Florentin was initially populated primarily by poor Sephardic Jewish immigrants from North Africa, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, and Bukhara.

[4] The land was purchased in the 1920s by the Salonika-Palestine Investment Company, founded in 1921 by Jews in Salonika to develop commercial relations with Jewish settlements in Palestine.

After World War I , compounding the effects of the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917 in which the city's Jewish quarter was destroyed, along with 12,000 homes, leaving over 70,000 homeless people.

In 1924, the Salonika-Palestine Company sent an envoy to Palestine to purchase land in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv's Herzl Street, in an area bordering Neveh Tzedek and Ahuzat Bayit that was close to the Jaffa-Jerusalem railroad.

[6] Today, the area is still also an industrial zone and a garment district, where both Jewish and Arab wholesalers buy and sell clothing and furniture.

[4] In 1933, the Jaffa Municipality allowed shops and light industries to be opened on the ground floors of the new residential buildings, providing a source of income for the wave of immigrants settling in Palestine at the time.

[5] An urban renewal campaign sponsored by the Tel Aviv municipality in the 1990s led to a revival of the area, which has become a popular night spot.