Faded Dreams

Although Tel Aviv's legendary Dizengoff Street has
fallen on hard times, plans are in the works to restore
some of its lost glory.

EMILY HAUSER SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

izengoff Street, 1997. Walk
into any of the bookstores
and you'll find travel
guides describing Tel
Aviv's most famous thoroughfare
as everything from "the city's
smartest shopping area" to "the
summation of the city's life and
atmosphere." Most describe
Dizengoff Square in equally glow-
ing terms.
Contrast this to a lexicon of
now-passe cultural icons titled
"What Have We Lost?" which ap-
peared recently in Iton Tel Aviv,
one of the city's weekly papers.
Listed there, among record play-
ers and the once-ubiquitous asi-
mon (phone token), is Dizengoff
Street. 'That's right, kids," goes
the terse commentary, 'it used to
be The Place."
Walking down the street itself,
tripping over broken sidewalks,
counting empty storefronts (12
on the Ben-Gurion-Arlosoroff
block alone), noting the dearth of
consumers and the profusion of
dirt, one quickly realizes Iton Tel
Aviv is right, and the travel
guides need an update. If this
sums up Tel Aviv's "life and at-
mosphere," this city's in big trou-
ble.
What happened? Dizengoff
was once so identified with all the
fun Tel Aviv represents — cul-
ture, fashion, trend setters, gos-
sip and cruising for dates — that
a verb, lehizdangeff, was created
to denote "to `do' Dizengoff' or "to
be Dizengoff-ed." The country's
best and brightest flocked to the
cafes and galleries that dotted the
street and its environs.
During the War of Indepen-
dence and the Sinai Campaign,
it wasn't unusual to see generals
straight from the front engaging
in intellectual conversation with
the likes of poets Natan Alterman
and Avot Yeshurun at the most
famous cafe of them all, Kassit.
In the 1960s, a new generation
of artists expressed their rebel-
lion against the old order by mov-
ing to Vered, a cafe up the street.
Eventually, the country's
younger generation of artists felt
they needed a space they could
call their own, away from Kassit.
The early '60s saw the rise of
Vered, on the corner of what is
now Ben-Gurion, with the regu-
lar patronage of the likes of Meir
Wieseltier, Yona Wallach and
Yair Hurwitz — among the most
important of later Israeli poets,
all known for their controversial,
nonconformist work.
Moreover, former Kassit reg-

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ular Hazel Arieli recalls, the
cafe's very popularity was a fac-
tor in its downfall.
"Even before Dizengoff stopped
being Dizengoff," she says, "there
was a certain movement away
from Kassit because these people
didn't want to be tourist attrac-
tions."
And so, some time in the mid-
'60s it started: Dizengoffs slow
decline from jewel in the crown
to dirty has-been. The introduc-
tion of television, a sudden craze
of card-playing at home with
friends, regular influxes of out-
of-towners, bigger apartments
and the gradual introduction of
air conditioning meant that, for
Tel Avivians, going out lehiz-
dangeff lost a lot of its thrill.
'The place of [poets] Alterman,
Pen, Shlonsky and Zach was
grabbed by all sorts of under- 14
world rejects and sorry night-
birds," literary critic Gabriel
Moked complained bitterly in an
essay he wrote in the 1970s. 'The
ugly Israel took over the heart of
Dizengoff."
In a slightly more objective
tone, veteran journalist Natan
Dunevich, author of the 1959
book Tel Aviv, points a finger at
simple snobbery. 'There was also
an ethnic backdrop to the de-
cline," he explains today. "In the
early '60s, there was a movement
northward of shops from the Cen-
tral Bus Station area, a process
of stores turning into bazaars and
the removal of the display win-
dows. Young people from the new
cities surrounding Tel Aviv be-
gan to come into town to have a
good time, to wander the streets 4111
or sit at the cafes.
"The Ashkenazim, the tzfon-
im' [elitist residents of north Tel
Aviv], were escaping the cdromim'
[residents of the city's largely
Sephardi southern quarters]."
Hip Tel Avivians began to grav-
itate to different neighborhoods,
such as the areas around
Sheinken Street, Basel Street
—9
and the Florentine Quarter.
In 1977, as if determined to
shovel the last bit of dirt on
Dizengoffs grave, city hall de-
cided to favor motorized trans-
portation over pedestrians, and
raised the famous square to al-
low traffic to flow underneath it.
Enter increased traffic, more
fumes, messy death as a real
prospect for those who try to cross.i
the street, and two hideous
Dizengoff Square fountains —
the first an aqua affair that
looked more like a piece of a ship-