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Cast a giant shadow By Kobi Ben-Simhon It's midday and Moshe Langleib is pacing his home restlessly. Finally he walks to the balcony, opens the sliding glass door and looks out. "I live with that monster every day," he says, pointing at the tower jutting out above his home. "Every day I hold my head in my hands and ask how such a thing could have happened. How could it be that in the middle of an old, historic neighborhood they put up such an ugly building? The noise from the building's machinery room bothers me 24 hours a day, every minute - it's a nuisance in the bedroom, the living room, the garden, the kitchen. That is why the windows here are always shut." Langleib, former managing director of the Bagir clothing company, has lived in the building at the end of Amzaleg Street in Tel Aviv's Neve Tzedek neighborhood for 16 years. He now feels he made a mistake. "My wife and I came here because we wanted a quiet spot. Now we have to cope with a concrete monstrosity, which wraps us in its arms against our wishes. When the tower was being built we were pounded by air hammers day and night. We complained to the police, but nothing helped. Because in this story the residents of the neighborhood don't count; the only people who count are the real-estate sharks. When the municipality and a businessman hook up, there is no power on earth that can stop them. It makes no difference to them that during the day this huge tower casts a shadow over whole streets and over people. It's the old story of the culture of power and money. You know, they could have done something else here, something that would fit in with the surroundings. Even something considerate." Advertisement Construction of the Neve Tzedek Tower, also known as Nechushtan Tower (after the company that developed the project), began in 2003 and was completed in 2007. In March 2006, as the 11th floor was being built, a crane collapsed at the site, killing two workers and injuring eight passersby. A year after its completion, the massive monument that intrudes crassly on the fabric of the surrounding neighborhood remains a megalomaniac, alien presence amid the small structures around it. Located on Eilat Street and sprawling over seven dunams (almost two acres), the skyscraper thrusts skyward for 180 meters and has 300 apartments on its 32 floors. In the middle of the day the vast property is a wasteland. Hardly anyone comes or goes. Only the wind from the sea seems to burst with energy. The only sounds and semblance of movement come from three Arab workers pushing wheelbarrows, and a Chinese worker plastering exposed walls. A couple who emerge from the revolving door of the lobby converse in French. "We arrived three days ago from Paris," the husband says in Gallic English. They are both wearing white slacks and flip-flops. She is impatient; he breathes heavily from the effort to connect the words. "In France I am a lawyer and the apartment here, ours, I bought when the tower started to be marketed. I live on the 16th floor and I really like it. There is a breathtaking view to the sea and to Jaffa. A delight. But that is all I can say, because I have no time, we have to get to a restaurant." There is something disturbing about the sequence of decisions that gave rise to the skyscraper in this colorful section of the city. The Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality lost little time cooperating with the building's planners, but was in no hurry to tell the local residents about the intrusive project. They learned about the plan from the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). That was in May 1999. "Because projects of this kind are now done without informing the public, we have assumed the role of mediator between the inhabitants and the municipality's Local Planning and Building Commission," explains Omer Cohen, who represents SPNI on that body. "We were astounded by the plan," he continues. "By the time a plan like this is presented to the commission, the city engineer has already consulted with the developer and they have reached understandings. Not every building plan reaches the commission; some are rejected beforehand. We thought there was a serious problem with a skyscraper of this scale in this location. My view was that we had to examine the aesthetic and social implications of the tower, which would straddle the line between Neve Tzedek and Florentin" - another old neighborhood. When SPNI launched a public campaign against the project, neighborhood residents joined immediately. Alik Mintz, a computer consultant and the great-grandson of Tel Aviv's third mayor, Israel Rokach, spearheaded the neighborhood's struggle. "We started to organize toward the end of the period for submitting objections to the planning and building commission," he recalls. "If SPNI had not informed us, we would probably never have known what was going to be built above us. We had only two months to get organized. We formed a lobby with members of the local council and mainly with members of the planning and building commission. There was a lot of enthusiasm. We had the feeling that we were out to save ourselves." The residents explained to the commission that building the tower entailed "the destruction of the historic character of the first neighborhood of Tel Aviv," Mintz says, sitting in his backyard. "We said that this violent structure would adversely affect the way winds circulate in the area and would cast a shadow on hundreds of families. To our surprise, the committee decided in short order to reject our objections. It was all wrapped up in a jiff." The procedure left a bitter taste in residents' mouths. "During the whole struggle I had a feeling that there were peculiar relations between the municipality and the developer," Mintz explains. "My feeling was that they saw us as nonentities. Our major argument was that in the case of such a huge project, the municipality also had to provide transportation solutions. After all, hundreds of cars enter and leave the tower. But our case was not taken seriously, even