Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Finding Natural Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department Finding Natural Jerusalem

Modern Jerusalem is a confusing city. The names of contiguous streets change every few blocks, and rectilinear avenues are very few and far between. Lurking underneath the difficult patchworks of alleyways and highways, the hilly landscape is the ultimate factor in confusing the navigator. The myriad hills reveal themselves around the most unexpected corners, shattering any sense of enclosure and continuity in neighborhoods that are otherwise whole.

Hidden in the complex calculus of modern Jerusalem’s fabric lies an order that can only be obtained through various levels of abstraction, a logic that is worth uncovering for numerous reasons. Insofar as Jerusalem’s plan can successfully be simplified, a few of the benefits to reap from this endeavor are: it might help guide the uninitiated through the Jerusalemite labyrinth from origin to destination. Beyond that most basic function, it can potentially serve as a template against which to compare and contrast to actual Jerusalem, and to other cities; this clarification of the city’s physical nature can provide new social and political insight about the city, and a sense of whether Jerusalem is as unique a place as its heavenly profile would have it.1

1 Gandelsonas, Mario, X-Urbanism: Architecture and the American City, Princeton Architectural Press, New York: 1999, 75. Architectural students “read” the dimensions of Rome, but the “exploration of the plans of New York, Los Angeles, Boston, New Haven, Chicago, Des Moines and Atlantic City between 1984-1994 reveals an ignored formal universe in the American City”, 77. “The process was based on drawings that described only the pertinent elements that belonged to the parti, while the features that did not relate to the architectural idea were’edited out.’ Finding Natural Jerusalem 1 Many cities have street plans that lend themselves to easy navigation.Benjamin Lehrer’03 They Near Eastern Studies Department are organized by some explicable, predictable logic. The simplest of these is the grid, a form expressed quite purely in Manhattan, among other places. Manhattan’s dumb orthogonal layout assures that at each intersection, pedestrian and cabbie alike are both confronted with the same perpendicular views. Though the crow may fly in a straight line from point A to B, rarely does such pure form exist in nature—rectilinear blocks are essentially artificial. Human infants cannot distinguish abstract shapes for some time after birth; straight lines are a manmade construct used to exert control over the world at large.2 And useful they are. In places like

Jerusalem where urban form is not so readily distinguishable, where the next corner is hidden by a broad curve and a hill, it is helpful to find one’s position vis-à-vis that hidden place by drawing a straight line through the hill or over the curvy fabric of the city, to triangulate into thin air the place where both spots are visible. This gives a basic sense of how different places relate to each other in a city. In this analysis, causality will be excluded from the equation, as will local inconsistencies in the larger scheme. Regardless of how it ended up as it is, there is an overall logic to

Jerusalem, and since history obscures that, we should push chronology aside for the time being.

“By working with the plan of Chicago rather than with buildings, my studio, based on the assumption of the autonomy of the plan, ‘eliminated’ the perceptual level and focused on architectural questions derived from the symptoms, disruptions, and discontinuities that interrupt the continuous spatial flow implied by the grid of streets of the Chicago plan.” This paper bears a clear debt to Gandelsonas’ method of abstracting the city in order to discover underlying reasons for why the city is what it is.

Finding Natural Jerusalem 2 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Modern Jerusalem bears an uncanny resemblance to Washington, D.C. It is the capital of the State of Israel, and its political and cultural institutions occupy the center of the Jerusalem plateau. Likewise, Washington is the capital of the United

States of America; its beacons of governance and memorialized history sit in its central Mall. This unlikely comparison requires proof, lest disbelief and shock remain lodged in the reader’s mind.

The most dubious part of this claim is that , the home of a large chunk of the Israeli government, is also the central geographical point in

Jerusalem. Washington, D.C.’s Mall sits smack dab in the middle of its diamond borders; this is not a result of happenstance, but of the deliberate 1791 scheme of

Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who envisioned an intimidating European order for the capital of America’s young democracy.3 On the contrary, Kiryat Ben Gurion, the government “village”, was established in the 1960’s on what was at the time the western extreme of Jerusalem, Givat Ram—“High Hill”. The of Jerusalem was and is entrenched in the collective imagination as the heart of the city, both because of its historical gravity and its quite discernable location in the center of the

Old City Basin. To make a claim that a forty year old outcropping trumps a polis more than three millennia of age is therefore outrageous. Though the Old City

2 Gombrich, E. H., Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Princeton University Press: 1956, 2nd Ed. Revised, 3rd Printing, 1969, 291. The inability of infants to discern straight lines is due to their undeveloped perceptual abilities; though these abilities are intrinsically inscribed in the brain, Finding Natural Jerusalem 3 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department merits an intense closer look, it is not a form giver to greater Jerusalem, and that is what we are looking for first.

The Jerusalem Plateau stands about 2500 feet above the Mediterranean Sea and the Sharon Plain to its west, and 4000 feet above the Dead Sea to its east. It also stands head and shoulders above the hills of Judea to its south and Samaria and to its north; it is separated from all by a ringlet of ridges.4 Two main internal ridges partition the plateau into three small basins, a southern, northern, and eastern. The distinct nature of this larger circular form is obscured by history—for over three thousand years, only one corner of it was occupied, and so it wasn’t understood as a whole entity all unto itself. From its founding as the seat of the Jebusites, a

Canaanite tribe, Jerusalem occupied only a little sliver of land at the bottom of the bowl that formed the Old City Basin, the easternmost basin.5

It took the lion’s share of Jerusalem’s history for the city to fitfully expand beyond that tiny outpost to cover the full Old City Basin; while this cautious, often timid expansion spanned more than 99% of the Jerusalem timeline, it in fact covers a relatively much tinier percentage of the whole plateau’s surface area. Because of this fact, when Jerusalemites are asked to draw a conceptual map of the city, they invariably draw the Old City Basin much larger than it actually is, often taking up and nature does contain geometries, like in snowflakes, it is a ma�er of time before the brain is able to apply these tools. 3 Gandelsonas, 20. “Washington is the American city that condensates European and architectural desires; it

Finding Natural Jerusalem 4 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department the lion’s share of the whole Jerusalem Plateau.6 In the mind’s eye, the Old City

Basin, which also consists of Arab and modern “West” Jerusalem, is so important, that this relatively small geographical feature, the Old City Basin, even conceals the existence of the larger plateau.

The very fact that Downtown Jerusalem, which barely comprises the western ridge of the tiny Old City Basin, is called shows a certain misunderstanding of everything in the western two thirds of the whole plateau. All the hills to the west are anathema, shapeless and confusing. Jerusalemites do know the difference between what is and what is not Jerusalem, but this is not because of any real spatial understanding. The probable reasons illuminate much about

Jerusalem.

