Every once in a while my dad mentions a shopping complex in Tel Aviv called “Scud City” that he saw while on liberty during a Navy tour. Apparently our pal Saddam was flingin’ Scuds around one day and happened to land a real dud-of-a-Scud in the middle of the roof of a shopping center that had just finished construction. It had been scheduled to open that day, but before the missile hit, the opening was postponed for a week (I think) because of some completely unrelated phenomenon, like the weather or something.
Anyway, the Scud-dud never went off, and supposedly is now hanging in the ceiling of this mall–which is supposedly now called Scud City–which runs (or ran, back when our other buddy George’s dad spent a lot of time with Saddam) just like any other Tel Aviv mall.
I heard nary a word about the whole thing when I was in Tel Aviv, and I wasn’t there long enough to investigate and see if I could find the damn place. Nobody in Jerusalem or anywhere else in Israel was much help, either.
I know we have some Tel-Aviv dopers here. Can anyone give me the Dope on Scud City? Does it exist? Did it ever exist? Does it run? Did it ever? Is the story as I heard it true, or is something different?
Yeah, that’s it. When it opened a couple of months after the war, its managers hung a huge inflatable rocket - pointing more-or less downward, with its “nosecone” purtruding from a hanging “windowframe” - from the ceiling of the main gallery. It stayed up there for quite a while.
I doubt the mall was supposed to open the same day (what with the 6-o’clock curfew and all), and I never heard it referred to as Scud City. The mall went downhill pretty fast, it’s clientelle stollen by the much snazzier nearby Grand Canyon (a nice mall, but an atrocious pun), and the neighbourhood turning into a low-end clubbing district.
That makes a lot of sense, because he spent much more time in Haifa than Tel-Aviv, and now that I think about it I tend to move most of his Israel stories from Haifa to Tel-Aviv in my mind.
