Dizengoff Center

This guide to Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv opens on the eve of Purim in March 1996, one of the busiest nights of the year, with a twenty-four-year-old man standing at the doors in front of you, unable to get past the police posted at the entrance. It traces back to Dizengoff Center's opening in 1977 as Israel's first shopping mall, a concrete puzzle of two towers linked by skywalks and underground passages. Four hundred shops and a rooftop pool now fill those same towers. Stand at the doors and picture the crowds streaming past in costume that night.