Neve Tzedek

The founding date depends on where the clock starts. The Suzanne Dellal Centre, which occupies the middle of the quarter, gives 1887 and describes a small group of Jewish families leaving the overcrowded port city of Jaffa. Wikipedia's account has the Chelouche family moving onto the ground several years earlier, in 1883, with roughly fifty families following over the next few years and the neighbourhood taking formal shape in 1887. Both accounts name the same two men: Shimon Rokach, and Aharon Chelouche, a Jaffa landowner and businessman who sold the plots.

The name is not a description of the place. Neve Tzedek is a phrase from the Book of Jeremiah, rendered in English as the habitation or oasis of justice. What the founders actually built was a grid of small plots with houses fronting straight onto narrow streets, each with its own water and sanitation, at a time when the alternative was a rented room inside the Jaffa walls.

The scale is documented from an unexpected direction. The Nahum Gutman Museum, describing its own building, says it was built by the Schulman family in 1887 as one of the first 48 houses that formed the nucleus of the new neighbourhood; the Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites in Israel repeats the same figure. Forty-eight houses is the whole of Neve Tzedek at the start, which is why the quarter is still measured in a dozen streets rather than in blocks.

It did not stay alone for long. Neve Shalom followed in 1890, Yefe Nof in 1897 and Batei Feingold in 1904, all of them on the same dunes, and in 1909 the Ahuzat Bayit society laid out the plots that became Tel Aviv a short walk to the north. The Council for Conservation makes the point plainly: these neighbourhoods were the nucleus out of which the first Hebrew city grew, and Neve Tzedek was the first of them on the coastal plain.

Between 1907 and 1914 the Schulman house on Shimon Rokach Street was the editorial office of Hapoel Hatzair, The Young Worker. Its editor Yosef Aharonovitch lived there, and so did the writers Yosef Haim Brenner and Dvora Baron; Baron was the paper's literary editor and married Aharonovitch in 1912. The museum that now occupies the building says the house became the meeting place of the group of Hebrew writers who began the new Hebrew culture, and that it was known as the Writers' House long before anyone thought of restoring it.

Other names attach to the same few streets. S.Y. Agnon, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, lived in the neighbourhood and wrote it into his novel Only Yesterday. Nahum Gutman, the painter and children's author whose estate fills the museum, grew up here. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the neighbourhood's first rabbi, opened a yeshiva in it. Israel Rokach, son of the founder, was mayor of Tel Aviv from 1936 to 1953.

The most conspicuous survivor of that period is a ruin. The Eden Theatre on Lilienblum Street, built in 1913 to a design by the German architect Richard Michael and constructed by Akiva Aryeh Weiss, one of the founders of Ahuzat Bayit, opened on 22 August 1914 as the country's first purpose-built cinema. It ran until 1974 or 1975, served briefly as a bank data centre in the 1980s and has been sealed and neglected since. The original sign and the ticket booth are still on the building. A conversion into a hotel of about sixty rooms was announced in 2016; nothing has opened.

After 1948 Neve Tzedek was used to house new immigrants, and it went down fast. By the 1960s the quarter was in serious decay, and the municipality's answer was to clear it for high-rise building. The Nahum Gutman Museum's own account of its building is the sharpest illustration: the house was badly damaged, abandoned in the 1960s, and formally condemned by the Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality. What saved it was a long public argument that ended with the house declared a landmark and bought by the Jewish National Fund.

That pattern held across the neighbourhood. Buildings were declared heritage sites, demolition became impossible, and from the late 1980s a restoration programme worked through the quarter street by street. The result is admired and it is also a real replacement of population: the households that lived here through the bad decades are largely not the households living here now.

It is worth being precise about what survives. The Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites calls Rokach House, built in 1887 by Shimon Rokach, the only house in the neighbourhood that has been restored and reconstructed exactly as it was. The Nahum Gutman Museum is a hybrid by design: reconstruction of the Writers' House began in 1992, the northern wing was historically reconstructed and the southern wing modernised by the architect Ronny Zeibert, and an entirely new adjacent wing opened on 9 September 2009 on the spot where the Ottoman guard post had stood when the neighbourhood was founded.

