Street smarts

Private cars are not permitted to park on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv. Dozens of bus lines and taxis ply the thoroughfare, incessantly starting and stopping. Some consider it a deficiency, others see it as the quintessential trait of a main urban artery. In any case, the street it is an important alternative - political, social and cultural - to the shopping mall.

Development work on Allenby Street, begun by the Tel Aviv Municipality in December 2000, is now nearing completion. Renovation of the final section, between Grusenberg and King George streets, is now beginning, and will be completed - the municipality assures us - by year's end. Some renovated sections of the street are already showing some wear and tear - the new sidewalks are stained from the fruit that falls from the ficus trees, discarded chewing gum and other sources of filth - but the overall picture has improved nonetheless.

Allenby is once again showing its face as a vital, kaleidoscopic, alternately pleasant and ugly, altogether Israeli street. It is the point of encounter and commerce for a sizable portion of the population of Tel Aviv and environs - members of the lower-middle class and below, foreign workers and residents of Jaffa, Holon and Bat Yam. According to Central Bureau of Statistics data, 46 percent of Israeli households do not have a car, so the shopping mall subculture is therefore beyond their reach. For some, Allenby is likely to furnish all their needs.

Variety is the most conspicuous advantage of the city street, the source of its liveliness. And Allenby has it all: shops selling religious articles, sex shops, discount appliance stores and small stores featuring discounted clothing, factory outlets of textile chains (like Castro and Delta), synagogues, video stalls, stores that sell artificial flowers, paper goods and musical instruments, falafel and shwarma stands, photography shops, stores for power tools and bras, delicatessens, kiosks, pubs, cafes and restaurants, and on the outskirts of the street - the Carmel market, teeming with people and cheap, fresh merchandise.

On top of all this, there is something that perhaps makes Allenby unique among all streets in Israel, and certainly differentiates it from the shopping malls: about 15 bookshops, most of which offer both bargains and surprises. One, Lotus, specializes in schoolbooks; some sell secondhand books in English and Hebrew; others cater to Russian readers. There are also three Steimatzky bookstores, including one in the Opera Tower at the end of Allenby, near the beach.

Allenby is the antithesis of a mall. Instead of a sprawling parking lot, it has bus stops. In place of air conditioning, it offers the shade of broad-shouldered ficus trees, fertile and green, which provide a cool respite for passengers waiting at the bus stops. And there is the pollution and the crowds, the panhandlers and peddlers, the homeless and the junkies and the prostitutes plying their wares. These do not represent the more aesthetic nature of the street, but its democratic attributes. Those sectors of Israeli society that are out of sight at the shopping mall are made to feel at home here. The public space welcomes them.

Browsers' paradise

Yossi Halper, owner of Halper's, a secondhand English-language bookshop that for the past 10 years has been situated in an inner courtyard of the street, says he considered moving to a shopping mall, "but I'm not organized enough for them. After dithering over it a while, I realized that my natural home was here," he says. The store is full to bursting, with row after row of shelves crammed with books. It radiates a relaxed atmosphere of well-arranged confusion that invites browsers to skim through the shelves for hours, looking for good buys. "I couldn't endure the rigid regulations of the shopping centers, which are all about cleanliness and order," says Halper.

Manchur Essil, who has for the past 28 years sold tobacco products and cigars at Tabak David, a small, crowded, colorful and aromatic shop that has been an Allenby fixture for six decades, and Gideon Raz, who has sold electrical appliances for 23 years at Salon Raz, are not interested in moving to a shopping mall, either. "Heaven forbid," says Essil. "It isn't the same thing. It wouldn't suit me. This is where the store is, this is its proper place.'

To which Gideon Raz adds: "Although it is hard to be here, with the air pollution, and malls are cleaner, there is a good atmosphere here. It's a whole world in itself. Like the smells, the colors, and the fresh fruits of the market - in the same way, Allenby Street is an aggregate of the businesses, the banks, the post office and the stores of every type. The neighbors and the shopkeepers are nice. We know one another, make coffee together. This is home."

The shopkeepers may complain about the lack of parking on the street, but claim it can be solved. They do say that they are losing customers because of the lack of accessibility for automobiles. "This morning, for instance," says Essil. "A customer phoned me from the car a few minutes away from the shop. It's already become standard practice for me: I take two packages of cigars out to him, leaving the store closed for a minute. He takes the merchandise and continues driving. Despite the trouble to me, it's still worth my while, because I keep my customers."

Raz says that although people prefer to go to a mall, because there is parking and everything is easier there, "people come here from all over Israel because Allenby is the electrical appliance market of the country. The prices are 10 to 40 percent cheaper than in the malls."

Halper, the bookseller, adds: "I appeal to the English reading public, but a lot of the [potential buyers] from the Anglo-Saxon community in Raanana, for example, won't come here because of the parking, even though they can take a bus from Raanana straight to Allenby Street. Parking in a lot on the street costs NIS 70 a day, but in the parking lot near the Dolphinarium, which is only a few hundred meters from here, it's only NIS 12. Meaning that there is no real parking problem. It's just that people aren't willing to walk more than a 100 meters," he says. A lot of people in Israel, says Halper, a New Jersey transplant, do not think of walking as a reasonable option.

Walking the length of Allenby, from Jaffa Road in the south to the beachfront promenade, takes about 40 minutes at a moderate clip. Although it is not especially long, there are more than 20 street corners that break up the trip. For urban expert Jane Jacobs, author of the classic "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," this is one of the critical prerequisites for a lively city street. The starting-and-stopping, the encounters, the crosswalks and the architectural character dictated by the short sections of sidewalk - all are conducive to a spirited street life, and are adapted to human dimensions and the comfort of pedestrians.

At the southern tip of the street, at the corner of Rothschild, pedestrians pass by two upscale coffee shops - Arcaffe and La Central - which are to be joined later this month by a branch of Starbucks, the newly arrived American chain. Further up, the street takes a businesslike and short-tempered turn, lined with kiosks and shops. Along the farther end of the street, as it nears the sea, one can once again take a break, sitting down for coffee or something else to drink. Suntanned men sit on plastic chairs by the kiosks near the beach, drinking plenty of Goldstar and Carlsberg from recyclable half-liter bottles.

Walk for democracy

In "Wanderlust," an attractive book on the history of walking by Rebecca Solnit, a San Francisco cultural critic (published some months ago in the United States and United Kingdom by Veros), the author writes about the political importance of walking through city streets: "The street is democracy's greatest arena - the place where ordinary people can speak unsegregated by walls, unmediated by those with more power."

She writes that cities that do not ensure suitable conditions for pedestrians - cities where everything is built for the convenience of motorists, where private commercial centers thrive as a modern substitute for the public market square - are undemocratic. The possibility of moving by one's own physical power through space, supplying the social, cultural and existential needs in the public arena - together with a natural human mosaic of people, not subject to selection - is the fundamental requirement of a free society. And this option is being wrested from our grasp as city streets increasingly wither and die, and are supplanted by planned and regulated shopping malls.

On one recent Saturday, most pedestrians on Allenby Street were from foreign lands, speaking foreign languages, primarily from Africa, the Far East and Eastern Europe. Their presence is felt on weekdays, as well. The stores on Allenby, on the other hand, are an astonishingly Israeli hybrid: There is the Mama's Jahnoon Coffee Bar, north of Sheinkin, or conversely, the Amusement Center at Allenby 11, whose immense sign unabashedly trumpets its "Internet-Cafe services" and "Striptease and pleasure performances."

On the section of the street between Sheinkin and the beach, some pedestrians have a hard time walking a straight line; they weave to and fro, arms akimbo, eyes rolling. This is an area to which women who have been purchased abroad as slaves are brought. And it is also the part of the street that in recent years has filled with nightlife - it has dozens of electronic music clubs, and is frequented by masses of young people from all over the metropolitan area. According to Jacobs, in order for a street to live and fulfill its social function, it must draw people to it at all hours of the day. Allenby now meets that condition.

Dr. Benny Maor, director of the Tel Aviv Municipality's Construction and Infrastructure Authority, states that the municipality has invested about NIS 30 million in the street. Sidewalks have been replaced by "paving that reflects the light at night;" about 150 light poles have been installed with about 300 streetlights suspended from them; the road has been repaved ("with an advanced asphalt compound that is stronger and more durable") and the street has been furnished with 95 benches, 85 trash cans and about 230 barriers to prevent cars from parking on the sidewalk. Everything is simply designed and painted gray. It seems to be a wise choice, well suited to the street.

Nevertheless, although the resurgent Allenby presents better alternatives for pedestrians, the attitude of urban planners toward them is still not good. The subterranean passages at Kikar Hamoshavot (Allenby, corner of Jaffa Road) and the Allenby-Sheinkin-King George intersection are considered "an insult to pedestrians."

That was the reaction of Fred Kent, an expert in revitalizing urban areas for the Public Spaces Project, when he visited Tel Aviv a few months ago. Not only are they neglected and repulsive, he said, but the movement of pedestrians should be as uninterrupted as possible. In reality, many people approaching these intersections decide to forgo the descent into the passages, thereby cutting off the flow of people into Allenby, the Carmel market and the nearby streets.

Moreover, pedestrians reach the area by buses and shared taxis, which cause unbearable pollution. During the day, from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M., approximately 10,000 vehicles traverse the street from south to north, and about 5,600 from north to south (based on the most recent count conducted by the municipality in southern Allenby in 1997). Experts on urban thoroughfares consistently argue that it is important to reduce traffic congestion - and the pollution it brings - while expanding the degree of environmentally friendly traffic in city centers.

A light-rail system on Allenby would be a major boon, but remains the stuff of dreams. Bike riding on the street means virtually risking one's life. Danny Kaiser, Tel Aviv's city engineer, says that bicycle paths will be marked, and will run down the middle of the sidewalks between the storefronts and the bus stops. He claims that bike paths cannot be placed in the street itself, because the behavior of drivers in Israel makes such an idea impractical.

Cyclists argue that marking a bike path down the middle of a sidewalk is a very bad idea: riding would not be continuous, and this, after all, is the primary function of a bicycle path. Moreover, riding on the sidewalk endangers pedestrians. There is no logic to this plan, they say.

"In Munich," replies Kaiser, "they marked out bike paths on the sidewalks and it works well." "Nevertheless," he notes, "it is well known that the ability of Israelis to obey the law is entirely different from that of the Germans." He makes no reference to the width of the sidewalks in Munich or to the location of the paths, which allow pedestrians enough room to walk without walking into the bicycle path, which would not be the case on Allenby Street. Although it is easy to predict that a bike path running down the middle of a sidewalk is destined to fail, the Allenby plan is still moving ahead. Although those devoted to reviving the street may have the best of intentions, pedestrians will be submitted to a new source of danger.

	ALLENBY BY NIGHT: Masses of young people come from all over the metropolitan area. Pavel Wohlberg