The mid-level commercial neighbourhood between Downtown and the upper Carmel, the centre of Haifa's mid-20th-century Bauhaus and International Style architecture. The streets between Herzl and Balfour hold many of the surviving 1930s residential blocks built by Jewish architects fleeing Germany.
It has been declining for years and looks shabby compared to the renovated lower city, but the architecture is interesting and a handful of bars and restaurants are pushing the area back. The Technion campus was founded just above it in 1912 and gives the neighbourhood its scholarly mythology.