I am walking on wooden pathways laid between old rails, with refurbished rail carriages and spruced-up railway buildings all around me.
Imagine a train station that is now a leisure destination where children run around and play, and families shop at upmarket boutiques and have a meal under ancient trees. I am at the old Jaffa railway station (HaTachana in Hebrew), which carried passengers from Jaffa in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem when the British ruled the country.
Israel’s Tel Aviv is a city that never rests on its laurels. One of the best things in this city is its urban regeneration projects where the old morphs into the new.
HaTachana was built in 1892 as the terminus for the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway. When the railway closed in 1948, the site became a ghost town.
This unused piece of prime real estate was then rehabilitated and restored by the Tel Aviv Yaffo Municipality to its former glory, and turned into a vibrant art, shopping and entertainment complex, which opened in 2010. Located between the Tel Aviv Beach and Neve Tzedek, the city’s first Jewish neighbourhood to be formed outside ancient Jaffa is a popular hangout for locals and tourists.
The complex includes the home of Templar Hugo Wieland, part of the German Templars, a fringe Protestant sect, who moved to Israel in 1900 and built his home near the train station, and his tile and brick factory alongside. This proximity to the railway allowed Wieland to transport his products efficiently to Jaffa Port, where they were loaded onto ships and sent abroad.
We walk through the rambling station complex that includes 22 buildings from various historical periods. I see refurbished rail cars, freight terminals, train tracks and even a disused cement factory from 1905, which has been redesigned as retail space.
Local building materials were used for the construction of the station, mainly sandstone and burnt bricks with special steel beams on the ceilings. The southern awning, made-of-steel beams filled with wood and covered with zinc, was created by the same French company that built the Eiffel Tower. I love the original patterned tiles on the floor that are part of a home décor shop today.
The complex retains some of the original structures and carriages from its heyday. An old wagon at the entrance acts like a museum—it displays pictures of the former train station. The ground floor, which was the ticket hall, today houses a unique souvenir emporium, Made in TLV, the brainchild of a Tel Aviv television producer, and an Israeli actor.
I take a leisurely stroll to find a diverse selection of restaurants , cafes, pubs, ice cream parlours and boutiques in an enviably realistic historic setting.
I find boutiques run by Israeli clothes designers, local jewellery creators and a spa-style Ahava boutique selling beauty products made from Dead Sea salts. I have a drink inVicky Christina, a young, fun tapas bar offering tapas with pitches of sangria with outdoor area in the shade of a humongous ficus tree.
The station complex is also home to many vibrant activities—street performers doing acrobatics or exhibitions of Israeli artists. Every Thursday, Israeli designers, artists and concept creators converge for a roofless trade show open to the public.
Live music and DJs accompany the exhibitions. There’s an organic market on Friday morning offering another unique twist to the diverse use of this public space. As the New York Times put it, HaTachana is “like being on the fast track to Tel Aviv’s new-school cool”.