The origins of the Bukharan Quarter, originally called Rehovot, were quite different from those of Jerusalem’s other early residential neighborhoods. To begin with, it was fully planned. Then, in contrast to the poorer Jews from Eastern Europe whose building aspirations were financed mainly by Jews from abroad, wealthy Jews from Bukhara, Samarkand and Tashkent built mansions for themselves, some of them "summer homes."

The first immigrants from these cities - in what is today Uzbekistan - arrived in Jerusalem in the 1870s and 1880s. They bought the land for their houses and employed Conrad Schick to plan the quarter. The 1891 Code of Ordinances of the Hovevei Zion Association of the Jewish communities of Bukhara, Samarkand and Tashkent stated that: "...the streets and marketplaces [are to be] built as in important European cities, and the arrangement and style of building should follow European practice, that the quarter become a proud part of Jerusalem."

And so it was: the quarter was built with wide streets (three times the width of the broadest thoroughfares in Jerusalem at the time), spacious family homes and large courtyards. German, Italian and Muslim influences marked the houses: there were neo-Gothic windows, European tiled roofs, New-Moorish arches and Italian marble. Jewish motifs such as the Star of David and Hebrew letters decorated the facades. The buildings were mostly asymmetrical, commensurate with the residents’ belief that perfection belongs to God alone.

Construction of the quarter stretched from 1891 to the early 1950s; altogether, some 200 houses were built. During World War I, the Turkish army requisitioned a number of buildings and cut down all the trees in the area. After the Russian Revolution, these Jerusalemites were suddenly cut off from their relatives abroad, who had been running their businesses and sending them funds. Many residents, in financial straits, had to let parts of their homes.

At the war’s end, some of Jerusalem’s leaders made their home in this neighborhood: Itzhak Ben-Zvi (later Israel’s second President); Moshe Sharett (later Israel’s first Minister of Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister); and historian Jacob Klausner.

The most elegant house in the quarter is Beit Yehudayoff, known as Ha’armon (The Palace), erected in 1907. The facade is reminiscent of the 17th century Capitolina Museum in Rome, its walls marble-faced. In this splendid house, the Messiah was to be greeted on his arrival. So far, its stones have witnessed more mundane events. During World War I the Turkish army used the building as its headquarters, and, upon the British victory, the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish community of Jerusalem held a festive reception there for British General Allenby. Today the building, as others in the quarter, is somewhat run-down; it houses two religious schools for girls.