The Flourishing of Public Space in Tel Aviv

Abandoned buildings, e-commerce, sparks

A few weeks ago, I received an article recommendation from Medium: Dead Malls Predicted the Erosion of Public Space in America.

It looked intriguing enough. Abandoned places once teeming with people have always attracted me in an suspenseful, eerie way. In high school, I photographed old decrepit factory buildings left to decompose. In Oregon, I visited old crumbling country stores, mere vestiges of their glory pasts. I would search up pictures of malls that had been reclaimed by the natural world, weeds sprouting through escalator stairs and tigers patrolling the food court.

Visiting Germany, I heard of AbandonedBerlin.com from a guitar-playing Frenchman in my Berlin hostel. Apparently, this interest wasn’t mine alone.

What is it about abandoned places? Airports, amusement parks, swimming pools…decay is mysterious. Abandoned places feel secret and hidden. Visiting them feels like eavesdropping on the past, revealing something we aren’t meant to see.

With the proliferation of e-commerce, in-person shopping becomes largely archaic and inconvenient. Already in seventh grade (circa 2012), I remember when our local Chet’s video store shut down — a flagship center of the town to ashes. Our small community’s bastion of oily popcorn and employee movie recommendations scribbled on the whiteboard had been rendered irrelevant. It was at Chet’s that my brothers and I first rented Drake and Josh DVDs to play on our portable DVD player on long car rides.

From Chet’s, we transitioned to Blockbuster. Morning of the road trip, Dad would drive us to the store, telling us 3 boys to compromise on 2 movies.

As the world of online streaming grew, Blockbuster too became obsolete, a vestige of a world still not inundated by screens, pocket computers and login credentials.

Many have lamented the demise of public space. When Howard Schultz accelerated the growth of Starbucks, he intended on creating “a third place,” — apart from home and work.

With many frequenters of coffee shops on their laptops, do they still constitute a 3rd space?

When I arrived to Tel Aviv in November 2020, a full government lockdown was in effect. All the usually bustling restaurants were shut. The Dizzengoff sidewalks were clear. Noise pollution was down and consumer business was struggling.

You might have thought people had retreated indoors.

But they had gone outside.

Picnics galore — on city benches, milk crates, blankets on the wispy Tel Aviv grass, it didn’t matter.

Now, January 2022. Despite the threatening shadow of Omicron, the bars and cafes are open for business and teeming with laughter.

It’s different here, then where I grew up in the Boston suburbs. There’s less privacy on a scooter than a minivan.

“The city of sparks,” said Rav Shlomo Carlebach once about Tel Aviv.

Sparks may seem lofty and grand, elusive and transient; but just like the sunsets here they are a daily occurrence, the intangible but palpable substance resembling fireworks or the seedlings of a dandelion exchanged in our every cappuccino and conversation.