JERUSALEM, SANS TOPOGRAPHY

The first reason Jerusalemites can identify where Jerusalem begins and ends is sheer familiarity. They know the city because they have traveled its curvy back streets hundreds of times. This is not a useful method for analysis, because it does stands for the European city with an American scale and grid.” 4 Kutcher, Arthur, The New Jerusalem: Planning and Politics, The M.I.T.Press, Cambridge, Massachuse�s: 1975, 11. Though Kutcher mentions the circularity of the plateau, he focuses only on the Old City and its basin, thereby ignoring our field of inquiry. 5 Kroyanker, David, Jerusalem Architecture, The Vendome Press, New York: 1997, 21. 6 Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City, The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Massachuse�s, 1960, as interpreted in Tuan, Yi-Fu, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Preception, A�itudes, and Values, Columbia University Press, Morningside Edition, New York: 1990, 205-7. A perceptual map of Jerusalem with accurate scale was

Finding Natural Jerusalem 5 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department not illuminate anything beyond the fact that even the most byzantine of labyrinths can be navigated by memorization. We are striving to find some deeper system for knowing Jerusalem than the rote treading and retreading of every single pathway.

Without a greater exploration of how Jerusalem works, we might not discover why Jerusalem is so cherished. Admiration for Jerusalem in this case would remain confined to the realm of topophilia, or love of place. Based on the notion that familiarity of place breeds attachment, topophilia is the sentiment that causes people to fall in love with gas stations and other objects of questionable aesthetic value.7 In his works Yi-Fu Tuan describes the theory that aesthetic beauty can only be digested visually for two minutes, and beyond that, appreciation of a sight or object is simply a matter of conditioning.8 “Human needs, emotional drives and aspirations,” like the necessity to take pride in one’s surroundings or justify one’s actions, “are largely non-rational, but the neo-cortex has a seemingly infinite capacity to provide ‘reasons’ for what we are compelled by our lower brains to do. Wishful thinking and delusion permeate all our ideals, political and environmental.”9

In that vain, the author was once asked to list what was objectively special about Jerusalem, and was faced with this interesting specter: if there is no palpable shown to Jerusalemites, who invariably protested that the inhabited areas of the Old City Basin were drawn too small in relation to the empty regions of the other basins. This parallels Lynch’s study: he had residents in acommuter neighborhood of Los Angeles, Northridge, and a pedestrian neighborhood, Boyle Heights, draw maps of the city. The pedestrians focused on a small chunk of downtown, enlarging it disproportionately, while the commuters accurately drew the system of freeways to scale with correct geographical

Finding Natural Jerusalem 6 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department method to its madness, how could his opinion be taken seriously in any context outside of navigating? This is because to show logic is to show a rational mind.

To know that Shay Agnon Boulevard is the distant southern successor of Zalman

Shazar Boulevard is to explain why Jews have a justification to live in Jerusalem beyond the exercise of colonial power inherited from their Western predecessors, the

British. Builders demonstrated certain sensibilities in dealing with that street that are intrinsic to the topography, the history, and their world outlook. A Palestinian

Muslim, a religious Jew, a secular Jew and a Christian might all have rational ideas of what constitutes Jerusalem, and yet come to tetrametrically opposed conclusions of how this should dictate building on a certain site because of the different premises from which they start their logical odysseys. Still, to discover order is to be able to form a worthwhile opinion. In a case like Jerusalem where one’s very presence is often up for existential debate, this critical knowledge of the place allows one to justify that existence, among other things.10

Though attempting to remain free of clouded, circular judgment, the first crack at answering the question was half wishful thinking: the writer described his admiration of the city’s history, its expression in architecture, its cultural richness and its communal spirit. The reply came that all these attributes also described New

York City, to which this writer responded, “Does that sound unreasonable, that I

Finding Natural Jerusalem 7 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department like a city that shares much in common with a metropolis that has been called the

Greatest City on Earth?” But even establishing a common standard of “great cities” relies on a woeful amount of subjectivity…Jerusalem is not a particularly large city, with around 600,000 inhabitants, and a width of only 6 miles from West to East. To call it “the Holiest City on Earth”, or “the Most Beautiful”, is to engage in the type of valueless boosterism that enabled Sheboygan, Wisconsin to proudly call itself “the

Bratwurst Capital of the World” and Tawnton, Massachusetts “the largest city for its size.”11

But symbolism and myth might be the elusive traits that define the city. The

Talmud states that God bestowed on Jerusalem nine measures of beauty, on the rest of the world only one. Though one tradition describes a dichotomy between

Heavenly Jerusalem and Earthly Jerusalem, such denigration of Jerusalem’s sanctity, even in the daily sphere, is anathema to many. To chronicle Jerusalem’s role for those of absolute faith is almost cliché, as the modern asylums of Jerusalem can attest to. They accommodate many foreigners suffering from Jerusalem Syndrome, an affliction that makes them believe they are messianic saviors.12 In the medieval ages, the so-called “T-O” maps showed the cosmology of Christian Europe, which placed

Jerusalem at the direct center of earth’s three known continents, Africa, Europe and

Asia, whose boundaries formed a “T” with Jerusalem at the intersection.13

Finding Natural Jerusalem 8 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Jerusalem’s symbolism creates a strong sense of community for each ethnic group, not only its minorities. European Jews, even secular ones, feel a euphoric sense of salvation from the terrible genocidal fate of the Diaspora. In moments uncluttered by existential danger and its resultant tension, they seem to rejoice in a newfound sense of belonging. In a larger place, their “whiteness” might only be an undercurrent, but the polity of Ashkenazim is self-conscious because Israel is a heterogeneous, small and conflict-ridden society. Though these three characteristics put Israel in company with many other states, like Bosnia, the level of wealth, technological advancement, and cultural sophistication make the country unusual.

Perhaps as China encroaches upon Hong Kong, similarities may emerge between that small territory/large city and Jerusalem.

