Tel Aviv - They stare from the photographs, some stiffly, some self-consciously, some curiously, many proudly, all of them gazing out from another era, a black and white reminder of a city's history now being reclaimed for its 100th birthday. "Revealing the Hidden City," a collection of photographs of the early, or earlier, days of Tel Aviv, is one of the projects the municipality has undertaken to mark its 100th birthday.

The photographs are displayed on public boulevards and in shop windows and the simplicity they illustrate provides an affectionate, even touching, contrast to a city which now prides itself on living in full technicolour and in widescreen as well.

In its 100 years Tel Aviv has gone from a suburb of Jaffa to Israel's metropolis, the country's cultural and financial hub with a population of400,000 people, and another 3 million living in cities within commuting distance.

Given Tel Aviv's long-established reputation as Israel's entertainment capital it is ironic that in the city's formative years, a passionate debate was held whether it should even allow any entertainment outlets at all. In an extra irony, the street named after Menahem Shenkin, one of those most opposed to allowing entertainment, has become Tel Aviv's trendiest, coolest street.

It took several years before the first kiosk was allowed to open, and it was only allowed to sell cold soda water. The kiosk is still there, at the bottom end of Rothschild Boulevard, but now, in keeping with Tel Aviv's image of itself, it is an outlet for a trendy coffee shop chain, although it still sells soda water by the cup.

But is no longer a focal point, but merely one of a plethora of kiosks, most of which are open 24 hours, in keeping with Tel Aviv's (self-awarded) description as "the city which never sleeps."

That is just one of the nicknames they city's residents and municipality have tried. They city also bills itself as "The Big Orange," a somewhat self-conscious play on New York's "big apple" moniker, combined with Jaffa oranges which were exported from what is today a suburb of Tel Aviv.

Other names used to refer to the city, with varying success and accuracy, include "the little apple," "Israel's Soho," and "Tel Hanut" -the "city of shops," this last given by disapproving Zionist pioneers aghast at the supposed emergence of luxury at the expense of pioneering socialist principles.

The Tel Aviv municipality also came up with the name of "The White City", to mark the fact that it is home to the largest number of Bauhaus and International Style buildings in the world, courtesy of Jewish architects who fled Germany in the 1930s and who, in a act of poetic justice, ensured that an architectural style banned by Adolf Hitler would flourish in the Jewish state.

The nicknames given to Tel Aviv are perhaps unintentionally symbolic of the fact that when the city was founded, it was not intended to expand into a metropolis, nor was it called Tel Aviv.

On April 11, 1909, several dozen families from Jaffa gathered on the sand dune north of the ancient port to allocate land for a new neighbourhood. Unable to decide how to parcel out the plot, they held a lottery, gathering white sea shells on which the names of the families were written, and grey sea shells, on which the plots of land were numbered.

The shells were paired and the new neighbourhood began.

At first they called it "Ahuzat Bayit", which translates, unimaginatively, as "Housing Property', but within six months the residents were debating a new name.

By a five vote majority, they decided on "Tel Aviv", the translated title given to "Altneuland" (old-new land), a book by Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism.

British officials who ruled Palestine under a Mandate from the League of Nations, granted the Tel Aviv formal self-governance in 1921, following several clashes between Arabs and Jews in Jaffa.

The city's local council hurriedly declared Tel Aviv a city, even though it comprised just a few streets and piles of deep sand.

Revelling in its status as "the first Hebrew city in 2,000 years", Tel Aviv was a stop on the itinerary of any visiting dignitary, although the visits did not always pass without embarrassment.

In 1921, Winston Churchill, then British Colonial Secretary, paid a visit. Tel Aviv was already decked out with flags, flowers and a red carpet for the occasion, but the welcoming committee went one step further, cutting down trees and sticking them in the sand.

Unfortunately, the pressure of the crowds as Churchill drove by caused the trees to fall down, displaying their severed roots, and leading Churchill to roar with laughter and tell Mayor Meir Dizengoff that "without roots, you will grow nothing here."

By the Tel Aviv municipality's own admission, the city's "truce development" took off after Scottish urban planner Sir Patrick Geddes presented his vision of how the city should look.

Very little remains of Geddes' concept of Tel Aviv as a garden city. Mass immigration to the city and the concomitant need to build housing as quickly as possible led Tel Aviv to sprawl northwards and southwards, to incorporate Jaffa, today forming a huge conurbation with other cities and towns.

Yet within its municipal boundaries, it retains its identity - not the identity its founders had forseen, perhaps, but something in many ways different to the rest of the country, bustling, expensive, hedonistic.

And like every large city, it has its problems, from a high cost of living- it's the 14th most expensive city in the world, and the most expensive in the Middle East, according to one set of data - to traffic congestion ("it takes an Iraqi Scud five minutes to reach Tel Aviv, and one hour to find parking," residents joked cynically when Tel Aviv was targeted by Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War.)

Not everyone is happy with Tel Aviv's image as the "Manhattan of Israel." During the recent mayoral campaign, Mayor Ron Huldai faced a concerted challenge from candidates who complained that he was turning the city into a place in which only the rich could afford to live.

Other residents however, feel that Tel Aviv's drawbacks are the unwelcome price paid for living in a thriving metropolis. .

It was ever thus. The story has it that in Tel Aviv's early days, Chaim Nachman Bialik, who would go on to become Israel's national poet, had his pocket picked outside a city kiosk.

"At last," he cried on discovering the loss. "Tel Aviv is a normal city."(dpa)