Florentin

The land came out of a catastrophe in Greece. The great fire of Thessaloniki in 1917 destroyed the city's Jewish quarter along with some 12,000 homes, and in 1921 Jews in Salonica founded the Salonika-Palestine Investment Company to build commercial ties with the Jewish settlements in Palestine. In 1924 the company sent an envoy to buy ground in Jaffa, south of Herzl Street and near the Jaffa to Jerusalem railway. The Hebrew account dates the founding to 1927 and credits David Abarbanel and the contractor Shlomo Florentin; the English account says Ottoman land law held building up until 1933.

The plan itself is unambiguous. Florentin was drawn as a bourgeois quarter mixing craft businesses, small industry and commerce with residential blocks of three and four storeys on narrow streets. In 1933 the Jaffa municipality permitted shops and light industry on the ground floors of the new buildings, which gave the arriving immigrants an income and fixed the neighbourhood's character for the next ninety years. The first residents were Jews from Greece, Poland, North Africa, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bukhara, and they were not wealthy.

Because Florentin lay inside Jaffa, its children were schooled in Tel Aviv institutions while its rates went to a municipality that did not serve it. In 1936, during the Arab revolt, that arrangement broke down: residents refused to pay and set up a committee of their own to provide street cleaning and welfare. The quarter was annexed to Tel Aviv shortly after Jaffa fell in the 1948 war, so a neighbourhood built in the 1920s only joined Tel Aviv in its third decade.

• East: HaAliya Street. West: Elifelet Street
• North: Jaffa Road. South: Derech Shlomo, the old Salame Road
• Three and four storeys, workshops at street level, flats above
• Inside Jaffa until 1948, then annexed to Tel Aviv

The working half of Florentin lies in the west and south of the grid, around Abarbanel and the lanes off it, and it is a genuine trade district rather than a preserved one. Furniture, upholstery, timber, fabric and hardware are sold wholesale by Jewish and Arab merchants, and the day runs the reverse of a visitor's: shutters up early, goods out onto the pavement, much of it closing by mid-afternoon. One lane there is Simtat HaMasor, the alley of the saw, which is about as literal as a street name gets.

That trade has been shrinking since the late 1960s, when the original residents began to move out and small commerce and manufacturing moved further in. The clothing and furniture businesses declined again through the renewal years of the 1990s as cafes, galleries, artists' studios and designer shops took the frontages. Rising values reached back into the old tenancies: several landlords sued long-standing residents holding flats under key-money agreements, and some families left as a result.

Two losses are worth knowing about because visitors look for them. Shuk HaAliya, at the corner of HaAliya and Wolfson streets, was a Bauhaus market building of 1938; the municipality demolished most of it on 6 April 2012 and a residential compound called Florentin Village went up on the site, part of the exterior listed for preservation. Gan Druyanov, the garden at the western edge, was built over by the Druyanov school in 2016, and Elifelet Garden replaced it after a residents' campaign.

What survives from the first years is domestic and religious rather than monumental. The Ahavat Hesed synagogue at 54 Abarbanel Street still carries the building style of the quarter's earliest phase; it was founded by the neighbourhood's rabbi, Yitzhak Yedidia Frankel.

Florentin is the centre of street art in Tel Aviv, and the sequence by which it became one is well documented. Garages, blank end walls and half-derelict buildings gave a first generation of painters a free surface in the late 1990s and early 2000s: Klone, who began painting in 1999 at sixteen, Know Hope, Zero Cents, Foma (Anna Mirkin) and Adi Sand among them. Dede came later, and a second wave arrived around 2008. A good deal of the work is text rather than image: Hebrew poetry, religious passages, and arguments between painters carried out on the same wall.

The best-known single piece is the 27 Club mural at 3 Haim Ben Atar Street, painted in 2014 by John Kiss, formerly Jonathan Kis-Lev, with Itai Froumin and Roman Kozhokin. It is about three metres by ten and shows Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, each of whom died at twenty-seven. A mural on Washington Boulevard of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin is the other fixture on the tour circuit, though published accounts of when it was painted do not agree.

The commercial turn is usually dated to 2014, when the American site Thrillist named Florentin the second most hipster neighbourhood in the world and the graffiti tours multiplied. By 2017 the friction was open: Haaretz reported groups of fifteen walked through the lanes and locals furious about it, and one wall on Eilat Street answered the tour parties with an obscenity in metre-high black capitals, which the tour parties photographed. Time Out Israel's 2018 account, written with the artists, argued that the first generation had largely gone, priced out and bored, leaving butterflies and doodles where the political work used to be.

