Cross the bridge

Alongside the light-rail bridge at the western entrance to Jerusalem is a pedestrian walkway. It is separated from the tracts, sort of attached to the side. From the train, you cannot see it.

Given a lift to Jerusalem Saturday night, we were dropped off under the bridge. We found the walkway, and walked across to the tram stop at the Central Bus Station. The walkway's pavement is translucent and lit at night, while the street side is transparent, a bit disconcerting for an acrophobe. Still worth the walk.

From the stop across from the bus station, you can get to the bridge if you walk with the tracks and the station to your right. Once on the other side it is a bit of a walk to the Supreme Court building, the nearest attraction, so just walk to the next stop or turn around and walk back.

The bridge does not fit visually with anything around it. But it is beautiful, especially if you look at it while riding the train. And if you think of it as David's lyre, it belongs here.

Copyright Jane S. Fox 2015

Walking the tracks

Some years back, whoever decides such things decided thtat the railway line into Jerusalem, running through a highly populated area, was too dangerous to cars and pedestrians. They overbuilt a new railway station way out at the approaches to Jerusalem (near the Malha mall) and closed the last part of the century-old route. (A few weeks ago they stopped all trains into Jerusalem. Though the reason given was needed repairs, I thinkspect the company wants to get its customers out of any habit they might have in preparation for using the line now being built from near the Central Bus Station, via Modi'in, to the airport, and thence to Tel Aviv.)

A decade or so after they stopped running trains to the Ottoman-built station on the edge of the German Colony, the new light rail trams started running. In the city center they run along a Jaffa Road now closed to all other traffic, which encourages pedestrians to walk on and over the tracks, but so far no one has been killed, even on Independence Day, when the trams gently push through crowds.

On the train tracks through Baka, the city built a beautifully landscaped promenade and bike path from Talpiyot to the historic station, now known as The First Station, where dacnces, fairs, music, and occasional ice skating attract crowds. The old tracks support the walkway. Steel sleepers stick out at the sides. First I knew sleepers could be steel. Along the way are descriptions of the railway's history. Cafes and sellers of fresh fruit invite you to refresh yourself.


Copyright 2015 Jane S. Fox

Almond trees, poppies, and cyclamen

The train ride from Jerusalem to Bet Shemesh has always been beautiful, but last Tuesday with the almond trees in bloom along the valley, sometimes below us, sometimes right outside the windows, it was spectacular. In places, with the green groundcover, they formed an eastern carpet beyond the ability of the best weaver or knotter. Really good eyes could see the paler cyclamen.

Today green laced almond-blossom white.

To think, all that beauty and almonds, too.

Copyright 2013, Jane Schulzinger Fox

Snow and free transportaiton

Thursday morning we woke to what eventually was 10 inches (25 centimeters) of snow on the ground, bushes, trees, cars, sidewalks, and streets. The updates at the bottom of the TV screen informed us that public transportation in Jerusalem would be without charge until 2PM. Of course buses had been pulled off the streets and the light rail trains had stopped running not, we were assured, because the system was not built to run in snow but because of a problem.

Nevertheless everyone seemed in excellent humor. Schools were, of course closed, and children were out playing in what must have seemed extreme cold. The temperature hovered around freezing. Many businesses closed, but the little local store opened. Restaurants were open for business.

I left a tap dripping two nights running. Pipes are outside buildings and not insulated. So far we have not lost electricity or water, so we, too, are in excellent humor.



Copyright 2013 Jane Schulzinger Fox

Demonstration against the light rail

At 8 AM on 14 March a protest is planned at the Har Herzl end of Jerusalem's light rail line. According to the poster, users protest crowding, lack of seats -- especially for the old and infirm -- lack of buses along Sderot Herzl (the lines that used to go that route were replaced by the train), infrequent service (it is, indeed, slower than the buses, and they went to more places), and impolite conductors (transfer from bus to light rail is only with a ravkav card, which confuses people used to buying a ticket on a bus and transferring with that paper ticket to another bus annd leaves them open to a fine; plus the machines that read the ravkav do not always work).

