From Wealthy Mansion to Abandoned Mall: The Story of Migdal HaNeviim

There are old buildings, and then there are buildings you enter and feel that someone simply stopped time. The Prophets Tower (Migdal HaNeviim) in Haifa is exactly that.

It is located at 2 Khoury Street, at the junction between Hadar HaCarmel, Wadi Nisnas, and the Lower City. But long before the blue glass and the strange corridors, one of the most impressive houses in Haifa stood on this spot: the "Khoury Palace." The house was built in 1908 for Salim Khoury, a wealthy Christian-Maronite businessman. During the Mandate period, it became the headquarters of the railway administration, was damaged and burned in the battles for Haifa in 1948, and was eventually demolished.

After decades of unrealized plans, construction of the Prophets Tower, designed by architect Moshe Zur, began in the early 1980s. Its cinemas opened as early as 1985, and the building was officially inaugurated in 1986. It was massive for its time: about 34,000 square meters of commercial space, offices, parking lots, and entertainment, wrapped in reflective glass. Advertisements promised it would become the new center of Haifa's activity.

That did not exactly happen.

Commerce weakened, government offices later moved to the Government Complex (Kiryat HaMemshala), and the cinemas closed. Parts of the tower are still active today, with offices, clinics, a fairly large supermarket, and other uses, but the commercial floors have lost much of the life that was supposed to fill them.

This is what makes the Prophets Tower so interesting: the elevators, the passages, the different levels, and the winding corridors create an almost labyrinthine feeling. It is not an abandoned building, but it is also definitely not a normal mall. It is a kind of Haifa time capsule that shows what the future looked like as imagined in the 80s and how that future has aged.