1956 Friedlander City Plan of Tel Aviv and Environs

This scarce English-language guide map of Tel Aviv, Israel, was produced in 1956 by Zvi Friedlander. Packed with information and advertisements, it provides a snapshot of daily life in the city in the years just after statehood.

A Closer Look

This colorful map covers Tel Aviv - Yafo (Jaffa) and its environs in fantastic detail. A grid surrounds the map, corresponding to indexes of important buildings and neighborhoods and street indexes on the verso. The public buildings, including government offices, foreign embassies and consulates, banks, hospitals, and more, are numbered with corresponding indexes. Many of these reflect the status of Tel Aviv as Isreal's de facto capital, having initially been the formal capital of the State of Israel until the Knesset relocated to (West) Jerusalem in 1950. As the United Nations and most countries did not recognize Israel's jurisdiction over Jerusalem, their embassies and consulates remained in Tel Aviv. Advertisements, mostly related to housing and tourism, appear in the margins and on the verso, where an inset map of Israel also appears. These suggest that the intended audience for the map was Jewish travelers and prospective emigrants from other parts of the world, especially English-speaking countries.

Garden Cities

In the years before this map's publication, Tel Aviv was growing at a tremendous rate. When Jewish settlers began arriving in Ottoman Palestine in large numbers in the late 19th century, they could buy lots on the outskirts of the ancient walled city of Jaffa (marked with three blue Xs towards the bottom-left here). What began as a collection of homesteads soon took on grander ambitions. From an early date (the early 20th century), plans were formulated to develop Tel Aviv into a major Jewish urban center modeled on the garden cities movement popular at the time. British administration, following the World War I (1914 - 1918), turbocharged these efforts. Scottish urban planner Patrick Geddes drew up a plan for the city's future development, with the area north of Tel Aviv planned to follow the garden city model with small, local streets and parks intersected by major avenues. Although Geddes' Plan was not followed to the letter, its influence is evident in the street layout here, especially around the Kikar Hamedina towards the top, and in planned neighborhoods such as Tel-Ganim, advertised at right. At the same time, the Interwar period saw Jewish Bauhaus-inspired architects emigrate to Palestine, resulting in the distinctive architecture of many buildings constructed in the 1930s and 1940s, collectively known as the 'White City.'

Publication History and Census

This map was prepared by Zvi Friedlander and printed by the Israel American Offset Printing Co. Ltd. in 1956. Friedlander published a guide map of Tel Aviv-Yafo in multiple editions from the late 1940s until the early 1990s, some of which were also published in Hebrew. The current edition is only noted among the holdings of the University of Arizona in the OCLC, and the National Library of Israel holds both English and Hebrew ('תל אביב-יפו חולון בת-ים') editions from 1956 as part of the Eran Laor Cartographic Collection.