Copyright 2012 Jane S. Fox

Clong

A light rail train went past me on a practice run this morning. There is a bell. Sound like metal hitting a thick metal pipe. The driver wasn't using it much, but I expect to hear the sound more when there are more trains, and they take on passengers who will be tempted to run across the road.

Copyright 2011 Jane S. Fox

Bridge and Hourglass

Santiago Calatrava's Jerusalem Chords light rail bridge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chords_Bridge )looks odd and out of place when you approach the western entrance to the city, when you look at it from the Central bus station or indeed from anywhere else close up. You wonder whether there's a master plan to rebuild the city in glass and stainless steel (sign to avert the evil eye).

But seen reflected in Anish Kapoor's hourglass sculpture at the top of the Israel Museum's hill (http://www.sculptsite.com/sculpture-headlines-Anish-Kapoor-08-15-10.html ) the bridge sails towards the buildings, not playing their music perhaps but eager to reach them.

Upside down.

Turn around and see the bridge's distant beauty right side up. Turn back and walk around the sculpture on days clear, cloudy, and overcast.

Copyright 2011 Jane S. Fox

Jerusalem Light Rail

Word now is that the light rail will not be transporting passengers until August at the earliest. According to Yediot Akhronot, the city has budgeted over a two million dollars to teach people, from school children to the elderly, how not to be run over by the train. Since they insist they will allow no other traffic on Yafo from west of the shouk all the way to City Hall, they worry, justifiably, that people will be crossing the street wherever the want to. And since the train is close to silent, pedestrians will have to be very alert."'clang, clang, clang,' went the trolley in St. Louis, but the Jerusalem light rail is close to silent. "'Ding, ding, ding,' went the bell'" but I gather the Jerusalem trains won't bother. Meanwhile getting through the city is slow and I expect the merchants in the shouk are hurting.

Allowing taxis and buses along the part of the right of way now totally closed to all other traffic would keep pedestrians alert, and be a lot more convenient for people who want to go where the train won't. Between the old Shaareu Tzedek building ant City Hall (Safra Square) the train won't be able to go fast anyway because the stops are close together.

Copyright 2011 Jane S. Fox

Jerusalem Light Rail hahahahaha

A friend who has not been in Israel for a year asked whether the light rail system was running. Hahahahaha.

There has been progress, or at least change. Tracks are laid. Station shelters are in place with electronic signboards ready to show when the next train will arrive.

Some time in mid April.

Meanwhile Jaffa Road is closed to all vehicular traffic. For three months there will be no transportation, public or private on Jaffa Road. Of the first time in at least 3,000 years.

The light rail project is 13 years old. http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/transportation-mural.html described the warning mural.

Copyright 2011 Jane S. Fox

Bus Transfers

Your ticket is now your transfer on Egged buses in Jerusalem. For 75 minutes after you get on the first bus, you can use your ticket to board another

This changes trip planning. From Dereckh Azza to rhe Malkha Mall, no need to await a 17 or 17 alef, which make their round about way through Givat Mordekhai -- scenic but not quick. To be sure the 31 no longer goes down Azza and straight on to the mall, and past it to stop near the train station, but you can now take a 32 or 19 to Tsomet Pat and there transfer to 6 or 17 or 17 alef, whichever comes first.

And I know at least one man who takes the bus from Bayit veGan to Mahaneh Yehida, does the weekly produce shopping, and gets on the bus home without having to pay a second fare. If you see a man with a toddler shopping very efficiently, don't distract him. He has a bus to catch.

Copyright 2010 Jane S. Fox

Birds Fly Free

After you deplane at TLV (aka Ben Gurion airport or nahtbahg) you walk along the long corridor that tells international arrivals "You're not there yet." The grace of this one is soothing. At one point the glass wall to your right gives you a view down at the fountain in the central departures hall. To your left you can see outside, but no vistas. Soon outside wall to your right you can see another wall. High on it, metal birds soar as their real models do when migrating through Israeli airspace. In your own corridor, on the low wall of the moving walkway, they've painted birds, these bright and colorful. Welcome to Israel.

Stop Lights

The municipality has placed stoplights at the corner of Rav Berlin and Aza and a little way down at the corner of HaTibonim. Getting to the bus just became safer.