While Jerusalem hasn’t always enjoyed such prosperity, a certain urban egocentrism has always swirled around its historic role, so that even in the days when it was an Ottoman backwater its Arab residents viewed it as a coherent place.14

But to accept Jerusalem’s individuality on the basis of those who believe it to be the

Holy City is to put an absolute faith in them and their religion that is not becoming of an academic exploration, so it befits us to take a skeptical look at this history. interrelationships. Jerusalem confuses everyone, even commuters, as we shall see. 7 Tuan, 57. Tuan quotes Frank Conroy’s autobiographical novel, Stop-time, which describes among other things the “delicious smell of gasoline.” 8 Tuan, Yi-Fu, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 1977, 93. 9 Tuan, Topophilia, 14. 10 BENVENISTI, CITY OF STONE? 11 Tuan, Topophilia, 32. Finding Natural Jerusalem 9 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

On the simplest axis of history, Jerusalem is old and Tel Aviv is new. But one layer below this analysis is the observation that Jaffa and East Jerusalem are old and Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem are new. In one place, Tel Aviv-Yafo, the old is viewed as minimal, the original state of the land is seen as empty. In the other, Jerusalem, the new is viewed as insignificant, for the region has contained spirits since pagan times. Tel Aviv professes to represent the newness of Zionism and the secular humanism of democracy, Jerusalem the oldness of religion and the attendant zero-sum game of conquest. Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus geometries reflect its purity and newness, while Jerusalem’s ancient stones reflect defensive walls and slung murder weapons.15

The view from the Bauhaus balconies does not just include the pristine

Mediterranean, but also the lighthouse of Jaffa, which sullies its purity. Inherent in the Arab presence in Jaffa is the Jewish State’s legacy of discrimination against the Palestinians. On the other hand, the modernism of West Jerusalem elevates

Jerusalem from its focus on history to a focus on the future. At its best the International

Style aims to bind its surroundings to the worldwide tradition of technological and scientific progress. This style is ubiquitous in Tel Aviv, aching to be contradicted; in Jerusalem, the Turkish minarets and defensive walls encircle Christian spires and

Arab mosques that wither in the intense gaze of Mormon and Hebrew universities

Finding Natural Jerusalem 10 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department and Israeli highrises. As the exception instead of the rule, the Israel Museum and the Knesset provide a compact but powerful dose of Tel Avivi idealism to the overgrown Jaffa that is Jerusalem.

For now we should de-emphasize the political symbolism of these Givat Ram institutions in favor of the technological symbolism of the skyscrapers, because we will need to call on all the spatial understanding that we have yet to develop in order to compare these institutions to those of Washington and other capitals of consequence, like Brasilia and Chandigarh.

Many of the highrises perched atop the Old City Basin’s ridge serve what

Arthur Kutcher calls an inductive purpose, to project modernity regardless of the surroundings, and therefore do not regard themselves as spatial objects that are relevant to the topography.16 Though they have been useful in our juxtaposition of old and new, we should continue in our non-spatial analysis of what is uniquely

Jerusalem before we decide if space is indeed the defining factor.

Though the skyscrapers have tried to proclaim otherwise, it is difficult to tell if conflict is the source of Jerusalem’s character. If not, then social comparisons with the Benelux countries of Northern Europe might be in order (it bears mentioning, in contradiction to Amsterdam, Jerusalem does not even have a red light district to speak of, nary a theater for blue movies). Sadly, events in the Israeli-Palestinian

Finding Natural Jerusalem 11 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department conflict preclude such a comparison; they appear in the international news daily.

To the casual observer the scale maps of The Holy Land are so small that ethnic conflict appears to smolder in every square inch of tierra sancta.17 The very idea that a geographic location could command loyalty to the point where people would die for that place is foreign to many, though the events of September 11, 2001 drove home the point that nihilistic destruction is not a fate deserved by strange foreign peoples, but a sad one visited on random innocents. Often a land is contested because neither group has another place to flee to; as a home it is non-negotiable. But that obscures the notion that people often die for a home because it is otherwise a good place to live. Jerusalem, according to the literature, is said to be such a place.

People have often insisted that the only bond tying Jerusalem together is its shared cultural and civic character. It is definable by its mixture of Western and

Eastern customs and foods. Israeli popular music, with a tinge of strong cantorial melodies, soft organs, guttural Arab influences and rock and roll rhythms, heightens the sense of place that a topophile might ascribe to Jerusalem. While many old-timers play backgammon over a smoke from the nargileh and a sip of black Turkish coffee, others consume Viennese or Danish pastries, or even bagels with cream cheese as they rush to work with their cappuccino. Snacks alternate between Bamba peanut butter puffs, baygeles with za’atar, falafel and french fries. Were the place simply a

Finding Natural Jerusalem 12 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department mix of Middle Eastern and European, it might be difficult to distinguish Jerusalem from a city like Istanbul that is literally Eurasian, or a host of other postcolonial cities.

But the presence of a prevalent Jewish culture is also unique, like the Passover well wishing on cola bottles that replaces the yuletide greetings of Christian countries.

New York City is largely Jewish, and has a preponderance of bagels and cream cheese, but its climate disqualifies it from complete similarity to Jerusalem. Perhaps only Los Angeles and Haifa share climate, a dose of yiddishkeit and a hilly landscape with Jerusalem…we shall delay discussion of their shared landscape until later.

For people who are unable to perceive any larger order, the foreground of Jerusalem betrays a natural hint—the typical regional flora. Pine, cypress and palm trees dot the rocky terrain, as do rosemary and sage bushes, giving it the same subtropical sense as southern California. Other sensory information may also hearken to elemental Jerusalem. For some, the smell of rose water is emblematic of

Jerusalem, while for others the thickness of the air looms largest in the imagination.

Inside Jerusalem buildings, a distinctly local method of cleaning floors, dumping water on them, developed because of the ubiquity of tile, which gives a fresh echo to all internal goings-on. The quality of light complements that thickness, enlivening the gold of the Jerusalem stone.18 12 For more information, h�p://www.jerusalemsyndrome.com/jsstart.htm. 13 Tuan, Topophilia, 41. 14 Muslim tradition holds that every prayer said in Mecca counts for a 100,000 prayers elsewhere, in Medina, 50,000. A prayer in Al Quds, The Holy—the Arabic name for Jerusalem—is equal to 25,000. Finding Natural Jerusalem 13 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Even the most obvious symbol, Even Yerushalmi, Jerusalem’s limestone, is too diluted a signal to provide insight on what is uniquely Jerusalem. Towns far afield of the plateau, on the road up to it or in the surrounding hills have buildings built or covered with the pinkish-golden rock. Galilean stone gives a similar character to Haifa and the villages of the Carmel. On the other hand, the Travertine Marble of The Getty Center in Los Angeles induces a whiff of Jerusalem, while its situation on a ridge top places it all the more in the genus of Western Jerusalem urbanism that we shall research later. To confuse matters, in Jerusalem itself, though the

British legislated that all buildings have at least façades of stone,19 some of the most recognizable landmarks are not clad in the skin—like the institutions on Givat

Ram!

