North of the plaza, the covered prayer halls under the causeway leading to the Chain Gate. The Kotel continues there under a great arch springing from it: it once carried a bridge to the platform, above the street that ran along the wall.
Dimensions
- span of the arch: thirteen metres
- its crown: 6.1 m above today's floor
- outline of the halls from OpenStreetMap
- an ark holding more than a hundred Torah scrolls and a library, from the 2005–2008 renovation; the ner tamid, lit in 2010 (thekotel.org)
- a shaft showing fourteen courses below the floor (Wikipedia)
Project decisionChoice of the tour: the vault is a semicircle running the whole length of the halls, and the rest of their outline is solid up to the platform's paving. The dimensions come from archaeology, Wilson's surveys included, not from a source of the corpus. The furniture and its placing: the ark at the far end, under the crown — against the Kotel the vault drops below one metre —, the library along the western side, the shaft near the entrance.