When the sirens went off, rising and falling, I though it unlikely that rockets were on the way to Jerusalem. In any case it's hard enough for the sun to get to the windows of this flat. I turned on radio and TV. After a few minutes they announced that a "technical problem" had set off the warning.

If I'd been walking down the street would I have felt different? If people around me had seemed disturbed? I wonder how the cellphone lines held up. I don't have a service that surfs the Web, but many people do, and even I might have phoned to ask someone to turn on the radio.

Copyright 2009 Jane S. Fox.

Carriages

Carriages (or cars) for Jerusalem's light rail wait not far from the Hebrew University's Mt Scopus campus and Hadassah Har HaTsofim.

I'm told the new mayor suggests the light rail system is an overly expensive boondoggle. Throwing good money after bad is not an action to be undertaken lightly, but the inconvenience of laying the tracks is so great that Jerusalemites feel they deserve some increase in convenience sometime.

Today the bus ride from the central bus station to the shouk (about a 7 minute walk if you don't hurry) took 35 minutes. In Jerusalem a severe jam makes you wonder if there's been an attack, but no sirens were heard, vehicular traffic flowed from the other direction (much of it coming from a feeder road), and the sidewalks were full of pedestrians walking normally towards the bus station and towards the shouk. Jaffa Road's constriction to two lanes was the culprit.

Abandoning light rail would require paying to fill in excavations. I suppose the rails would bring a good price for scrap. The decorative bridge, with its abstract David's-harp-flying buttress, which the last mayor insisted would be as symbolic of Jerusalem as the Eiffel Tower is of Paris, would be Israel's bridge if not to nowhere at least to no purpose.

Copyright 2009 Jane S. Fox

Light Rail

• On Sderot Herzl -- which runs from near Jerusalem's central bus station, past Kiryat Moshe and Beit HaKerem (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/beit-hakerem.html ) -- to Har Hertzl) they have laid tracks for the promised light-rail system.
• To my eyes the gauge seems to be the standard for regular trains.

Copyright 2008 Jane S. Fox

Taxi Tax

• Taxis in Jerusalem are a bargain. (See http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/taxis.html )
• They are wonderful for tourists. Along with buses, hey help make residents comfortable with carlessness.
• Now the mayor proposes a tax on taxi stands.
• Go figure.

COpyright 2007 Jane S. Fox

Entertaining Children

• Children like the energy-saving lights in Jerusalem stairwells. They push the button to trun on the light, wait on the landing until the light goes out, push the button again. One races ahead to push the button o,n a higher landing. That extends the time the light is on.
• For a child used to the family car riding a bus is an adventure -- a city bus where you give the driver money and get change and the printer prints out your ticket. You can keep the ticket as a souvenir. The bus starts moving before you get to a seat. It winds back and forth through narrow streets, up hill and down. Who needs Disneyland?
• Taxis. Another treat! "Good thing I'm a city kid and I can hail a cab" goes the song. (Googl ehas failed to identify the source.) It's magic for a midwestern kid. I wave my hand and a car stops, ready to take us anywhere.
• The shouk (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/abundance.html )can be almost too exciting. "What are those men shouting?" asks an eight-year old. He stands very close to me. "Bananas two and a half shekels a kilo," I tell him "Clementines three shekels a kilo." He moves a little away from me and listens. "Yes," he says. "I hear 'bananas' and 'kilo.'"
• For kids who don't like strange food, there's pizza. Many pizza parlors squeeze fresh juice (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/juice.html ).

