Tel Aviv Port

Jaffa had been the coast's port for centuries and the Yishuv had no share in running it. A Jewish port at Tel Aviv had been argued for since the end of the First World War, by Meir Dizengoff among others, and refused. The Arab general strike declared on 19 April 1936 changed the answer: with Jaffa shut, the British administration agreed to a landing stage on the sand north of the city, on condition that no Mandate money paid for it.

The money was raised instead by Otzar Mifalei Yam, a company floated for the purpose whose shares were sold to the Jewish public, and the work was done in part by Greek-speaking Jewish labourers from Salonika who had done this kind of work before. The Times of Israel's account has a Yugoslav freighter carrying a thousand tons of cement dropping anchor when construction had barely begun; the Hebrew record dates the first unloading to 19 May 1936, from the ship Četvrti, in sacks carried ashore by lighter. The first wooden pier collapsed the day after it was opened and a metal one replaced it inside a month.

The first man in charge of the place was Volodia Itzkovitz, who had been the only Jewish cadet at the naval academy in Odessa and by then went by the name Ze'ev Hayam, Wolf of the Sea. Dizengoff, mayor and by then gravely ill, is recorded at the opening saying that there would be a great port here. He died a few months later, in September 1936.

The improvised pier became a port proper on 23 February 1938, when the finished works were inaugurated at their full size. The basin was small by any commercial standard: the Hebrew account gives it as roughly 225 metres long and 63 metres wide, closed by a breakwater built parallel to the shore rather than thrown out to sea, which is why ships anchored off and cargo came in by lighter rather than alongside.

Its civilian working life was short. The British took the facilities as a military base for the Second World War, and the port's next significant moment was the 1948 war, when it was the only port wholly under Jewish control: supplies, weapons and the iron plates for the armoured convoys to besieged Jerusalem came through it. After the state was established the traffic moved to Haifa, and the shallow basin here had no answer to bigger ships.

Ashdod, deep-water and purpose-built, opened in 1965 and settled the question. The last ship left Tel Aviv on 25 October 1965. What followed was thirty-odd years of fishing boats, storage sheds and workshops, and the compound became the sort of place a city keeps its ugly functions in. The port's barges had one further outing: in the 1973 war they were taken to the Suez Canal for the crossing.

• Basin: about 225 m long and about 63 m wide
• Breakwater: built parallel to the shore, not out from it
• Cargo worked by lighter from ships anchored offshore
• 1939-1945: taken by the British as a military base
• 1948: the only port wholly under Jewish control during the war

The single most legible piece of the working port is the crane standing by the marina near the central deck. The municipality's own text dates its service from 1938 to 1965, calls it the only one of its kind operating in the country and says it lifted vessels during the Second World War. At its eighty-first year it was refurbished and lit as an installation by the designers Kochavi and Kimchi, which is a fair description of what has happened to the whole site: the machinery survives as sculpture.

At the northern edge stands the lighthouse, a 17 metre square concrete tower built by the British administration in 1934-35 and lit from 1935. It went dark in 1965 with the port it served, had a boardwalk built round it by the Israel Antiquities Authority in 2007, and in 2021 was fitted out as a cafe.

Under and around it is Tell Qudadi, an ancient mound on the north bank of the Yarkon mouth. P. L. O. Guy cut trial trenches there in October 1937 and a salvage dig by Eleazar Sukenik, Shmuel Yeivin and Nahman Avigad ran from November 1937 to March 1938, funded by Pinhas Rutenberg. No final report was ever published. When Alexander Fantalkin and Oren Tal went back to the material and published their reassessment, they moved the fortress from the tenth or ninth century BCE, where the excavators had put it, to the late eighth century under Assyrian rule, with abandonment around 650 BCE. The disagreement has not been settled, and the conserved remains sit beside the promenade with nothing on the ground to tell a walker which reading to believe.

The hangars themselves are the fourth survival, and the most misleading. The shells are original cargo sheds and 1930s fair buildings, restored; everything inside them is a fit-out of the last twenty years.