The Suzanne Dellal compound is a third case again. Of its three nineteenth-century school buildings, the Lewinsky Seminar building had actually collapsed before work started, so what stands there now is reconstruction rather than a preserved building. The honest summary for a first-time visitor is that the street pattern, the plot sizes and the scale are original, many facades are restored, and a good deal of what is behind them is new.

• Rokach House, 1887: reconstructed as it was, on the conservation council's account
• Nahum Gutman Museum: northern wing reconstructed, southern wing modernised, new wing added in 2009
• Suzanne Dellal: two school buildings restored, the collapsed third rebuilt
• Eden Theatre, 1914: standing, sealed and unrestored
• The street plan and plot sizes: original, and the reason the quarter reads as old

The Suzanne Dellal Centre's own history page describes what was on the site in 1986: most of the buildings empty and derelict, the Lewinsky Seminar collapsed, the Girls' School occupied only by a theatre group run by Oded Kotler and Miki Yerushalmi, Yechieli Street running between the buildings, and the Inbal Dance Company rehearsing in a small building in the back yard. The compound had held three late nineteenth-century schools: the Yechieli girls' school, the Alliance school for boys and the Lewinsky teachers' seminary.

The centre opened in 1989, funded by the Dellal family of London in memory of their daughter Suzanne, together with the Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality, the Tel Aviv Foundation and the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Education. The brief was two things at once: to give contemporary dance in Israel a permanent home, and to pull the neighbourhood around it back from the dead. In 2010 the centre was awarded the Israel Prize.

The piece that does the second job is the plaza. The road between the two main buildings was closed and replaced by a public square of 2,800 square metres, designed by Shlomo Aronson with Judy Green and Barbara Aronson. It is planted with orange and citrus trees, a deliberate reference to the groves that stood on this ground, and small water runnels beside the trees step down between levels. It is open, unticketed and in constant use as a shortcut, a meeting point and an outdoor auditorium.

What runs there now is substantial. The Batsheva Dance Company, founded in 1964 by Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild with Martha Graham as its first artistic adviser, has been resident since 1989; the company currently lists Ohad Naharin as house choreographer and Lior Avizoor as artistic director. Inbal Dance Theatre, founded in 1949 by Sara Levi-Tanai, is also based here. The centre says it stages more than 600 performances a year and has presented over 1,300 premieres since it opened, and it describes itself as the most visited tourist site in Tel Aviv, which is its own claim rather than an independent count. A renovation the centre dates to 2016 to 2018 added a third floor with the Zehava and Jack Dellal studio, rebuilt the Yerushalmi Theatre and put in an outdoor stage with seating for 300.

Shabazi Street is the spine and the commercial one: galleries, design shops, patisseries, ice cream, a few boutique hotels, and rents that reflect all of it. The quieter lanes off it, Shimon Rokach, Yehieli, Chelouche, are largely residential, and the correct way to see them is slowly and on foot. The Suzanne Dellal Centre calls Neve Tzedek a good afternoon; that is about right, and it is also about the limit before the quarter starts repeating itself.

The southern edge is the old Jaffa railway station, now the HaTachana compound. Ground was broken on the station on 31 March 1890, the first section to Ramla opened on 24 May 1891, the line reached Jerusalem in 1892 and the station closed on 15 August 1948. Restoration began in 2004 and the compound reopened later that decade as a public precinct of restaurants, shops and galleries built around the platforms and the track. Entry to the compound is free.

The transport edge is newer. The Red Line light rail station Elifelet sits on the old railway ground at the bottom of the neighbourhood and reuses part of the original 1891 alignment, which makes the tram the simplest way in. The Nahum Gutman Museum gives Elifelet as its own nearest station. The Suzanne Dellal Centre directs drivers to the HaMered Street car park behind Textile House or to Manshia Street at the entrance to the old train station, and lists bus routes to the Carmelit terminal, Eilat Street and Kaufman Street.

• Shabazi Street: shops, galleries and cafes, busiest in the late afternoon
• Suzanne Dellal plaza: free to walk into, ticketed only for performances
• HaTachana, the 1890s Jaffa station compound: free entry, at the southern edge
• Elifelet light rail station: on the old railway ground, no Saturday service
• Charles Clore Park and the seafront promenade: a few minutes west