Today's prayer plaza at the foot of the Kotel, nineteen metres below the platform. Retaining walls surround it: the upper city stands above it. It has two levels: against the Kotel, the prayer area, dug out in 1968; to the west, the visitors' upper plaza, sixty centimetres higher, behind a low wall with a parapet that two gaps open. From its north-west corner a stairway climbs to the Jewish Quarter, and a covered passage leads to HaGai Street; to the north are the covered halls of Wilson's Arch; to the south-west, a passage towards Batei Machaseh; to the south, through the security checks, the way to the Dung Gate, and the Mughrabi Bridge climbing to the platform.
Dimensions
- outline and stairway line from OpenStreetMap
- the Jewish Quarter, twenty-two metres above the plaza (elevator project from Tiferet Yisrael Street)
- two levels since 1968: the prayer area lowered by about two metres, then the step to the upper plaza reduced to sixty centimetres; the low wall between them, about ninety centimetres high, has carried a one-metre stone parapet since 1979 (S. Bahat, Cathedra 174, 2020)
- the passages to HaGai Street, Batei Machaseh and the Dung Gate, and the gaps in the low wall, from OpenStreetMap
- the furniture from OpenStreetMap: netilat yadayim stations, fountains, mechitza, low wall of the prayer area, fences, security checks, the "HaKotel HaMa'aravi" bus stop
- a thousand white plastic chairs, delivered in 2020 (thekotel.org)
- Aish HaTorah, facing the Kotel: seven storeys above the plaza (aish.com)
Project decisionChoice of the tour: its level. The tour's thirty-metre terrain smooths the wall's nineteen metres into a gentle slope; the plaza is set at the visible height of the Kotel below its top. The stairway climbs in one flight, between two walls, to the ground the terrain gives at the end of its line; its steps are sixteen centimetres high. The furniture: height of the fences and low walls, a mechitza one metre eighty high, number and placing of the chairs, siddur shelves. The houses around it show it storeys of three metres twenty and arched windows: a pattern, not a survey. The tour's terrain puts its north-west corner — police, toilets, entrance to the Western Wall Tunnels — above it: their doors are brought to the foot of the nearest wall. That terrain puts the plaza itself thirteen metres too high: the three passages to the city stop after four covered metres, without saying at what level they reach it; their width of three metres fifty, their height, the one-in-twelve slope of the men's entrance and the steps of the women's are choices; the last stretch of the OSM low wall, along the slope, is not built. The upper plaza is laid flat.