None of that makes the walls not worth looking at, but it does mean the painting is churned constantly and a mural photographed last year may not be there. The curator Tal Lanir, whose 2011 exhibition Inside: Street Art in Tel Aviv was the first museum treatment of the subject, says many guides pass on misinformation.

Levinsky Market sits at the eastern end of the neighbourhood, on the street named after the Russian Jewish Zionist writer Elhanan Leib Levinsky, laid out in the 1920s as the spine of Yosef Tischler's plan for Neve Sha'anan. The retail market along the narrow stretch between HaAliya Street and HaShuk Street was a deliberate municipal creation rather than an organic one: the foundation stone was laid on 7 August 1961 and the market inaugurated on 15 March 1964, to gather up the food stalls scattered across south Tel Aviv into one place.

It never became a hall. Most of the original stalls turned into shops over the following decades, which is why Levinsky reads today as a street of shopfronts: spices sold loose by weight, dried fruit and nuts, cheese, pickles, borekas and Balkan groceries, descended from the trades the Salonican and Balkan immigration brought with it. It is the practical opposite of Carmel Market a kilometre north, being smaller, calmer and better for buying things to take home.

Since 2020 the market stretch has been closed to vehicles, and from 2022 the closure was extended west along Levinsky between HaAliya and Herzl streets. The eastern end is a different matter: it runs towards the former central bus station, whose long decline has dragged the surrounding blocks with it.

• Foundation stone 7 August 1961; market opened 15 March 1964
• Runs along Levinsky Street between HaAliya and HaShuk streets
• Spices, dried fruit, nuts, cheese, pickles, borekas, Balkan groceries
• Pedestrianised from 2020, extended west to Herzl Street from 2022

The one museum in Florentin occupies the building where the commander of Lehi was killed. Avraham Stern, known as Yair, spent his last weeks hiding in a rooftop room at 8 Mizrahi Bet Street, since renamed Avraham Stern Street, in the flat of the Lehi members Tova and Moshe Savorai. On 12 February 1942 the British detective Thomas James Wilkin found him inside a wardrobe. Wilkin left, the officer Geoffrey Morton arrived, stood the handcuffed Stern by the window and shot him three times from behind.

The top floor is preserved as it was. The furniture is original and in its original positions, the wardrobe Stern hid in is still there, a bullet hole is visible in the window frame, and a film about the killing is shown in the room itself. The roof was later closed in to make two memorial rooms, one for Stern and one for the 127 Lehi fighters killed in the underground and later in the Israel Defense Forces. The second floor holds an exhibition on the organisation's operations; the ground floor holds the offices of the Lehi association.

Members of Lehi tried to establish a museum in the flat after independence and failed. A plaque went up in 1953, the house was later handed to the Ministry of Defence, and the museum opened on 4 February 1986. The ministry's museums unit publishes its hours as Sunday to Thursday, 08:00 to 16:00, and its admission as ₪20 for an adult, ₪15 for youth aged 5 to 18, students, senior citizens and army pensioners, ₪10 for National Insurance disability and victims of hostile action, and free for bereaved families.

It is not a neutral museum and does not present itself as one. Lehi was the smallest and most uncompromising of the pre-state undergrounds, its record remains contested in Israel, and the exhibition is the account of the association that perpetuates its memory.

The same narrow streets that carry the wholesale trade in the morning carry the bars at night. Kitchens fill from about nine, bars from about eleven, and the noise on the pavement outside the flats does not subside until well into the small hours. Friday night is the peak, and it is also the night when scheduled public transport does not run.

The friction this produces is the current argument about the place. An ageing original population, a working trade district, a large student and young-renter population and a nightly influx of visitors all sit inside a third of a square kilometre, and residents have organised repeatedly: over policing, over the loss of Gan Druyanov, over the tour groups and over noise. In October 2006, when crime rose, a decision to reinforce the local police with Border Police officers brought residents and social activists out in protest; it was never formally rescinded, but Border Police have not operated in the neighbourhood since.

The quarter is most legible when both halves show at once: late morning, with the trade going and the night before still being swept up.