POLITICAL JERUSALEM

Are there any more intricate ciphers that can be decoded to ascertain where

Jerusalem starts and ends? By this measure, the first way to find out would be to locate the first street sign, park bench, or sewage grate that doesn’t have the crest of the city of Jerusalem—a lion—painted on it. But looking for the insignia of the

Municipality of Jerusalem is also counter to our endeavor because it entails making 15 Tuan, Topophilia, 144. See Tuan’s cosmological maps on the Wilderness-Paradise Motif. 16 Kutcher, 59-60. 17 Read any issue of the weekly online humor magazine www.Onion.com and the editors, all Midwesterners, reveal this perspective of the Middle East. See May 1st Top Story, Volume 38, Issue 16: “God Refloods Middle East”. Finding Natural Jerusalem 14 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department a circular definition. To declare that Jerusalem is where Jerusalem says it is puts too much faith in politicians. The likely scenario is that in the near future Jerusalem will be divided between the Jewish state and the Palestinian one.20 This division will be a wrenching one that will require an astonishingly sober analysis on the Israeli side of what the essence of Jerusalem is, i.e. which are the quintessential parts that they cannot bear to part with, symbolically, economically and politically.

In an almost prophetic way the politicians foresaw this, and began immediately after the conquest of East Jerusalem in the Six Day War of 1967 to strengthen the

Jewish claim to and hold on the city.21 This involved moving Jerusalem beyond the eastern basin, a project that had already begun, with different, less covert motives before the war.

Between the days of the British Mandate, when Bet HaKerem became the first neighborhood to meekly dip its toes beyond the eastern basin, and the Six Day War,

Israel had solidly wet its feet in the pool of Jerusalem expansion, providing train-like homes for impoverished Jewish immigrants from the Arab world in both the southern and northern basins.22 Architecturally, these new neighborhoods were a radical departure from the Jerusalem of the eastern basin, as was the contemporaneous and aforementioned Kiryat Ben Gurion on Givat Ram. Even though their architecture

18 Kutcher, 11. “As any Jerusalem photographer will tell you, her sky is incredibly bright...the extreme clarity of her mountain air, and the brightness of her sky can make distances hard to judge: near and far o�en appear juxtaposed, seemingly on the same plane.” Finding Natural Jerusalem 15 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department dematerialized public space, the alteration was not enough to destroy their bonds with the Jerusalem Plateau.23 It was undeniable that they were part and parcel of the city, connected as they were by the bonds of Jerusalem topography.

Going back to the 1967 War, we see why modernist architecture is not an accurate enough measuring stick for what is New Jerusalem. As we discussed before, politicians saw the need to continue the innocuous expansion of Jerusalem, but with underhanded intentions. Aided by an influx of money, they set out to build on all the other three sides of the city, which had previously been over the border in Jordan. While all of the new neighborhoods were built in the modernist or post-modernist idiom, not all of them are intrinsically Jerusalemite.24

The politicians were certainly aware of our conception of the Jerusalem

Plateau as a circle, and for the most part, they built in a mad dash around the circular ridges from both ends towards the southwest. However, neighborhoods in the north like Ramot Allon and east like Maale Adumim, which were built to shore up the Jewish presence on all four sides of the Old City, are totally beyond the pale of the Jerusalem Plateau. Ramot is on the hill below the northern ridge of the

19 Kroyanker, David and Rivka Gonen, To Live in Jerusalem, Israel MuseumProducts, Jerusalem: 1993, 76. “In 1918, shortly a�er the British conquest, Ronald Storrs, the British Governor of Jerusalem, introduced a bylaw banning the use of plaster and tin facing on houses in the Old City—with the result that all buildings in Jerusalem were now to be faced with stone.” 20 “’The United States and the EU share a common vision of two states, Palestine and Israel, living side by side in peace and security,’ President Bush told reporters at the White House.” Washington Times, Web Site, May 3, 2002, h�p://www.washtimes.com/world/20020503-41917368.htm.

Finding Natural Jerusalem 16 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department plateau, and Maale Adumim is beyond the eastern ridge, which is also known as the Starvation Point that separates the plateau and its rain-catching ability from the

Judean Desert.25 True, one can find two neighborhoods within the plateau, French

Hill and , which have much less in common with each other than with

Ramot. While Ramot shares architectural similarities with Ramat Denya in Malcha, and is architecturally aberrant, Ramot is still the odd man out because it lies outside the fold of the plateau. Other neighborhoods, like and East Talpiyot in the south, which are both isolated at a distance from the nearest neighborhood and are both beyond the Green Line, still qualify as Jerusalemite because they also stand within the ledges of the Jerusalem Plateau.

It is important to point this out, because the difference between municipal

Jerusalem, pre-1967 Jerusalem, and natural Jerusalem is a distinction completely lost on most people. Confused by geography, those who believe that politics, i.e. the Green Line, should determine where Jerusalem is might be surprised to find out that Industrial ’s HaOman Street straddles the line—nightclubs to one side are within Israel proper, and to the other side not. This overturns the notion that anyone beyond the Green Line is a settler, that fanatical breed of extreme occupier.

Right and left in Israeli politics revolve on an abnormal axis; social issues take a back

Finding Natural Jerusalem 17 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department seat to geopolitical ones, making Jerusalem a fairly right wing city. While finding left-leaning stickers would be a fairly clear meter of being in Jerusalem proper, it is impossible to tell the difference between a neighborhood over the Green Line and one within it judging by the presence of rightwing political stickers and banners on cars and homes. This is therefore not a good litmus test.26

It should be stated that the intention in differentiating between municipal

Jerusalem and natural Jerusalem is not to comment on the logistics of governing

Jerusalem. It might be wholly easier to deliver some heavy machinery along the large highway to , the distant northern home of the Jerusalem Airport, than it is to transport a similar power generator, say, to the newly gentrified neighborhood of , with its miniscule alleyways in the thick of Downtown Jerusalem.27

That is to say, political and topographical boundaries don’t prevent Jerusalem from serving as the regional hub—whether it be bourgeois Mevasseret residents who hop up the hill, settlers who commute in bulletproof buses, or Palestinian construction and service industry workers who bypass checkpoints on foot, all to participate in the economic life.

Many policies have developed that separate Arab and Jewish Jerusalem while reinforcing the Jewish hegemony, and quite often these policies make use

Finding Natural Jerusalem 18 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department of the internal topography of the plateau. It might even be less desirable for the municipality to fix the street lamps of Arab East Jerusalem than to attend to the needs of a Jewish place outside the bounds of the plateau. But we shall leave that until we have established the supremacy of topography on the whole as the ordering factor for the place. For that we return to Industrial Talpiot.