though in any other location the whole project would have been scuttled for that reason alone. "The municipality's reply was a joke: The transportation problems would be solved by the light-rail train, which is supposed to be completed in 2012. And then you ask yourself whether what you are hearing is for real. How could it be that the planning and building commission accepted that as a solution? Its job is to examine a concrete solution, not some future notion. It's ridiculous." Stinging failure The project's initiator, Levy Kushnir, owner of Nechushtan Investments, is not fazed by the complaints. "The tale of a few of the residents about the sunlight, for example, is nonsense: The building is very narrow," Kushnir asserts. "It's clear to me that there are a few residents of Neve Tzedek who object to the tower, but they [just] want to live in a village in the middle of the city." Kushnir acquired the land in question at the end of the 1970s. Originally, at the end of the 19th century, it was the site of a metal factory belonging to the German Templers sect (not to be confused with the medieval Templars). The factory was shelled by the British in World War I, because it manufactured munitions for German and Turkish forces. It was shut down permanently in 1940 after British intelligence uncovered the Templers' ties to the Nazis. The various local "German colonies" established by the Templers were abandoned, and the Neve Tzedek site came into the possession of the Nechushtan company. A new factory was built at the site, which manufactured water pumps for wells and manual cement mixers. In the early 1970s businessman Mickey Albin bought the site, and "I bought it from his widow, Galia Albin," Kushnir says, sitting in his office on Weizmann Street in Tel Aviv. He, too, is angry. "The lot was empty for years. Together with the municipality we turned an abandoned lot into a jewel. I just can't understand people who have complaints about this beautiful tower," he adds, in a tone that is both amazed and aggressive. "We were given construction rights because we undertook to preserve three historic structures from 1908. We invested millions of dollars to preserve Templer buildings in the compound." In 2002, Nechushtan was granted authorization to build without any great difficulties "because the structure only enhanced the neighborhood," Kushnir notes. "We initiated a real-estate project together with the municipality. We put our heads together to figure out how to bring residents to the southern part of the city. We had a concept. Until then no one even dared touch the south. We took a neglected area filled with homeless, crime, asbestos roofs and slums, and turned it into a prestigious location. We and the municipality had a common goal: to improve the outward appearance of the southern section of the city. And that is exactly what we did. It was all done with the support of the municipality and of the mayor, Ron Huldai." But Kushnir needed more support. After obtaining the building rights, Nechushtan signed a contract with Almog Yam Suf Developments. Kushnir was looking for contractors that would be able to handle an ambitious project on the scale he had in mind. Under the terms of the deal, Almog Yam Suf built and marketed the luxury structure, and Nechushtan received part of the revenue from the sale of the residential units. Neither Huldai's support for the project nor the deal between the developers daunted the residents. After their stinging failure with the Local Planning and Building Commission, and just before the bulldozers arrived, the neighborhood activists took their case to the District Planning and Building Commission. Mintz: "This time we organized properly and with all the residents we staged a huge concert in protest against the tower. We collected 400 signatures from the neighborhood at that event and we submitted them, with the objections, together with SPNI. Before that there were endless meetings, so much work, lawyers working with us every day. But in the end the district commission also rejected all of our arguments. It was a depressing moment. Many officials in the Tel Aviv Municipality like the city's 'towerization.' And they are the ones who make the decisions. After all our efforts, we did not achieve even a crumb of success. It is very frustrating. Our struggle ended in failure." French connection Dr. Shmuel Biger strolls by the Neve Tzedek Tower with a small dog. "It's not my dog," he says. "She belongs to a friend of mine, a French woman, who works as a buyer for the French families that have apartments here." The French tenants, he adds, usually only come for holidays, at Passover and in the summer. "That is why it is so desolate here now. When the French are in France the building is empty. I call it the French tower. The socioeconomic status of the people here is very high. You have dentists from Paris, big merchants - these are not the ordinary French people who buy places in Ashkelon or Netanya. They are something else. And I think it is excellent that they decided to invest their money in Israel, because they could have bought a place in, say, Miami, if they had wanted. It is a tremendous contribution to Tel Aviv." Biger is not familiar with the whole saga behind the prestigious building, but enjoys offering his take on its tenants. "My friend buys them things you wouldn't believe: a sofa for NIS 28,000, an ugly lamp for NIS 12,000. I am appalled when I hear about her shopping sprees for them. It is a different world, one we don't know. The French compete among themselves in everything - the costliest things, the biggest things. That makes them feel good. They are very spoiled and live like a closed society in their small territory: the tower, the sea, a few restaurants. They are going to build two kosher restaurants for them here and a cafe where they can get a croissant. They will waste their euros in huge amounts." Attorney Douglas Hawar, one of the first to buy an apartment in the tower, admits that he does not know anyone in the building. He is from Boston, he has family in Tel Aviv, and one day he