The port did not arrive on empty sand. Two years earlier the same ground carried the Levant Fair, a trade exhibition of about ten hectares laid out at the northern edge of the city. The 1934 edition opened on 26 April, ran to 26 May, was inaugurated by the High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope and drew, on the usual account, 600,000 people from thirty countries in a month.

Its pavilions were designed by the architects who were then building the White City: Aryeh Elhanani, Richard Kauffmann, whose central pavilion was shaped like a ship, and Arieh Sharon. Elhanani also drew the fair's emblem, a winged camel that Tel Aviv has never quite let go of. One of the pavilions, built for Romania, was later used as a clandestine Haganah weapons workshop.

Most of the fair is gone. Elhanani's statue of the Hebrew Worker has been restored on the site, some of the halls stand as retail and event space with their numbers still on them, and the large playground occupies eight dunams of lawn where the Maccabiah stadium used to be. The municipality's own page about the port is filed under the fair's name, which is the tidiest indication of how thoroughly the two sites have merged.

Otzar Mifalei Yam, still the owner, began putting the compound back together from 2001; the infrastructure was overhauled by 2002 and the leisure complex was substantially open by the end of 2004. The surface everyone now photographs came later. An open competition held in 2003 was won by Mayslits Kassif Architects, working with the landscape architect Galila Yavin, and the deck was completed in 2008.

Their design is a single continuous timber surface that rises and falls in long waves, described by the practice as an undulating, non-hierarchical surface referring to the dunes the port was built on. Nothing on it is labelled as a route, a plaza or a lawn, which is the point: the deck is meant to be read as an open invitation rather than a plan. It has since carried everything from spontaneous rallies to art projects, on the architects' own account.

The published areas do not agree, because they measure different things. The municipality gives the deck as 24,000 square metres. The architects give 55,000 square metres for the whole scheme. The Hebrew account of the rebuilding says over 20,000 square metres of decking was laid. Read them as a deck of roughly two hectares inside a project of about five and a half.

In October 2010 the project won the Rosa Barba European Landscape Prize at the sixth landscape architecture biennial in Barcelona, from 427 entries and a shortlist of nine. The practice makes a larger claim for it: that a design strategy, rather than a grant of building rights, is what stopped the waterfront being developed commercially and turned it into the metropolitan area's most used open space. That is the designers' reading of their own work, and it is worth knowing whose it is.

The compound runs as a shopping and eating district with a public promenade through it. The municipality counts more than 140 businesses and lists the fixtures a family will actually be looking for: the city's letter installation on the central deck beside a large sandbox, a 2.5 metre red heart frame between hangars 26 and 29, a carousel designed by Anat and Ilan Berman on 1950s and 1960s references, the eight dunam playground by the amphitheatre, and a three metre pair of angel's wings near the Yarkon bank, a copy of Jorge Marín's Alas de la Ciudad given to the city by the Jewish community of Mexico City.

The other fixture is the farmers market, Shuk HaNamal, which sells produce, cheese, fish, spices and prepared food out of a hangar. Its published hours are Sunday 09:00 to 14:00 on a reduced schedule, Monday to Thursday 09:00 to 20:00, Friday 07:00 to 17:00 and Saturday 09:00 to 18:00, and the market itself advises checking stall by stall.

Saturday is the busy day here precisely because so much of Israel is shut: the port is open every day of the year and most of the city's shops are not. That is also the day scheduled public transport does not run, so the journey home is the thing to think about before setting out. The setting either side is worth the extra hour: the Yarkon estuary and the Reading power station, built in 1938 around the country's first turbine, to the north, and the promenade running south past the beaches to the hotel strip and eventually to Jaffa.

The practical infrastructure is municipal and published. Three clusters of public toilets open daily from 06:30 to 22:00, at Hangar 3, at Hangar 25 and in a container by the playgrounds on the old fair ground; all three are accessible and two have baby-changing corners. A control room staffed around the clock covers this compound along with the marina, Jaffa port, Old Jaffa and HaTachana.

• More than 140 businesses, open every day of the year
• Farmers market in a hangar, with a reduced Sunday schedule
• Public toilets at Hangar 3, Hangar 25 and the fair ground, 06:30 to 22:00
• Playground of eight dunams, plus a sandbox on the deck itself
• The Yarkon estuary and Reading power station immediately north