Over the past three millennia Jerusalem has known its fair share of master builders, from Kings David, Solomon and Herod to Suleiman the Magnificent and mayor Teddy Kollek. But the city has also known a mirror-image legacy of monumental and municipal projects that were stillborn or abandoned.
Site of the planned museum of tolerance.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski
The Third Wall, intended to protect the city's northern flank, was never completed, allowing Titus to breach the Temple in 70 CE. Today Rehov Hahoma Hashlishit, a tiny street tucked between Highway 60 and Mea She'arim, preserves the unfinished rampart's unlucky memory.
In 363 CE Julian the Apostate, Rome's last pagan emperor, visited Jerusalem on his way to battle Persia's Sassanid Empire. Touring the ruins of Herod's Temple, and in keeping with his efforts to foster religions other than Christianity, Julian ordered the Jewish shrine rebuilt.
Though a cornerstone was laid, the Third Temple was not to be - the building project was abandoned following an earthquake and remains the quintessential expression of unbuilt Jerusalem.
Another architectural natural disaster casualty is the steeple of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which collapsed in an earthquake in July 1927, and remains wrapped in scaffolding to this day.
In 1538, according to legend, the Ottoman engineers who built the Old City's ramparts failed to include Mount Zion and were publicly hanged by Jaffa Gate; the two lied that they didn't know David's Tomb was a Muslim holy site. Over time, their names were forgotten but not their building blunder.
Skipping ahead four centuries to the beginning of the British Mandate over Palestine, Sir Ronald Storrs - who in 1918 became military governor of Jerusalem and in 1921 civil governor of Jerusalem and Judea - commissioned Scottish town planner Sir Patrick Geddes to draw up a master plan for the city.
Storrs's plan bears a vague resemblance to Pierre Charles L'Enfant's layout of Washington, DC - a diamond-shaped city with boulevards running at right angles. The only part of Storrs's plan implemented, however, was a series of garden suburbs, including Boneh Bayit (today Beit Hakerem), Janziria (now known as Rehavia) and Talpiot.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the newly appointed grand mufti of Jerusalem, had an equally illusory sense of grandeur. In 1923, as head of the Supreme Muslim Council, he commissioned ambitious plans to build al-Aksa University on the site of the deconsecrated Mamilla cemetery (today Independence Park).
Al-Husseini envisioned a series of neo-Mamluk buildings for higher Islamic and secular education to counterbalance the newly established Hebrew University on remote Mount Scopus. The Aksa project was finally halted in the mid-1930s due to a lack of funds.
The legacy of that failed project still reverberates: see the Museum of Tolerance below.
Al-Husseini wasn't the only Arab leader in 20th-century Jerusalem whose plans came to naught. Having annexed the West Bank after the War of Independence, King Hussein of Jordan subsequently began building a palace at Tell al-Ful - the site of King Saul's fortress court at Gibeah (I Sam. 10:26, 11:14). Construction abruptly ended when the 1967 Six Day War broke out. Today all that remains of the palace is a rusting skeleton of decayed magnificence.
Another source of architectural undoings over the centuries has been illicit dalliances. The prophet Nathan prevented King David from building the Temple because of his adulterous tryst with Batsheva (II Sam. 11). In 1987 US TV evangelist Jim Bakker's affair with a 19-year-old church secretary led to the unraveling of his ambitious Court of the Guard project, a serene meditation and prayer garden outside Damascus Gate. Plans - for which Bakker bilked millions from his naive followers - called for the construction of an east Jerusalem Central Bus Station on Rehov Hanevi'im. The dilapidated, and still in use, Jordanian-era depot is situated next to the Garden Tomb.
Jerusalem architect and preservationist David Kroyanker is the author of dozens of books about the city's urban heritage including Dreamscapes: Unbuilt Jerusalem (1993). He curated an exhibit of the same name at the Citadel Museum about the planning and development of Jerusalem since 1967. The book and exhibit document the grandiose planning ideas after the Six Day War that sought to refashion Jerusalem. "Sometimes the unbuilt projects over the years are more interesting than the built ones," he says.
"Many present creative thinking and visionary notions from unbridled imagination and fantasy. As far as most of them are concerned, it's very good that they were thrown into the garbage can of history."
Following are descriptions of some of the city's contemporary architectural ghosts.
Ein Kerem Cable Car
Hailed as the solution to the traffic congestion in Ein Kerem's narrow streets, the proposed Ein Kerem cable car was planned to carry 800 passengers an hour from the Mount Herzl light rail station down to Ein Kerem. According to the JDA, this project is not being dealt with.
Ring road
Transportation engineers have dreamed of a capital beltway allowing traffic to flow west to Tel Aviv or east to the Dead Sea without driving through the city center. This bypass could also link Bethlehem to the south with Ramallah to the north in a future Palestinian state. While the north section called Highway 9 opened last year, the east section of this ring road, from East Talpiot to A-Tur, involving a series of tunnels and a bridge over the Kidron Valley, remains tied up with the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA). Plans for the western arm became moot last year when Mayor Uri Lupolianski withdrew his support for the Safdie plan for the development of west Jerusalem.
The "Kosher" Har Nof Jerusalem Forest Promenade
Planned to meet strict standards of Halacha observance, including a kosher lemehadrin eruv, low shrubbery and benches to avoid offending community standards of modesty, the Har Nof section of the Jerusalem Forest Promenade is one-third of a series of continuous promenades running along the forest's western edge from Har Nof to Ein Kerem. The promenade is designed to delineate and protect the forest from further encroachment as well as making it accessible to more people.
