61 The Crossroads Commercial Palace

The Crossroads Shopping Center attracts a multitude of people. Sometimes it seems that it serves as a sort of Town Square for the neighboring villages. On Saturdays crowds mill about as if buying was a ritual. Those heading for the center are not concerned only with shopping. Youths sit on little patches of lawn next to the road, children play in the playground next to the parking lot and ride on the little electric train near the pizzeria.

Families cross the shopping center from one end to the other, some of them hurrying from store to store, but others stroll nonchalantly as if they are on the boardwalk. In the lot in front of the supermarket – which is shown in the picture – puppies are sold on Saturdays and people gather in front of the ATM machine on the right. On Saturdays there isn't a single available cart between the iron rails near the ATM and when one becomes available it is immediately snatched up by a new customer.

I took this picture in the middle of the week. Everything is calm and one can observe the entrance to the supermarket leisurely. The ninety degrees angle of the roof that protects from the summer sun and winter rain creates – with the help of the illumination – the effect of a lighted pyramid. "Get out of the dark and come into the light" the shopping center whispers to us. But the rising triangle also resembles a huge shark which is about to swallow us.

Behind the glass doors of the supermarket the light becomes brighter and it blurs the details in the picture. That is the heart of the "palace", a consumer heaven spread out on shelves filled with everything one might desire and soft music drifts over the price tags. The large pictures above the heaven's gates remind one of the other periods of this place and a time that has passed never to return – Moments of the history of the nearby Kibbutz Gan Shmuel that was established in 1922 and who are the present owners of this supermarket. Very few people lift their eyes to this lost ideal