Jerusalem’s ugliest building (hint: it’s not the Holyland)

February 3, 2012 by · 5 Comments
Filed under: Environment, History and Culture 

The Amir Center in Jerusalem

For years, whenever I have driven down King George Street, near the Great Synagogue and the Leonardo (formerly Sheraton) Plaza Hotel, the building at the corner with Agron Street has pained me – a tremendously ugly, 7-story, dilapidated monstrosity that I have waited patiently for some announcement of its pending demolition that never comes.

And now I learn that the building was not only once considered a paradigm of daring optimism and ”modernity,” but the architect behind it has become one of the most celebrated in the country’s history.

That’s not to say that the Amir Center (as the building is officially called) won’t someday be torn down to build another luxury apartment tower; other high-rise buildings have already been approved in its immediate surroundings. But a retrospective, almost loving article in today’s Haaretz may temper those ambitions.

In 1958, architect David Resnick was asked to design a new residential building at the intersection in question. In an interview, he praised its innovations, which broke out of the classic Jerusalem Stone look and feel to splash a dose of modernist paint on the city. The Amir Center was built on a large 10 dunam plaza, its 7 floors propped up on stilts, with a Supersol supermarket (the first in Jerusalem) down below.

While Resnick was pleased with his creation (it even won an award in 1963 for technological innovation), the building was immediately dubbed “Jerusalem’s ugliest building” in street interviews that took place at the time, Haaretz reports.

That controversy, however, helped raise Resnick’s public visibility, and the architect went on design such more acclaimed Jerusalem landmarks as the dome shaped synagogue on Hebrew University’s Givat Ram campus, the Mormon Center on Mount Scopus and the Van Leer Institute, among many other always-modernist style projects.

That said, Resnick admits that the Amir Center has been “modified” beyond its original clean lines: residents have enclosed balconies, added unattractive air conditioning units. Indeed, Resnick says “When I walk past the building today, I look the other way. I can’t bear to see what they did to it.

The city is promoting a plan where a contractor is given the rights to build an extra floor or two at no cost provided the residents’ current living space is upgraded (including making it earthquake proof). But the building’s shell, apparently, isn’t strong enough to bear the additional weight, so for now, it’s either demolish or stay ugly.

While “to date no plan has been formulated or submitted,” according to a municipality spokesperson, Resnick would undoubtedly be opposed. “The question of nice or not nice is irrelevant,” he says. “I think that the Israeli establishment does not understand what architecture is and its importance to the state.”

In another 50 years, will they be talking this way about the Holyland project too?

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RIMBY

January 31, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: education, Environment, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life 

In all its glory...my local recycling cage.

Exciting news on my block, sort of IMBY, or RIMBY, instead of NIMBY: After numerous calls over the years to the iriya, the municipality, we finally have a plastic bottle/disc case/battery recycling cage just down the street, smack next to the newspaper recycling bin. This is exciting because while I live in a neighborhood that should, in theory, have many recycling cages because of a population that is happy to recycle, we haven’t had that many, and the one that is closest to us is quite a few blocks away and not really on the way to anything.

That’s meant schlepping bottles in the car, on the stroller, on the way to this or that, and having a stockpile of them in the house at all times. And I can finally get rid of the batteries that have been piling up in my front closet for months because I can never find battery recycling anywhere.

In fact, I’ve been so frustrated about the state of recycling in my neighborhood that I recently wrote a piece about it for JTA, which was just published the other day. You can read it here, and one interesting fact is the following:

“According to Chagit Hoshen, the marketing manager of ELA Recycling, the nonprofit organization that handles recycling collection countrywide, an average of 41 percent of plastic bottles were recycled in 2011. Once the recycling rate reaches 50 percent, the organization says it will build a factory for the production of plastic bottles containing 40 percent recycled raw materials.”

At the same time, at least in my city of Jerusalem, many people still don’t recycle, and I often see neighbors simply throwing out their plastic bottles with the trash, just like they think nothing of tossing garbage out their car windows or sweeping the dirty water gathered from washing the floor out their front door. Of course, that’s not everyone, and there are many Israelis, both native-born and immigrants who take their recycling seriously and will gather their bottles, their cardboard and their tin cans and compost and deposit it in community gardens, community bins and other recycling centers.

In any case, it’s a start and one that I’m excited to begin using.

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In their tracks

January 15, 2012 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Entertainment, Environment, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Travel 

This photo, of which there was a similar one in today’s Ha’aretz, shows deer walking around in the Odem or Red Forest, the largest nature reserve in the Golan Heights. I love the photo because it doesn’t seem like it could have been taken in Israel, as deer with antlers, romping in the snow, look so foreign to these parts. But Odem is a fairly magical forest, with deer, ibex and gazelles wandering around, overlooking views of the Golan mountains and Mount Hermon.

The forest and the moshav of Odem are located on Mount Odem, which is 3,580 feet above sea level, making it the second-highest town in Israel, after Neve Ativ, which sits on Mount Hermon. Odem, the moshav, has a few business concerns, but most interesting, perhaps, is its winery, Har Odem Winery, which is worth checking out, especially if the snow has melted by the time you get up there.

