GERMAN COLONY HOTEL PLANS STIR DEBATE
by Jonathan Pearlman
The Jerusalem Report
July 24, 2006
A plan to build two high-rise hotels at the northern end of Jerusalem’s
German Colony is facing staunch opposition from residents, who say the
buildings will mar the residential nature of the leafy neighborhood.
A campaign against the hotels was launched after the district planning
commission made public plans for a 14-story Four Seasons Hotel at
the beginning of the colony’s main artery, Emek Refaim Street, in an
empty lot just south of Liberty Bell Park. Across the road, at the
corner of Emek Refaim and Bethlehem Road, developers are planning
the separate 12-story Colony Hotel and residential complex.
The latter will be built over the top of a 19th-century Armenian
church, which served as a community center for the German Templers
who founded the German Colony.
Residents say the hotels are at odds with the low-rise stone
houses built by the German Protestants around the turn of the 20th
century that still set the tone of the area, one of Jerusalem’s
most affluent. A community action group, run by employees of the
neighborhood’s International Center for Culture and Youth, has
hired architects, lawyers and conservation experts to examine the
plans and will submit an objection to the planning commission. The
group’s coordinator, Marik Shtern, told The Report the hotels would
set a dangerous precedent and could result in further high-rise
blocks being built around the nearby old train station and inside the
neighborhood. "Instead of the arch of trees that lead up to the German
Colony, we will have big blocks of walls of up to 50 meters high,"
he said. "You don’t have to live in the neighborhood to see it as a
personal assault."
Shtern said the group had collected about 3,500 signatures for a
petition against the hotels. The group also held a conference on July
2 featuring panel discussions with the architects Hillel Schocken and
David Guggenheim and prominent Jerusalem residents including the poet
Haim Gouri. "This is a beautiful and very precious part of Jerusalem,"
Gouri told The Report. "But if they build buildings that do not suit
the style of the area, it will not keep its character."
The action group has also enlisted the aid of descendants of the
German Templers, who were deported by the British to Australia after
the outbreak of World War II. During a recent trip to Jerusalem,
about 20 descendants visited the site and wrote a letter of objection
to the council.
But the lawyer representing the two hotels, David Shimron, said they
were being built on unused blocks and would improve the neighborhood.
"It’s important to allow development that is reasonable and helps the
area progress," he said, adding that the Four Seasons was unlikely to
rise higher than 12 stories. Plans for the Colony Hotel, which will be
funded mainly by U.S. investors, were yet to be submitted for approval,
but it would preserve the character of the church, Shimron maintained.
Anahid Ohannessian, an Armenian Christian who lives on the church
grounds disagrees. "The hotel will eat up my house and cover the
church. It is a very bad plan, both aesthetically and culturally,"
he told The Report.
Jonathan Pearlman