying Three Holy Cows from the Mandate Era” references the quintessential Jerusalem stonework facing decreed by British military governor of Jerusalem Sir Ronald Storrs, preserving open spaces and nature spots, and keeping the urban skyline on a considered leash. 

The latter seems to have gotten completely out of hand over the past decade or so, as, for example, 30-story apartment blocks along Hebron Road, towering office and residential edifices near Mahaneh Yehuda, and the planned business and hi-tech compound near the western entrance to the city, completely changing the look and feel of Jerusalem.

“Yes, it has gotten out of control,” Kroyanker concurs. “It is ugly.”

Ever the professional, distaste notwithstanding, Kroyanker nevertheless opens my eyes to the practicalities of that troubling phenomenon. “Jerusalem is not meant to expand outwards. We’ll call it an inner city,” he explains. “There are still adequate spaces for construction within the circumference of Jerusalem, so the idea is to condense the center of the city.”

Not all is bleak

But it is not all doom and gloom, and Jerusalem That Once Was includes some encouraging beacons.

There is, for example, a gorgeous building on the corner of Rachel Imeinu and Tel Hai streets that was shifted several meters forward, toward the former, in order to make room for construction to the rear, thereby obviating the threat of having several floors added to the existing beautiful structure.

The latter was a recurring disruption to the physical milieu during my five years as a resident of Baka when quite a few quaint single-story Arab houses had three or more floors stacked on top and their original architectural design obliterated.

“Adding floors in a controlled manner is beneficial,” Kroyanker advises, ever the practical optimist. “There are some good examples of that, in Baka, too.”

He also has some kind words for the redevelopment of the environs of the former YMCA soccer stadium, famously used by Beitar Yerushalayim for over half a century, and for the elongated Mishkenot Sha’ananim center. He also shared some fond childhood memories of a polo field at the British Sports Centre near the German Colony, and the positive impact of the ongoing light rail construction on the city.

“My mother used to take me for walks to Old Katamon. I remember those Arab villas in their glory days. They were something to see,” he recalls.

“I am a creature of Jerusalem,” Kroyanker proudly and somewhat wistfully declares. “This book covers a century of the city I lived in for most of my life.”

And still loves, one might add. The book title is preceded on the jacket by “A Personal Perspective.”

That, and a learned professional bird’s eye view, make the book an important chronicle to be saved and savored.

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