TOPOGRAPHICAL JERUSALEM

We have exhausted non-topographical methods for calibrating what is and what is not Jerusalemite, cultural, civic, geopolitical, and architectural. Industrial

Talpiot is largely apolitical—it illustrates the strength of the topographical bond of Jerusalem because it is dissimilar to other places in the city. Its boxy buildings are cumbersomely scaled; as a collection of geometric shapes they do not mimic the postmodernist ridge clusters, as an ensemble of set back objects they do not share a similar architectural style like Rechavia’s Bauhaus, nor even like the austere

French Hill. They are not big enough to have a commanding presence over their surroundings like some of the Downtown highrises, and lack a coherent scheme of storefront signage to tie them together as parts of one whole district. There are no trees, and the buildings are not uniformly covered with Jerusalem stone, so that the

21 Kutcher, 54. The intention of the 1968 HaShimshoni Master Plan for Jerusalem “was a political one. The goal was to physically express, and thereby to help bring about, a united Israeli Jerusalem. This unity was to be imposed contrary to the city’s functional capacities and financial limitations, and at the expense of many aesthetic and environmental qualities.” Finding Natural Jerusalem 19 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department tiny falafel kiosks amongst the bulky structures could be in any factory back lot in the Middle East, or at least in Israel, judging by cultural, architectural, and political standards. But a native Jerusalemite would still have a sense that the zone is part of the city, and so might be surprised to learn that HaOman, a street not even on the edge of the neighborhood, lies on the Green Line...the reason is the surrounding topography.

Because of the set back buildings and shallow slope of Industrial Talpiot, the profuse sky reigns above the area. Edging below the heavens into the chiaroscuro composition on the south and west, the hills of Gilo and Malcha enclose the

Katamonim, Talpiot and Malcha in a typical bowl valley like the Old City Basin.

These shallow basins are much more pacific than the sharp landscapes that drop off just beyond the outer edges of the Jerusalem Plateau. While in the valleys of the Tel Aviv road or Ein Kerem a crank of the neck is required to see the tops of the surrounding ridges, within the Jerusalem Plateau any imminently steep edge is offset by the soft view of a distant range of hills. The northern basin is less discernable as one contiguous form because its internal valleys are narrow and their outlets are masked by curved hills, but from atop the northern ridge of the basin, on Herzl

Boulevard, the soft enclosure of the basin is visible. It is this sense of enclosure throughout the plateau that separates it from the drop off to the east.

Finding Natural Jerusalem 20 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Aside from the narrow valleys, there is another equally or more confusing topological feature: though the ridges of Jerusalem are well defined, the inconsistent slopes that descend down from them face every which way. Subjugating these mystifying slopes to the easier logic of their ridges, we can now use our method of straightening and triangulating to make sense of these slopes.

RIDGES, SLOPES, AND THE THREE BASINS

Firstly, the perimeter ridges can be reduced to a simple circle—this is the circumference of the Jerusalem Plateau. New neighborhoods built along the western ridge of the city were designed to cling to it as a method of preserving the valleys; as with older sites on the eastern ridge, these outcroppings act as markers from within the plateau.28 The northern and southern ridges abut shallower interior landscapes with more of the confusing slopes, so that they do not stand out as much, and are therefore harder to identify mentally. We must therefore turn inward and divide up the basins in order to gain the next level of clarity.

The main divider between the three basins is the drainage line that runs from

Shazar Avenue in the north to Golomb Street in the southwest.29 In the northern half Shazar and Ben Zvi Avenues bisect the Valley of the Cross; to their east the

22 Kroyanker, To Live in Jerusalem, 61. A�er abandoned Arab villages were filled with these immigrants, the Ma’abarot, or transition se�lements, were established to absorb the rest. Finding Natural Jerusalem 21 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department ridge dotted by Kiryat Wolfson forms the western edge of the Old City Basin, which can be thought of as a circle. To their west, Givat Ram is the eastern edge of the northern basin. The northern basin is surrounded on three sides by ridges, though its center is not a hollow bowl and its southern edge is not a hill. The multiple ridges within make the basin convex instead of concave, and are comparable to a cupped, overturned hand; Herzl Avenue forms the knuckles, and the little valleys between each “finger” all run parallel, separating Bayit VeGan from Bet HaKerem from the University from Neve Sha’anan and .

The road name turns to Rav Herzog Street and then Golomb Street as it veers southwest to follow the drainage line. At the end Golomb Street rises above the drainage line to meet Begin Avenue, a highway that runs parallel to the Ben Tzvi/

Shazar portion of the road through one of the little valleys of the northern basin.

This intersection is the effective southern edge of the northern basin, and because of the small rise in altitude above the drainage line, it serves as an effective northern barrier for the southern basin.

The southern basin’s lowest inhabited point is the location of downtown

Malcha. The mall, office space and stadium there serve as the center of gravity for the southern basin, which stretches northeastward to the wide ridge/plateau of

Talpiot. The basin also fits the conception of a circular bowl ringed by ridges. The

Finding Natural Jerusalem 22 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department border between the southern and eastern basins is difficult to define, and in fleshing out that boundary many distinctions can be made about typical Jerusalem spaces on a localized level. Before delving into that, we should look at our new conception of the three basins, one convex and two concave, in order to discover any helpful relationships.

In the northern half of the city, the internal ridges of the northern and eastern basin are all oriented along the north-south axis, and are parallel with the outer ridge on the east, . The regular Jerusalemite does not sense that they are parallel, because the access roads to Mt. Scopus hide the fact. From the city entrance, the road curves north along the outer ridge, from Yirmiahu Street to

Bar Ilan, Levi Eshkol, and Har-El Brigade Avenues, though its end point is just as southerly as its beginning. The main road from within the Old City Basin, which starts as Engineering Corps Road from Damascus Gate and becomes Peace Road,

Haim Bar Lev Avenue, and the Atarat-Talpiot Highway, is at first parallel to and within view of the Mt. Scopus/Mount of Olives towers, but then changes path in their general direction, albeit not fully. The schizophrenic swerving off-path occurs for many reasons, but whatever they are, they make the Mt. Scopus to seem oriented southwesterly from its southeasterly ridge. 23 Dematerialization is the ruination of any close urban relationship between buildings, so that no sense of scale is experienced at the human level. It is a result of what Kutcher calls Deductivism, and is pronounced in the ridge developments whose narrow precariousness ruins any close urban relationships. The only spatial relationship is between one ridge and the next distant one. Finding Natural Jerusalem 23 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

The connection from the Old City Basin over its western ridge to Givat Ram is similarly skewed. Though Betzalel Street offers a straight shot west to east arching over the ridge, it meets its automotive end at the Ben Yehuda Street pedestrian mall.

