Before you stands one of the oldest surviving buildings of the former Model Farm, its stone walls and arched windows hint at its past as an agricultural warehouse, a place once filled with the rhythm of rural life. But if you listen closely, the story carries you into the 20th century. In the 1940s, the **Old Central Bus Station** of Tel Aviv rose nearby, quickly becoming the country’s central transport hub — the point where all roads met. Around it grew a buzzing microcosm of markets, cheap hotels, and repair shops. Yet along with the noise and motion came the city’s darker shades — overcrowding, poverty, and petty crime. Locals even called the Hashmal–Aviv zone “the belly of Tel Aviv,” a place where buses ruled by day and the streets ruled by night.
With time, the station aged and was moved south, but the spirit of those decades still lingers. It was this mix — the 19th-century farm, Rutenberg’s industrial power, the roar of the old bus station, and the hardships of urban life — that gave the neighbourhood its character. Today, the area is reinventing itself: historic façades are being restored, cafés and co-working spaces fill old courtyards, and new apartments rise beside century-old stone. Standing before this building, it’s easy to imagine the scents that once marked its eras — orange blossoms, diesel smoke, fried street fish — now replaced by the hum of students and designers shaping yet another layer of Tel Aviv’s story.
You’ll walk through the very heart of old Tel Aviv — a neighbourhood where orange groves, missionary dreams, and the glow of early electricity all intertwined. The journey begins at the Model Farm and its iconic water tower, the birthplace of irrigation in Eretz Israel. From there, we’ll trace the footsteps of the Ishma’ilov family — Mashhadi *anusim* who built rental houses and inns for Persian merchants, yet lost much of their fortune under dramatic circumstances. We’ll pause in Gan HaHashmal, the city’s second public garden, which has witnessed the romance of the 1920s, decline, and the wave of 21st-century gentrification. The walk culminates at the grand Ohel Moed Synagogue — the “Tent of Meeting” — where eastern communities claimed their rightful place in the growing city. This is a journey through layers of time: from water to electricity, from merchant houses to gardens and synagogues — a story where every street guards a secret and every building speaks for its generation.
