When the Clal Center opened in the heart of Jerusalem in the 1970s, it was supposed to be a gleaming and innovative shopping mall that would become the city’s commercial hub.

Today, it has become a grimy labyrinth of empty storefronts, shady businesses, abandoned office machines, and indecipherable navigation signs. Widely considered one of the city’s biggest architectural failures, many believe an urban legend that says the building is cursed, even as a beautiful rooftop garden seeks to lure shoppers back into the building.

“There were many wrong decisions made here, and different opinions about what went wrong,” said Shimshon Sam Leshinsky, a social media influencer who gave a tour of the building recently. “It’s a disaster of a building, but for the purpose of sharing its stories, it’s a lot of fun.”

Leshinsky, a resident of the city who has achieved local fame for reviewing restaurants on Facebook, works in the Clal Center for his day job. He gave the tour as part of the Jane’s Walk Festival, an international movement of free walks and talks that invites residents to teach others about their neighborhoods.

Founded in Toronto in 2006 in honor of writer and activist Jane Jacobs, the festival is now held in more than 500 cities around the globe, organizers say.

“Shimshon has been giving tours in Jerusalem for several years, and is one of our most eclectic and colorful guides,” said Itamar Farhi, the movement’s organizer in Jerusalem, introducing Leshinsky to about 20 people who joined the tour.

There were high hopes for the Clal Center when the project was conceived for the 17-dunam plot of land between Jaffa Road and Agrippas Street, Leshinsky noted.

For nearly a century, the space was home to the Alliance Israélite Universelle vocational school (known in Hebrew as Ki’ach), founded in 1882 to teach trades to poor children from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim societies.

But after the Six Day War in 1967, Jerusalem underwent a massive real estate boom, and the old, low-rise Ottoman and British-era cityscape suddenly felt outdated to developers who dreamed of a modern, towering metropolis.

In 1970, before the strict historic preservation laws that today protect Jerusalem’s heritage were established, the Alliance school was demolished, with only its decorative iron gate remaining outside.

The Clal Group, a development company led by Azorim Investments, hired Dan Eitan, one of Israel’s most celebrated modernist architects, to create an ambitious plan for an upscale, indoor shopping mall, something Jerusalem didn’t have at the time.

The Clal Center was to be a futuristic wonderland, with a 15-story office tower rising above a massive, multi-tiered commercial center. Architecturally, the idea was for multiple entrances from the surrounding streets to feed into an intricate, spiraling system of half-floors and galleries wrapping around a grand, open-air central atrium. These would connect the historic Nachlaot neighborhood and the Mahane Yehuda open-air market to the new city center.

Construction began in 1972, and the building opened for business in 1978 with commercial success.........

© The Times of Israel