Jaffa Flea Market

The market sits in the block bounded by Yehuda Margoza, Olei Zion, Amiad and Beit Eshel streets, a short walk southeast and downhill from the clock tower on Yefet Street. That is the whole of it. Anyone expecting the scale of a Jerusalem or Istanbul bazaar will find something much smaller and much more mixed up, with second-hand stock, restaurant tables and residential doorways sharing the same pavement.

The Hebrew reference account divides the compound into three parts, and the division is worth carrying because it explains why the market changes character from one lane to the next. There is a building with two pedestrian lanes cut through it; an open lot known as the Amiad market, ringed by municipal warehouses and wholesalers' storage; and the Olei Zion pedestrian mall, where shops, restaurants and cafes share a surface that vehicles still use in places.

The market's own English information site puts the densest run of stalls along Olei Zion Street and the lanes off it. The street frontages have gone to design shops, jewellery studios and galleries, and the side lanes closed to traffic have gone to bars. None of this is signposted, so the practical approach is to walk the covered building first, then Olei Zion, then decide whether the rest is shopping or lunch.

• Streets: Yehuda Margoza, Olei Zion, Amiad, Beit Eshel
• The covered building, with two pedestrian lanes through it
• The open Amiad lot, ringed by storage
• The Olei Zion pedestrian mall, shops and restaurants
• The Greek Market, absorbed from the east

Jaffa's fortifications were dismantled during the 1870s, and the city spread east and north onto ground the walls had held it off. The new commercial quarter grew on that ground, and the Ottoman authorities put their own buildings in the middle of it: a government house, a prison, and a wide plaza outside the old town.

The clock tower went up in the same plaza. Construction began in September 1900 and finished in 1903, paid for by subscription from Jaffa's Arab, Armenian, Maronite and Jewish communities and raised for the silver jubilee of Sultan Abdülhamid II. The market that had been trading on that ground was moved off it. The municipal tourism service is direct about the mechanism: the traders were dispossessed to make way for the civil administration compound, and the flea market is the descendant of what was moved.

The Greek Market immediately east has a separate origin. Time Out's Tel Aviv guide says it was built by the Greek Orthodox monastery of Jaffa in the late nineteenth century, on ground just east of the clock square, and gives its address as 1 Pinkhas Ben Ya'ir Street. The flea market expanded into it later, which is why the two are now usually described as one place.

The building that displaced the market did not outlast it. The New Saraya, the Ottoman government house on that square, was destroyed by a Lehi truck bomb on 4 January 1948; the English Wikipedia article on Jaffa puts the dead at 26, mostly civilians, including children at a food distribution. The market two streets away kept trading, and the Hebrew reference account dates its consolidation into roughly its present form to the British Mandate period.

Almost nothing a visitor touches in the flea market is older than the late Ottoman and Mandate-era commercial buildings around it, and a good deal of the surface is much newer than that. The restoration was begun in 2001 by Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality together with the Ministry of Tourism, designed by the practice the Hebrew reference account names as Kislov Kay Architects, and it is the reason the market looks the way it does.

The project created the Amiad Centre for exhibitions, fairs and shows, laid out a shaded square for the traders, renovated the surrounding streets, and made room for galleries, artists' studios, restaurants and cafes. It is a considerable piece of work and it is not disguised: the paving, the shading and the lighting all read as recent, and the traders' pitches sit inside a designed frame rather than a grown one.

The one genuinely ancient thing on open view is not a market building at all. Under the lobby of the Market House hotel on Beit Eshel Street, sections of glass floor show the remains of a Byzantine chapel found when the site was developed. The Globe and Mail described the arrangement in December 2015; the hotel's own material dates the remains to the eighth century. The lobby is a hotel lobby, so this is a matter of walking in and looking down rather than of buying a ticket.

Beyond that, the age claims a visitor hears here attach to the goods rather than the fabric. Treat a stallholder's dating of a chair or a tile as a sales position, not a provenance, and treat the market itself as what the municipality says it is: a nineteenth-century displacement that became a flea market in the twentieth and was rebuilt in the twenty-first.

The restoration filled the market, and the argument about what filled it started almost at once. In March 2012 Haaretz's Roy Arad reported traders describing the change as a yuppie occupation of Jaffa: the market was neater, the cafes and bars were doing well, sales at the antique shops had fallen, and the streets he described were empty in the afternoon.

Five months later the same paper printed the other half of the quarrel. Odeya Ganor's article of 21 August 2012 described residents who had organised against businesses trading until four in the morning in a mixed commercial and residential zone where the rules require them to close at one. The municipality held mediation meetings, reported no change a month and a half later, and said it was drafting a new policy. Bar owners interviewed for the piece said enforcement had tightened and that they were being ticketed at least once a week.

The structural cause of that dispute is still printed in the market's own hours. The stalls shut at 17:00 from Sunday to Thursday and at 14:00 on Friday; the eating and drinking that replaced them runs late into the night and through Saturday, when most of the stallholders are closed. Two economies, one set of streets, and the second one is louder.

The municipality has leaned into the evening use rather than away from it. Its tourism service says the flea market's Thursday-night events in July and August, with music, street theatre and special illumination, have become part of Jaffa's calendar, and that some of the side streets in the market compound have been closed to vehicles to serve as venues for pubs and restaurants. It also says plans call for turning further streets in the Greek Market over to restaurants and lifestyle businesses.

Two economies share the pavement and they are priced in completely different ways. On the second-hand stalls, prices are unmarked and haggling is expected: the municipal guide describes a hodge-podge of new and second-hand merchandise where antiques and knick-knacks can sometimes be had for very little. In the studios and labels that took the street frontages, prices are fixed retail and an offer is an embarrassment.

Time Out's guide to the market lists both inside the same few streets: the jewellers Ruby Star and the Mirit Weinstock studio, the fashion studio Common Raven and the clothing house Maskit, alongside stalls it describes bluntly as ranging from poor-quality bric-a-brac to genuine vintage treasures and antique furniture. Both descriptions are accurate on the same morning, sometimes on the same lane.

The Greek Market keeps its own rhythm. Time Out gives its hours as Tuesday to Friday, 10.00 to 17.00, and says artisans and artists fill the compound every Friday with crafts, flowers, antiques and vintage keepsakes. That Friday session, rather than the antiques trade, is what most visitors mean when they say the market was busy.

Days matter more than hours. Friday morning is the fullest trading session of the week and it is finished by early afternoon. Saturday, most stallholders are shut and the restaurants are not, which makes a Saturday visit a meal in a closed market rather than a shopping trip.

• Second-hand and refurbished furniture
• Household goods and kitchenware from earlier decades
• Used clothing, rugs, vinyl and costume jewellery
• Design studios, galleries and contemporary jewellery at fixed prices
• Crafts, flowers and vintage keepsakes at the Greek Market on Fridays