Carmel Market

The land came first and the market was the consolation prize. Ruppin's 1913 pitch in Russia was to buy plots in Tel Aviv as an inheritance, not as a home, and the buyers who took it up were known afterwards as Ruppin's refugees. The 1,000 roubles they paid bought them strips of the sand that HaCarmel Street would be laid across. When they arrived after 1917 they had the strips and no capital, no trade and no way into an economy built on physical labour, so they asked the municipality for permission to trade produce on their own ground.

Accounts of whose market it was differ, and the disagreement is worth stating rather than smoothing over. The Hebrew reference literature credits the Russian arrivals and Dizengoff's licence. The market's own website tells it the other way round, as an informal marketplace called HaKerem set up by the neighbouring Kerem HaTeimanim in the early 1920s, which Ruppin and a group of Russian immigrants then turned into a commercial concern and the municipality formalised. The two versions agree on the name, the decade and the street, and on Dizengoff being the one who made it permanent.

Kerem HaTeimanim, the vineyard the first name refers to, was already there. It was settled by Yemenite Jewish immigrants on land belonging to Aharon Chelouche, Yosef Moyal and Haim Amzaleg. Most accounts date that to 1906, some to 1904. Its single-storey houses of timber and tin backed straight onto the strip of sand the market took over, which is why the market still leaks into its lanes today.

One piece of the geography has since been renamed out of recognition. HaCarmel Street originally ran all the way to what is now Rabin Square. In the 1930s the greater part of it became King George Street, leaving the market with the short southern stub that still carries its name.

On 21 December 1927 the newspaper Davar printed a letter from a market pedlar, and it is the most useful single document about the place. The municipality, he wrote, had the previous year moved the market from the corner of Allenby and Nahalat Binyamin to HaCarmel Street, and made the booth holders pay 20 Egyptian pounds each for the new booths. A large part of the customers had not followed: they stayed in the stretch of HaCarmel Street nearer Jaffa. Meanwhile Arab villagers were selling vegetables beside the market daily without any licence or municipal tax, and, carrying none of those costs, were selling cheaper. The municipality was then issuing licences to further pedlars who had not paid what he had paid, splitting a small living into smaller pieces. He signed it "one of the pedlars".

Everything that has been argued about since is in that letter: the municipality reorganising the market from above, the traders paying for the privilege, and the customers going where the price is. The 1920s complaint about unlicensed competition and the 2020s complaint about lease fees are recognisably the same argument, conducted a century apart.

The market has taken harder knocks than planning rows. A photograph from February 1948 shows a warning sign fixed to a barrel in the middle of the market, telling passers-by about sniper fire coming from the nearby Hassan Bek Mosque. In the early 1960s the Hebrew press ran a campaign calling the market a permanent sanitary nuisance. On 1 November 2004 a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt in the market shortly after 11 in the morning, killing three civilians and wounding dozens; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed the attack.

The market is legible if it is read as a single street with things attached to it. HaCarmel Street starts at Magen David Square, where six streets meet, and runs south-west to the Carmelit terminal and Gan HaKovshim, in the direction of the old Manshiya area and the sea. Everything else is an annexe reached from that spine.

Walking it from the top, the trade shifts as the street descends. The municipality's own description of the upper stretch is bread and pastries, olives, dried fruit, exotic spices and fresh produce, sold at competitive prices. Further down, food stalls, bars and sit-down counters take over more of the frontage, and this is the part that keeps trading after the produce sellers have packed the boxes away.

The market long ago outgrew its own street and now spills into several neighbouring ones, mainly in Kerem HaTeimanim and Nahalat Binyamin. Taken together with the Nahalat Binyamin pedestrian mall and Rambam Street, this makes a large area of central Tel Aviv closed to cars, which is a useful thing to know before circling in one.

• HaCarmel Street, from Magen David Square down: the produce, spice, olive and dried fruit run, and the market's official address at number 35.
• The lanes into Kerem HaTeimanim, Gedera Street among them, which backs onto the market and carries food shops and restaurants rather than stalls.
• The south-western end, known as Shuk Gaza, which is where the municipality aimed its first renewal pilot.
• Nahalat Binyamin, east of the market: a pedestrian mall on ordinary days, an arts and crafts fair on Tuesdays and Fridays.
• Magen David Square at the head of it, named for the six streets radiating from it: Allenby in two directions, King George, Sheinkin, Nahalat Binyamin and HaCarmel.

Visitors who arrive expecting a historic covered bazaar are in the wrong century and the wrong empire. There is no Ottoman hall at Carmel Market, no vaulting and no protected fabric along HaCarmel Street. The stalls are demountable, the roofing is corrugated sheet and tarpaulin strung between them, and everything standing above the pavement has been replaced repeatedly since 1920. Replacing the public roofing is itself one of the line items in the municipality's current renewal programme.

What is genuinely old is the arrangement rather than the material: the line of the street, the six-way junction at its head, the 1906 grid of Kerem HaTeimanim beside it, and the habit of selling produce along that particular kerb. Even the position is not original. The market only reached HaCarmel Street in 1926, having traded until then at the corner of Allenby and Nahalat Binyamin.

That makes the usual question about ruins into the wrong question here. Reconstruction at Carmel Market is not an event that happened once and can be pointed at; it is continuous, and it is what the traders and the municipality have been arguing about for a century. The thing being conserved is a trading pattern, not a structure.

The paperwork trail is long and the built result is short. The local planning committee approved a renewal scheme in 2009. In September 2011 the district committee agreed to deposit a plan covering about 75 dunams, taking in the market, the western market, the Carmelit car park, part of Gan HaKovshim and land held by the Israel Land Authority, at a reported cost of about 100 million shekels, with a logistics centre, underground public parking, light roofing over the stalls and a recycling centre. On 30 January 2013 the local committee approved the renovation itself, reported then at about 150 million shekels, with stallholders to be offered 49-year leases renewable for a further 49.

What the design would change was set out in a municipal proposal reported by Haaretz in March 2018: a roof over the main thoroughfare with the option of air conditioning, uniform stall design and signage, stall frontages capped at 1.5 metres, fish and meat moved off the main run into the side streets, fixed trading hours, and a maximum of ten seated restaurants and cafes in each section of the market, permitted only on corners. That last cap is the most revealing line in the document. It exists because the municipality did not want to produce another Sarona Market, and said so.

Money and property rights are the reason none of it has happened quickly. In 2017 traders told Globes they were being asked for 200,000 shekels for a 49-year lease on a stall of seven square metres. In September 2022 Calcalist reported a framework offered to about 1,000 traders then classed as squatters: 28,571 shekels per square metre for the first seven metres and 7,521 shekels per square metre beyond that, payable in 36 index-linked instalments, giving the trader half the ownership with the municipality keeping the other half, on a 49-year lease renewable once. The traders' committee has its own list of unresolved items, including second storeys on roughly 60 shops and the status of the meat market.

The municipality now splits the work into two stages. Stage A covers electrical safety at the stalls, replacing the public roofing, adding lighting, public address, cameras and ventilation, new stalls, drainage and resurfacing. Stage B replaces water, sewerage and underground utilities. It is to be done in 40-metre segments, each closed for several weeks with minimal pedestrian access kept open, working day and night on the main market and mostly at night on the western market, and the municipality says lease signing with the traders' committee began in 2024 and 2025. Traders remain divided. The line quoted to Time Out in January 2022 was that they did not want to become another Sarona.