Why? It was a rainy weekend over here, and that rain translated into snow up there, where a meter of snow fell on the Hermon, Israel’s ski resort mountain, and nearly as much in other northern towns, including Tzfat and other peaks in the Golan Heights.

Of course, once there’s news of snow, the whole country heads up north to see it for themselves, as snow days are few and far between in these parts. The deer, however, get to revel in it as soon as it starts falling.

Lucky. I’m gonna try and join them this week.

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Pacha Sleeping Mama

January 10, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Environment 

The Pachamama Alliance is a worldwide organization that aims to raise awareness of the environmental dangers facing planet Earth – from catastrophic climate change to the mass extinction of species.

The Israeli arm of Pachamama has been schlepping the organization’s five-hour core “Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream” symposium around the country. Friends of ours in Jerusalem hosted about 30 people in their home last week to participate in the seminar.

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A Pachamama workshop consists of a series of very professional 5-10 minute videos followed by small group discussions. There are activities (writing down vision statements, mini-meditations, calls to action) and larger group sharing.

The event is divided into two sections: the problems are spelled out before lunch, with what we can do personally to make a difference described after the meal.

The videos in the first half are quite disturbing and graphic, although if you follow the news, much of the data will be familiar (an example factoid: “if you have food in a refrigerator, clothes in your closet, a bed to sleep in, and a roof over your head, you’re better off than 75% of the people on the planet”).

After a barrage of 5-6 of these depressing films, I told the group that I felt quite useless; how could I as an individual possibly affect any kind of change when faced with an unquenchable demand on our rapidly reducing natural resources? Our facilitator said I should hold those thoughts until after part two; that there was indeed hope.

I unfortunately never got that far. After a healthy meal of lentil soup and fresh bread, I promptly fell asleep on the couch. While my wife sitting next to me was energetically creating a matrix of personal skills matched with possible responses, my head lolled in slumber, occasionally awakening to realize the other participants were being mutually empowered, before slipping back into dozy denial.

I vaguely heard the group leader asking my wife if she could wake me up for the final circle and her defending my right to nap. I rose anyway and regarded a very different group than the one I had left behind.

I feel kind of like the blue-skinned Na’vi in the movie Avatar about ¾ of the way into the film, when their world is being pulverized by the evil Earth army and there seems to be no way out. I came to the workshop to understand how I could make a difference. I left feeling depressed and drowsy, having missed the uplifting finale.

The good news: this will certainly not be the last Pachamama symposium scheduled in Israel and I’ll hopefully have the opportunity to attend another one. But next time, I’ll try to sleep during the first half.

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Explaining flavor

January 9, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: design, Environment, Food, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness 

Chefs at work at Machneyuda

There are times, many times when I’m reading an Ha’aretz article about something — whatever — and I’m just stumped about what they’re trying to tell me, the reader. Consider the piece in last weekend’s Haaretz Magazine, “Creative, But is it Edible?”, about how — I think — local chefs go to incredible lengths to come up with innovative dishes. It takes a while for the writer to get to the idea that local chefs, mostly Tel Aviv chefs, of course, are aspiring to be the kind of chefs that create from scratch, not merely copying or interpreting but making new flavors, textures and, eventually, recipes. It takes a while because the piece begins with chefs in Spain, and while that’s interesting, it’s not clear what their connection is to us.

Anyway. I was pleased to find that they quoted Asaf Granit, one of the chefs from the very popular Machneyuda, which is in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market and is considered one of Israel’s top restaurants right now. Unusual, really, as Jerusalem is seldom considered the have the best of anything trendy in this country. We may not care, but, sigh, I guess I do. So his contribution to this piece about coming up with unusual dishes was the following:

“Last week, there was a married couple and four young women here for a bachelorette party. We quickly got into a very interesting discussion and I decided to prepare a dish of beef tartare for them – right in their hands,” says Granit. “We put on their hands a layer of beef, onion, parsley and capers, all minced. We squeezed on some fresh lemon, drizzled a little olive oil, and all they had to do was lick their fingers.”

A traditional mahlabia

And down in Ashdod, a flourishing seaside city, Balzac’s Nati Shafrir (whose restaurant is possibly named after a very popular restaurant in NYC) is thinking about serving a dessert in a glass ashtray (you think there may just a little bit too much smoking around here?): He’s working on an “edible version of cigarette ash. It will be made of roasted coconut or cinnamon and cloves.”

Lovely. And, finally, a quote from Itai Rogozinsky, who owns the Vaniglia ice cream parlor chain and is most proud of his frozen yogurt made with rosewater, roasted pistachios and apricot jam, kind of a takeoff of mahalabia, a pudding dessert that is popular in many Arab countries. How does this boy who says the yogurt is “a nostalgic reminder of his childhood in Kochav Yair” — a suburban town east of Kfar Saba that has been around about 25 or so years, created by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to solidify the Green Line — know about mahalabia? Probably from the excursions his family used to take to nearby Nablus, Kalkiya and Tulkarm, three Arab towns in the vicinity.

It’s all good, drawing from memories and good flavors to create new tastes. And, interestingly, way down in the article an unnamed source commented that Israeli chefs just travel abroad to the chicest restaurants and come back to copy what they ate there. Would have liked a little more on that idea. Just a little context would help, oh Ha’aretz editors.

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