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Frutiger

• Johannes Frutiger, a Swiss Protestant, came to Jerusalem in 1858, working for a trading company. A bank he helped found became the largest bank in the Ottoman province and financed the railway from Jaffa to Jerusalem.
• Along with Joseph Navon and Shalom Konstrum he is credited with financing the building of the Mahaneh Yehuda Neighborhood after which the shouk (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/abundance.html ) is named.
• The 40-room house that Frutiger build for his family (he and his wife had 14 children) later became rental property. Menachem Ussishkin (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/jerusalem-street-poetry.html ) was a tenant when the 1926 earthquake damaged the Augusta Victoria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusta_Victoria ) building where the British High Commisioner (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/palmanda.htm )lived. The British expropriated the building for their man until Armon HaNatziv was built for him (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/haas-and-goldman-promenades.html ).
• The Frutiger house is called Beit Mahanaim. It now houses part of the Ministry of Education. It is on the corner of Shivtei Yisrael and Rehov HaNeviim (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/street-of-prophets.html ). It was the first stop on the 2.75 hour walking tour of three blocks along the Street of the Prophets.
  Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Transportation Mural

• Above the Maayan Stub (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/retail.html )treasure house is another trompe l'oeil mural (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/fooled-my-eye.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/trompe-loeil.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/mural.html describe three others ).
• Its subject is transportation in Jerusalem, past and present.
• Look up and to the right as you walk west on Yafo from Ben Yehuda.
• (Note added 21 January 07) Then look again. The mural shows the picture as stage dressing.

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

4 to the top

• When festivities are not blocking the street ( http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/course-check.html ), the 4 does continue along YeKhezkel. A pre-car alley caught my attention opposite Avinoam. Then a sign pointing left to the Bukharian Shouk. Its name marks its origins at the end of the nineteenth century.
• It is not until Eretz Khefetz that the bus turns left. It is soon among names related to battles since the founding of the State of Israel.
• The view opens up, and then we are in Ramat Eshkol (http://research.haifa.ac.il/~eshkol/ ). In the seventies, secular and "mdern orthodox" Jews bought apartments here. Now more and more residents ae kharedi, then men dressed in what Poles thought fashionable in the eighteenth (knee britches and stockings) or nineteenth (long black silk coats) centuries. Although many kharedi families are poor by choice and live on welfare, the economic range within these communities is broad. Several subgroups are very wealthy and have been buying real estate.
• The bus continues up the hill, giving you a beautiful view to the north. It passes under khaim Bar Lev (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Bar-Lev ) to HaHagana (http://www.zionism-israel.com/Haganah.htm ). If you get off the bus at the Mr. Zol supermarket (the sign is in Hebrew but the large red framed white on black logo is distingtive) cross the street and walk across the plaza, you'll see one of the best outward views in the city.
• See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/bus-4-names.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/number-4-bus.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/pump.html then http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/4-to-terra-sancta.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/4-on-king-george.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/beautiful-clothes.html and http://jerusalmblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/street-of-prophets.html
• I took the number 28 back to the central bus station( http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/bus-station.html ). It passes the Tnuva dairy plant. Fresh dairy products are one of the joys of Jerusalem. (Madison, capital of the Dairy State, cannot match Jerusalem for the quality and variety of dairy products.) The land having been bought by kharedi interests for other purposes, Tnuvah has announced it will closd the plant.
• Emap (http://www3.emap.co.il/eng_index.asp ) uses the same transliteration for khet as I do.

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Between Meah She'arim and Zichron Moshe

• You can get off the 4 on Nathan Strauss and explore one of the late 19th and early
  20th century neighborhoods. Between them imagine empty fields.
• Zikchron Moshe (built at the end of the nineteenth century for school teachers) is to the left and Meah She’arim to the right. (If you walk around here, women can tie an Indian silk skirt over their slacks. A shirt to the elbows will usually prevent rude shouts from boys with nothing better to do.)
• Jews have lived in Jerusalem since the time of King David, with a brief hiatus after Nebuchadnezzar conquered the city, another when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, and a third when the Crusaders killed every Jew they could get their swords on. Living in Jerusalem meant living within the city walls.
• In the mid-nineteenth century the city got so crowded and disease was so deadly that Jews agreed to leave the safety of the walls and live wherever communities could buy land. Although some families here choose to live outside the economy, and for them charity provides a major source sustenance (see http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/love-and-darkness.html ), Straus is lined with shops for those who have joined the consumer culture of fashionable shoes, good-quality housewares, appliances, cellphones.
• See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/number-4-bus.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/bus-4-names.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/pump.html then http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/4-to-terra-sancta.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/4 and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/beautiful-clothes.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/street-of-prophets.html

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox