The 'F-You Towers' of Tel Aviv
It’s so big, so out of place, and so unrelentingly ugly that it offends you. Its 30-plus stories set among the four-story buildings below show its arrogance and say in no uncertain terms, 'Like me or hate me, F-you'
A few more generic towers are sprouting up on Rothschild and the seafront. But the piece de resistance is a monolith being built on the corner of Frishman and Dizengoff that stands there like a giant middle finger sticking out of the ground.
The tower is rising over one of Tel Aviv’s timeless neighborhoods – half-crumbling Bauhaus buildings, colonnades of trees, the seemingly eternal Shine Café on the corner, and a small market on little Rupin Street, which was once the poor-man’s Dizengoff.
(“If you had a pretty girlfriend, you took her to walk on Dizengoff. If you had an ugly girlfriend, you took her to walk on Rupin,” my friend’s Tel Avivian mom once explained.)
Then F-You Tower comes into view. It’s seen from everywhere and at every moment, now a corpse-colored vertical bulk, but soon to be covered by reflective glass. It’s so big, so out of place, and so unrelentingly ugly that it offends you. Its 30-plus stories set among the four-story buildings below show its arrogance and say in no uncertain terms, “Like me or hate me, F-you.”
In Tel Aviv we’ve long accepted the destruction of our own culture in the name of “progress.” In 1965, the historic Gymnasium Herzliya school was razed so Shalom Tower, the country’s first skyscraper, could rise. Last year, we didn’t make so much as a peep when the Adler House, one of Tel Aviv’s first buildings (and home of the founder of Gymnasium Herzliya), was torn down to make place for high-end tower condos.
When it comes to the history of our own culture we either don’t know or don’t care. The towers of Tel Aviv (and the people who build them) can say “F-you” to us, the city’s citizens, because we say the same thing to our own culture.
But going one step further in our honesty, we have to recognize that what exists in Tel Aviv is a F-you culture, one which refuses the notion of the common good but insists on instant-self-gratification – doing what’s best for me, when it’s best for me to do it.
So we implicitly understand when a contractor decides it’s best for him to build a gigantic luxury tower in a neighborhood of classic Bauhaus low-rises. We have the same impulse. And with a shrug of the shoulders we utter the slogan of Tel Aviv culture – “What can you do?” – and carry on doing what’s best for each of us.
The shock is not that the F-You Towers of Tel Aviv are rising – it’s that they’ve taken so long to rise. It was only a question of time and money, since while we might have murmured a kvetch now and again, we never even considered exerting ourselves to oppose it. We were not actually going to go out and – heaven forbid – protest.
So we’ll gag a little on afternoon strolls around the city and shiver in the shadows of towers we’ll probably never enter. We might wonder how long we’ll be able to stomach the daily “F-you” before it becomes too much and overwhelms us, before we wholeheartedly give up on our own culture and say, “Yep, I guess F-me.” But what can you do?
Ashley Rindsberg is a 29-year-old writer who’s contributed to The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post and Ynet, in addition to recently publishing a book of short fiction, Tel Aviv Stories .
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