Its severance from the center of downtown and from any outlet to the eastern part of the basin curtails its ability to lend order to the city. Instead, offers the main connection. Its orientation from the northeast to the southwest is skewed at its outlet, the city entrance, so that its relationship to Yirmiahu and the road to Mt.

Scopus is totally covered. The magnetism between and the City Entrance from Tel Aviv dominates any conceivable order because it predates any settlement outside the Old City walls—it was once a country trade road, not the dense urban boulevard it is today.30 Jaffa Gate is the old entrance; the new entrance to the city is at the edge of the now fully populated Jerusalem plateau. If the whole plateau had been inhabited from the beginning, logic would have ignored the line between the two points.

Keren Kayemet LeYisrael Street is another east-west street where one can jaunt just three blocks from Independence Park Downtown, with its views of the

Old City walls, to Kiryat Wolfson overlooking the Knesset, thus seeing the close relationship of the Old City Basin to the northern basin.

Both of these spatial shifts disorient the traveler, though both ridges actually

Finding Natural Jerusalem 24 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department move along the same path as the north-south cardo that the Romans designed for the

Old City. It comes as a revelation to some Jerusalemites that, when standing at the promontory of Mt. Scopus, the museums and institutions of Givat Ram are directly beyond the ridge of Downtown. The next hills, home to the sciences campus of the

Hebrew University and then Bet HaKerem, are in the same progression, and it is this brief parallel order amongst the peripheral and internally skeletal roads that call to mind the Mall of Washington, D.C.

Washington’s Mall is a wide cross-axis connecting the main memorials and functional government centers; it spawns a regime of diagonal avenues that directly connect the objects on the Mall, and together the Mall and the avenues are superimposed on a grid that organizes the non-monumental remainder of

Washington. In Jerusalem’s “Mall”, monumentality is inverted…the underlying domed alleys and outlying ridge developments and skyscrapers provide the powerful forms, indicating Israel’s defiant sensibility, while the institutions themselves are fairly inconspicuous. The Israel Museum was designed to look like a local Arab village; the Knesset, a poor man’s version of a Greek temple, is not totally commanding, as if to indicate the schism between the Greek and Hebrew

24 Kroyanker, To Live in Jerusalem, 68. “The need to vary types of buildings and apartments stemmed also from the socioeconomic pluralism that evolved over the years, rendering public housing construction far less social-equality oriented than it was in the fi�ies and sixties.” The years of brutalist design were seen as a pox on the landscape. The appearance of neo-Orientalist post-modernism, due to the factors described in the quote above, was seen as a welcome intervention by the native design vernacular in the cycle of insensitivity building. 25 Kutcher, 11. Finding Natural Jerusalem 25 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department civilizations.31 Despite the difference in monumentality between Washington and

Jerusalem, there is still a similarity in layout.

The north-south axis on Givat Ram contains the Supreme Court, the Knesset

(Israeli Parliament), and the Israel Museum. This axis is more obvious than the east-west one, which has the Dome of the Rock and Mount Scopus at the eastern end and the Mount Herzl Military Cemetery and the Yad VaShem Holocaust Memorial at the west. This imaginary line of cultural monuments is not visibly expressed, though its tenuous existence can be cutely expressed by an invisible connection— green. The mall has the grassy university, the Rose and Botanical Gardens between the monuments at its center; they are surrounded on both east and west by the

first “Garden Neighborhoods” of Jerusalem, Rechavia and Bet HaKerem. Between

Rechavia and the Jaffa Gate, two parks further this theory: Rafael HaCohen Square, at the juncture of the aforementioned Betzalel Street with Ben Yehuda and King

George Streets, and Independence Park, at the other previously mentioned end of Keren Kayemet LeYisrael. That park’s southern limit, Agron Street, is also the southern limit of Givat Ram, as it is contiguous with Gaza Street, which joins Herzog

26 The test even fails by the le�-wing standard—Mevasseret Tzion, an unincorporated suburb to the west of the city, has shown liberal bearings in its willingness to allow the Reform Jewish Movement to set up schools and wield civil authority on local Rabbinates. 27 Kutcher, 54. Though Kutcher tends to oppose any growth of Jerusalem as unwieldy and damaging to its special character, he admits the logic of a plan that “would fill out the ‘city space’ of its mountain-top plateau, and the city’s edge would therefore be clearly defined by the steep slopes surrounding the plateau.”

Finding Natural Jerusalem 26 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Street, the drainage street discussed earlier. Continuing east from the parks via

Agron Street is Jaffa Gate. From there, the west-east corridor is finally expressed visibly…the Roman decumanus leads east as a processional allee directly to the

Temple Mount.

As in Washington, this scheme is applied to a lop-sided city—the northern basin’s edge mimics the Potomac River, which cleaves Virginia from the capital.

From Herzl Avenue along that ridge it is possible to view the parallel ridges as they fold toward the eastern basin; it is almost like the view from the Potomac, where

Capitol Hill blocks the rest of the city.

To carry the analogy another step, Malcha serves as Jerusalem’s Arlington,

Virginia. Arlington is the home of the Pentagon, as well as of the amorphous suburbia that is not beheld to the Washington grid. Malcha, with its mall, zoo, and stadium, also attracts an office core that is surrounded by the postmodernist suburbs—it embodies the fabric of West Jerusalem, which is totally different from that of the “original” city on the Old City Basin.

While juxtaposing these two cities might assist the Jerusalemite in understanding where the landmarks are in relation to one another, there is still the hardship of finding the way between these places on the ground, for the roads are not nearly as orderly as Washington’s diagonal avenues. Though we have established

Finding Natural Jerusalem 27 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department a system of ridges, valleys, and concave and convex circular basins, there are still some complex interactions between the slopes that remain vexing. The questionable boundary between the eastern and southern basin is one such place; a more finite local order must be sought out for how Jerusalem streets deal with its hillsides.

Core Jerusalem could adhere to one of two familiar models for dealing with its topography. It could have straight, steep streets on sloped hills, like in San

Francisco, or streets that curve shallowly along the slope, like in the Hollywood

Hills of Los Angeles, meeting in “T-intersections”. San Francisco’s solution is out of the question; Los Angeles’ seems equally so. The Hollywood Hills, which divide the Greater Los Angeles Basin, travel in one line, west to east, all facing the flat city to the south. The curves cascade down to this flatness in a semblance of order, only abandoning it when the hills skew southeast toward Downtown Los Angeles.