thought he'd move to Israel. "This is the beginning," he says. "Most of the people here are foreign residents, like me, doctors and retirees who in the meantime don't want to settle in Israel. The truth is that whenever anyone asks me where I live, I ask him right off if he knows Neve Tzedek. After that I reply frankly: 'I live in the skyscraper that wrecked Neve Tzedek.' I understand the anger and the rage against the tower. It is a modern building, with a somewhat concrete design, which is not compatible with the neighborhood. But this is the future. It's obvious to me why the local residents hate the place, but it does have its advantages. I think the tower can attract people to South Tel Aviv, which is something no one ever even considered before this project. That is something you can't ignore." The sales manager of the building, Ze'ev Wolfman, says 50 percent of the tenants are foreigners, mostly French Jews. All the apartments in the project have been sold, he says, speaking in his crowded office on the ground floor. "But the thing is," he adds with a poker face, "you can buy apartments second-hand. The price of a two-room gallery apartment is NIS 1.8 million. The first 10 floors are doubles: They contain two-floor duplexes. The apartments there have a high ceiling, of six meters, and each residence has a gallery and a huge picture window. There are also three-room apartments that go for between NIS 2.5 million and NIS 3.1 million. An apartment of 4.5 rooms costs NIS 6 million. There are also a few penthouses, which are owned by the company, and they are being offered for NIS 20 million." Two of the penthouses on the 32nd floor belong to Major General (res.) Shlomo Yanai, president and CEO of Teva Pharmaceuticals, and to millionaire Eli Papouchado. According to real-estate agent Hadas Halevy, from Hayam Hatichon Agency, when you swim in the building's spectacular 10th-floor swimming pool, "you see the sea and the sky, and it's like swimming between the clouds. It's a whole different sensation. It's a very pampering place. Of course there is 24-hour security, a sauna, a spa, a gym. But in addition to big names from the business elite in Israel, there are also regular people who bought apartments at prices significantly below what they are now, when the tower was still on paper. At the moment, 30 percent of the apartments are not yet inhabited." In the opinion of Tel Aviv Municipal Council member Meital Lehavi (Meretz), the struggle against the construction of the tower was naive. Lehavi, who spearheaded Meretz's resignation from the municipal coalition, in part because of the city's planning and building policy, is furious that the municipality permitted and promoted a project that the Neve Tzedek residents opposed. "The establishment viewed the struggle as a small-time affair, marginal and naive. I was at their demonstration against the tower. The problem was that people dealt only with the problem in their backyard. There was no large-scale organization. No one presented a broad view of the problem." She pulls out the original City Building Plan (CBP) of the Nechushtan compound (CBP 2353) in Neve Tzedek, concerning a lot of 5.9 dunams and building rights of 300 percent. The plan described two buildings, of nine and 11 stories. "In 1999," she explains, "a new plan was submitted (3235 A). It enlarged the area to seven dunams, with building rights of 335 percent, plus another 10 percent for balconies. The explanation for the change was that the developer undertook a public mission: restoration of three historic buildings below the tower and their designation as structures for community use. What [the city] said, in effect, was that the residents were being hurt by the addition of building rights for the developer, so let's give them something, too." But even that gift was taken away, Lehavi explains: "In 2004, in a surprise move, a new plan was submitted to the Local Planning and Building Commission. The Neve Tzedek Tower was already built, but in the third incarnation of the CBP (3235 B), the buildings designated for preservation were given commercial designations. That just makes the blood boil. Instead of the buildings being made available to the local residents, they will become restaurants. Every step that led to the building of the tower had something that drove you crazy." What else? Lehavi: "The CBP did not require specification of maximum height per floor. The planner discovered this legal loophole and demanded the right to build doubly high units. The municipality was able to block him by means of a compromise, according to which half the tower would be of double height and the rest regular height. The result was hallucinatory: The tower has 32 floors but the height of a 42-story building." Couldn't the commission disqualify plans like that? "The problem is that we receive the material in a near-complete state. At the commission, we actually receive a prepared recommendation, which has already been agreed to by the developer and the city engineer. It is difficult to oppose something that has been decided on higher up. Our ability to wield influence was negligible throughout the process. The elected representatives were given plans that were almost complete. Someone had already figured out what it would look like. That is very regrettable, but the present tower is only the beginning. It will be joined by others, just as big." What else can the neighborhood expect? "At least seven towers are going to be built on Eilat Street. On the southern side there will be five compounds on which the buildings will range from 26 to 40 stories, and on the north side, on Yitzhak Elhanan Street - two more of 30 stories each. That street is also going to become a six-lane road. Why? To provide transportation solutions for the towers. Within a few years Neve Tzedek will be a neighborhood under siege, a traffic island between major traffic arteries." Alien presence Neve Tzedek is about to get a face-lift, then. A new type of architecture will thrust itself upon the quiet streets and quaint lanes. The neighborhood's modest past will be swallowed