Savidor Center Layover: Rabin Square, Tel Aviv
Part of the full Tel Aviv Layover: Jaffa and Bauhaus From TLV
Tel Aviv’s Savidor Center station puts Rabin Square about 20 minutes’ walk west, the rowing reach of the Yarkon river a similar distance north, and the four-room library David Ben-Gurion left to the public a little beyond the square, none of the three charging anything to get in.
The assassination memorial on Rabin Square
Rabin Square is 17 dunams of open paving between Ibn Gabirol Street and Hen Boulevard, with Tel Aviv City Hall standing along its north side, and until 1995 it was called Kings of Israel Square. On the evening of 4 November that year, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot at the end of a peace rally held here, and the square was renamed for him within days. The memorial sits at the north-east corner, below the City Hall steps, and it is deliberately small: a marked spot and a low wall rather than a monument, at the place where it happened.
The rest of the square is an ordinary working plaza, big enough to feel empty on a weekday morning and used for concerts, protests and markets the rest of the time. A 2010 rebuild put an ecological water pool at the southern end, which is where the shade and the benches are.
The Yarkon river is the northern edge of Tel Aviv’s biggest park
Water is the thing that makes this park different from the rest of the city’s green space: the Yarkon runs straight through it, and rowing crews use the reach through the middle all year, sharing it with pedalos out of the boat hire. The park itself covers 3.5 square kilometres and takes something like 16 million visits a year, which is a lot of people spread very thin over a lot of grass.
The part worth walking to rather than through is the rock garden, four hectares carrying more than 3,500 plant species with 2.4 hectares of it given over to cacti alone, and the two-hectare tropical garden of orchids and climbers next to it. Both are inside the wider park and cost nothing. On a hot afternoon the tropical garden’s canopy is the only real shade in this half of the park.
Ben-Gurion’s four-room library of 20,000 books
Number 17 Ben-Gurion Boulevard is a plain 1930 house that Paula and David Ben-Gurion lived in from 1931 until they moved to the Negev in 1953, and that he kept coming back to until he died in 1973. He left instructions that it should become a public place for reading and study, and it opened on that basis on 29 November 1974. Everything in it is still theirs.
The upstairs is the reason to come: four rooms of shelving holding roughly 20,000 books in Hebrew, English, German, Greek and more, on Zionism, history, religion and the Bible, arranged as a working library rather than a display. Admission is free. The hours are the catch, 8am to 5pm on Monday, 8am to 3pm Tuesday to Thursday, 8am to 1pm on Friday and 11am to 2pm on Saturday, so this is a morning stop or it is nothing.
Every platform at Savidor Center is reached over a motorway bridge
The station is built in the median of the Ayalon Highway at the Arlozorov interchange, three island platforms and six tracks with six lanes of traffic on either side, so there is no street entrance in the ordinary sense. You come in across a bridge: one span west to the bus terminal, which moves something like 120,000 people a day on its own, one south to the light rail station underneath. Every rail passenger, coach passenger and tram passenger changing here crosses one of those two bridges.
That is the practical argument for not carrying a suitcase around this particular station: the bridges are the only route in or out, and at commuter times they are shoulder to shoulder in both directions.
Trains for Ben Gurion International Airport (TLV) leave here directly, about 20 minutes for NIS 13.50, roughly every 20 to 30 minutes, with nothing at all running between Friday afternoon and Saturday after dark. Six hours or more on the ground changes the calculation entirely: at that point the seafront is worth the crossing, and Old Jaffa, Carmel Market and the Bauhaus streets are what the extra travel time buys. Under that, the square, the river and the library are the three things this station can actually reach and return from.
Frequently asked questions
What should I do during a layover near Savidor Center Station in Tel Aviv?
Walk west to Rabin Square, then pick a direction. The square is 17 dunams of open paving with Tel Aviv City Hall on its north side and the memorial to Yitzhak Rabin at the north-east corner, about 20 minutes on foot from the station. North of the station, the Yarkon river cuts through a park of 3.5 square kilometres with rowing crews on the water and a four-hectare rock garden beside it; west, Ben-Gurion House on Ben-Gurion Boulevard opens its four-room library of 20,000 books for nothing. Three or four hours covers the square and one of the two, not both, and the library keeps short hours that decide the order.
How far is the beach from Savidor Center Station?
About 2.7 kilometres due west, which is 30 to 35 minutes on foot and there is no direct rail or tram service that covers it. Every railway station in Tel Aviv sits on the Ayalon corridor at the eastern edge of the city, so the sea is always a second leg from a platform rather than a short hop. If the water is the point of the trip, a taxi or a scooter is the realistic way to do it; if it isn't, Rabin Square and the Yarkon are both closer than the sand.
What is there to do near Savidor Center Station without spending anything?
All three of the main stops here are free. Rabin Square costs nothing and never closes, the Yarkon park is open all year with no gate on it, and Ben-Gurion House charges no admission at all, which is unusual for a house museum with a collection this size. The only thing you would pay for is a boat on the river or a coffee on the way. Budget for the fare back and nothing else.
Which trains from Savidor Center go to Ben Gurion Airport?
Direct ones, on the airport branch, taking about 20 minutes for NIS 13.50 with departures roughly every 20 to 30 minutes. Savidor Center handled more than 13 million passengers in 2019 and is the second busiest station in the country after HaShalom, one stop south, so the airport service is frequent rather than something to plan a day around. The exception is Shabbat: Israel Railways stops about two hours before it begins on Friday and resumes roughly an hour after it ends on Saturday night, and a taxi is the only way to the terminal in between.