There the order resembles Jerusalem, especially at the seams of the Silver Lake and

Ramparts regions. While Los Angeles exports freeways (like the Number 4 Begin

Highway or the Gilo-Malcha Road, which bisects the Arab village of ),

Jerusalem’s lackluster grids curvily superimposed on hills preceded those of L.A.; triangular intersections emerge as both of their hallmarks. The tripartite nature of the triangle dictates that an uneven number of the three outlets go in either direction, 28 In the 1970’s there was a debate between the national Housing Ministry and the Jerusalem Municipality over how best to preserve Jerusalem’s nature. The ministry advocated building on ridges to leave hillsides green, while the municipality advocated carpeting the urban core, thereby preserving all of the outlying ridges, Kutcher, 91. Finding Natural Jerusalem 28 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department up or down, and look in directions that are impossible to predict, that can induce vertigo.

As it happens, the three directions that can be viewed from this point in Los

Angeles echo the three mini-basins of the Jerusalem Plateau. Traveling on Effie

Street, the Hollywood Sign is visible to the Northwest, with the Cahuenga Pass right beside it that leads to the San Fernando Valley. Reversing on Effie, one arrives at Micheltorena Avenue; up the hill there is a view of Glendale in the San Gabriel

Valley, the second mini-basin in the L.A. Basin. This view also hints at the hidden San

Fernando Valley from the other direction. The third view is back towards Wilshire

Boulevard and Downtown. While this panorama gives a sense of orientation from above, when Micheltorena meets Sunset Boulevard at the bottom of the hill, it is at a confounding angle. The only way to distinguish which direction is towards

Hollywood, the San Gabriel or San Fernando valleys is to distinguish differences in the city fabric, i.e. where hillsides are painted with murals, where bridges go over valleys, and where buildings cover both hillsides and valleys.32 What are the expressions of spatial Jerusalem in its fabric?

29 Kutcher, 11. Topographical map with watershed lines. 30 Kroyanker, Jerusalem Architecture, 101. The first neighborhoods built outside Jaffa Gate were erected in the late 19th century. 31 Kroyanker, Jerusalem Architecture, 171. “Modestly appointed structures that would capture the original Zionist ethos were not, it turned out, easily reconcilable with the stateliness that seemed required by the new era of independence.” The Knesset is commanding on its south and east, but does not even occupy high ground. The surrounding forest of Sacher Garden cover it up, so that it is impossible for it to assume the central role amidst a stark landscape, as modernist capitols have done in Brasilia, Chandigarh, and Dacca, Bangladesh.

Finding Natural Jerusalem 29 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

The eastern basin maintains a high density of buildings from the northeast to the southeast. While the intense habitation peters out at the southeastern ridge of the eastern basin—Talpiot, the populace is crammed in further west all the way down to the Katamonim. There the sky becomes more prominent and fewer trees give shade. The train housing of the Mizrachi immigration of the 1940’s and 50’s sits less cluttered and less naturally on the land, the roads curve to accommodate the awkward site that results. But this is not quite the appropriate border for the southern basin. Even though the southern basin is sparsely populated on the whole, with ridge developments that leave empty hillsides, the denser neighborhoods to the northeast sit on the hill that should serve as the northern edge of the southern basin. The neighborhoods feel like a continuation of the core fabric of the eastern basin, but sit topographically facing the south; that contradiction makes them especially disorienting. When a view is stolen from the Jerusalem Theater, which feels solidly in the core of urban central Jerusalem, it is almost impossible to guess which direction it faces (hint: south).

The theater is located in Talbiyeh, which is just across the little valley of Gaza

Street that separates it from Rechavia, another stately, dense, shaded neighborhood.

32 O�en, history is the determining factor in the fabric of the city; the old core regions of Downtown and Pasadena occupy the eastern area of Los Angeles as Jerusalem’s historic core is on its east. Humorously enough, the heaviest concentration of Jews in Los Angeles is on its Westside! Jewish West Jerusalem provokes a comparison of lifestyle with Los Angeles, which is traditionally Tel Aviv’s turf. But inland Los Angeles, especially the San Gabriel Valley, has a similar sense of place and mixture of minorities, and lacks the latent surfer whim that Jerusalem does not have, either. Still, it is a large stretch to make that the spirituality of westward freedom imitates the heaviness of eastern history. Finding Natural Jerusalem 30 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Even though Gaza Street acts as the extension of the southern edge of the Mall and of the northern basin, its valley does not really cleave Rechavia from Talbiyeh…

Talbiyeh feels like a continuation of the western ridge of the eastern basin. But there is no spinal street that travels along the ridge, even at its center—this is a phenomenon we should examine in order to see whether or not Talbiyeh really is a seamless segue from the city core.

Two primary roads, Jaffa Road and King George Street, run atop the ridge,

Jaffa from the north, King George from the south, and could conceivably meet in the center of the ridge to form one continuous street—just as King George is an extension of Keren HaYesod Street to the South. But in a typically Jerusalemite confusion, they both curve east, and bisect each other at right angles. They switch roles, one traveling towards the Old City, and the other dancing radially at its periphery. This creates a triangular pocket bounded on the West by the ridge, and on the other two sides by the streets that meet at the intersection.

This is like the condition further south on the ridge of Ord Circle in Talbiyeh, one block above the Jerusalem Theater. Its streets meet at a right angle, coming from the four cardinal directions. But its northern feeder, Balfour Street, which follows the ridge, is a sleepy residential alley that meekly meets Paris Square, and is not up to the task of straddling the topography. The southern and western feeders meet

Finding Natural Jerusalem 31 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department each other in an oval, also shirking their topographical responsibility to connect different valleys and basins. The eastern road, Jabotinsky Street, fits a paradigm that we shall describe later.

The triangle and the oval are examples of the general undoing of the rectilinear geometry, the most typical condition of old Jerusalem space. History partly explains how these shapes came about… The first Jewish neighborhoods built outside the

Old City Walls focused on internal courtyards, continuing in the medieval tradition of shaping communal space that shunned the outside. As a result alleyways were created between the various communal clusters. Though within a neighborhood a few alleys might evoke the Old City, the neighborhoods themselves were not next to each other; there was no density in the new city, and no need for a rigorous order connecting these neighborhoods. Often a lone Arab mansion randomly dotted the space between them (like in Talbiyeh).33

Later, during the British Mandate period from 1917 to 1948, buildings were designed with an eye towards external space. Whether they were treated as modernist objects set back from the street, or as classical units in the urban fabric that shaped the street, there was an awareness of the urban whole. These externally

33 Kroyanker, Jerusalem Architecture, 116. “Just as in the first Jewish neighborhoods, Arab building took place within convenient walking distance of the Old city…However, unlike Jewish building outside the walls, which was organized along social and institutional lines, Arab construction remained entirely private or carried out by patrilineal families…This gave rise to separate and unconnected ‘family neighborhoods’, which lacked common community services.”