up by real-estate sharks. Journalist and writer Tsur Shezaf despairs at the way "history was privatized into bland real estate." He describes the Neve Tzedek Tower as an "urban horror," adding: "I think it is disastrous to destroy an historical landmark and replace it with an aggressive tower. There is a very Israeli statement here: The lot on which the tower was built encompasses the history of Tel Aviv. Its location is critical. Tel Aviv was born from there. When you hurt the fabric of a neighborhood like this, you destroy part of the city's soul." There is a "total misconception" here, Shezaf adds. "Mayor Huldai is a Zionist of the old school, of concrete and power. He does not understand the charm of Tel Aviv. He wants to create a New York here, a city of towers, but what makes Tel Aviv wonderful is its smallness and its human scale." The compound on which the tower now stands was once known as the "Valhalla neighborhood," Shezaf explains. It was the birthplace of the precise architecture of the spacious homes, the decorative tiles, the soft arches - of the architecture one can still find in Neve Tzedek and in the adjacent Shabazi quarter. "Today the place is called the Nechushtan Tower, but Valhalla bears far greater importance than the new building that tramples it will ever have." Shezaf's approach is seconded by architect and publisher Sharon Rotbard, who teaches architecture at Jerusalem's Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and is the author of "Black City, White City" (2005, Hebrew), which examines the origins of Tel Aviv-Jaffa. In Rotbard's view, the architectural identity of the Neve Tzedek Tower is alien to the surroundings. "It's a matter of taste," he says. "There is an architect and he has clients. That is what makes it possible for a project like this to happen. They saw a few sketches and chose what caught their fancy. Well, it's not my taste. A tall tower like this turns the city into its yard, its landscape." "This specific tower," he continues, "looks toward the north of the city, to the sea. It turns it back to the south of the city. The direction the building faces is very obvious. The relation with the street is almost nonexistent. The parking area is connected to the lobby, and the lobby is connected to the elevator. It is clear that a place like this is self-involved, and defines itself as an alien presence. Construction like this does not refer to historic and social values. There is some sort of economic impulse to build Tel Aviv upward. You see it in all kinds of neighborhoods, not just Neve Tzedek. It's no more of a scandal here than it is anywhere else. I am in favor of textures that serve a type of community. I am in favor of traditional values of neighborhood, street and house that are part of a type of traditional urbanism." Back to the junkyard The architect who designed the tower, Zvi Gabai, takes a different view. He is quick to talk about semantics. "It's not for nothing that 'Neve Tzedek' has the ring [in Hebrew] of words like 'self-righteousness' and 'cynicism,'" he says, plainly delighted with this linguistic sharpshooting. "The current residents of the neighborhood are not the original ones, who perhaps have the right to complain that they are being trampled underfoot. The current residents paid a pittance and made a whole population wander. They are perched in a glass menagerie and complaining that new residents are being brought in around them. But a city is not an oasis. A city has to let people live in it. From my point of view, it is a national mission to increase population density." Gabai is proud of his creation. It was very clear to him what he wanted to do, he says. "The volume of the tower was not decided by me. As an architect, when I designed it I thought about how it would be sold. That is why I decided to make the front face the sea and close the part that faces the junkyard - the industrial structures in the south of the city. No one wants to look at refuse and Florentin. That is why the big balconies face the sea and only small windows face south. The developer does not make a very big profit in a project of this kind; he has a 25 percent profit from his investment. That is why it is so critical to sell all of the apartments. If the developer does not sell a quarter of them, he is in dire straits. My mission was to create a structure that would attract 300 families to come live in it." Nevertheless, Gabai feels the need to explain that everywhere else in the world developers invest twice as much in exterior finish. The construction bar in Israel is too low, he notes. "My original plan was for the tower to be white. The gray and the small windows are a matter of budget. I wanted the exterior finish to be white concrete. But the developer got scared, because very few builders in Israel know how to handle that material. It requires very high proficiency. The stone that was finally chosen is gray granite." You know, people say the tower is simply ugly. Gabai: "I am not insulted by people saying it is ugly. What is important is that it is big, that it is significant. That it has something to say. The tower demonstrates presence. As an architect, that is very important for me." Don't you regret the location? "I think another five towers like this one are needed in Neve Tzedek. It is impossible not to exploit the property. It is a low-density neighborhood and it has to compensate for construction density such as exists in no other metropolitan area in the world. What is happening here is insane. The whole of the center of Tel Aviv is off-limits for building because of the UNESCO plan. If someone wants to live in the city he has only the cruddy apartments built in the 1960s. If towers like the Nechushtan are not built in Neve Tzedek, the neighborhood has no justification to exist - it has to be demolished."W Bookmark to del.icio.us   Knowing when to fold Ehud Olmert tells Kadima to begin preparations for party primaries. Cost of kashrut Meat prices set to soar after raid on biggest kosher slaughterhouse in U.S.

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