Finding Natural Jerusalem 32 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department conscious developments filled in gaps between the older neighborhoods, but could not fully impose a sense of order upon the oblivious clustered compounds. 34 This is the era when the public space of the central city was given its embryonic form, the triangles.

Such triangles exist between the clustered stalls of the Machane Yehuda market and the grander Downtown, and between the cramped lanes of and the more reserved facades of the . These slanted spaces feel zipped open, and often have stone bollards that mark unusually shaped sidewalks.

Magnifying the infrastructure also reveals a local flavor—sidewalks are often asphalted with a feeble curb instead of cemented, giving a sense of informality to the street; when curbs are painted it is with alternating white and colored stripes instead of solid color. Sidewalk handrails are like those in Europe, while kiosks, stalls, and storefronts have a more Middle Eastern feel. They color all of these triangles, which exist by the Old City in , in East Jerusalem off of Salah El-Din Street, and in the north at the City Entrance, where the rupture between Binyanei HaUma and the Central Bus Station obscures the intersection of the northern and eastern basins.

There are many such triangles at the border between the eastern and southern basin

34 Kroyanker, Jerusalem Architecture, 145. From 1926-37, “the chief characteristic became the ‘corridor effect,’ created by adjoining buildings with a continuous façade…erected along the edge of the sidewalk on both sides of the relatively narrow street. This hallmark of Mandate Period construction endowed the emerging downtown section with a ‘European look.’” The Bauhaus neighborhoods like Rechavia acted as objects in space, though their small size allowed their gates, trees and alleys to shape space, unlike later modernist buildings which would dematerialize it. Finding Natural Jerusalem 33 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department of the city.

The few straight streets that attempt to tame the topography, like Jabotinsky and Menachem Ussishkin Street in Rechavia, feel ill-at-ease in Jerusalem. Jabotinksy

Street, the eastern feeder for Ord Circle, could conceivably be a marked divider between the eastern and southern basins, descending as it does due east toward Mt.

Zion and the Valley of Hinnom at the southeastern edge of the eastern basin. It is parallel to another unlikely candidate, Rachel Imenu Street, which runs flat along the bottom of Talbiyeh’s hill. Though Jabotinsky and Rachel Imenu run parallel, no street directly connects them. Their ends are bounded in a loose trapezoid…the eastern edge of the trapezoid is marked by the train tracks of the German Colony and the empty spaces above Liberty Bell Park, both triangular aberrations. The western edge is at the soft triangular meeting point of Palmach Street and the two oval feeders of Ord Circle, Nasi(President’s) Street and Chopin Street, the Jerusalem

Theater’s home.

Try as we might to find it, there is no cut and dry border between the eastern and southern basin. The trapezoid contains a wild, pine grove park, and its bottom,

Rachel Imenu, is a flat terrace in the steppes of Talbiyeh’s hill. Its western edge,

Rasco, is privy to the most elements of Jerusalem topography; Tzernichovsky Street, its main drag, receives the northern end of the drainage street, and as Tzernichovsky

Finding Natural Jerusalem 34 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department

Finding Natural Jerusalem Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department rises to Shay Agnon Street it overlooks the drainage street veering into the southern basin. Its architecture is an unadorned, dense mixture of modernist boxes with empty ground floors that allow views to Givat Ram and then Malcha. On the hill’s descent back to the Katamonim, the San Simon region morphs from an ordered to a haphazard modernism.

In the final analysis, Jerusalem still eludes an orthodox order. Breaking the city down into three circular regions, hopefully we have shed some light on how topography contributes to the other bonds that tie Jerusalem together. New analyses might arise from the pursuit, like an exploration of how the valleys are put to use.

From western valleys, inhabited by the mall and zoo, to the central valleys with parks and sculptures, to the east with Mizrachi slums and Arab neighborhoods, a certain commentary could emerge about the worldview of the planners who sought to protect the western valleys from habitation.

It is tempting to conclude with a broad statement about the mess that politically driven development can cause, but that would give a disingenuous sense of cohesion to the city’s history. Neither is Jerusalem a city of panoramas, as Arthur

Kutcher would have it (on page 84 of his book); the topography provides such far-off views, but they do not encompass the whole spatial essence of the place, sometimes

Finding Natural Jerusalem 35 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department claustrophobic, sometimes transparent and sometimes stately. It is sufficient to say that Jerusalem is elusive, its essence is difficult to capture with a camera or with a street map. Petering out on that note does the city justice…the best way to understand it is to just enjoy it on a nice evening walk.

Finding Natural Jerusalem 36 Benjamin Lehrer’03 Near Eastern Studies Department Bibliography PRIMARY SOURCES—MAPS http://www.jerusalem.muni.il/jer_sys/map2000_eng/first1.asp, Municipality of Jerusalem Website, 2002. http://www.jcpa.org/art/jid-map3.htm, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Green Line(1949 Cease Fire) Map. Kutcher, Arthur, The New Jerusalem: Planning and Politics. The M.I.T.Press, Cambridge, Massachuse�s: 1975.

SECONDARY SOURCES Gandelsonas, Mario, X-Urbanism: Architecture and the American City. Princeton Architectural Press, New York: 1999. Gombrich, E. H., Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton University Press: 1956, 2nd Ed. Revised, 3rd Printing: 1969. Kroyanker, David, Jerusalem Architecture. The Vendome Press, New York: 1997. Kroyanker, David and Rivka Gonen, To Live in Jerusalem. Israel MuseumProducts, Jerusalem: 1993. Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City. The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Massachuse�s, 1960, Tuan, Yi-Fu, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 1977. Tuan, Yi-Fu, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Preception, A�itudes, and Values. Columbia University Press, Morningside Edition, New York: 1990. h�p://www.jerusalemsyndrome.com/jsstart.htm. Information and links about Jerusalem Syndrome. H�p://www.onion.com, Top Story, Volume 38, Issue 16, “God Refloods Middle East”. May 1, 2002. h�p://www.washtimes.com/world/20020503-41917368.htm, Washington Times Web Site, May 3, 2002.

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