PHANTOM HOTEL
South Africa’s grandest stopover of the ’70s and ’80s has stood empty for 16 years. Carlos Amato hunts for a pulse
THE Carlton Hotel hasn’t checked in a living guest since 1997. But somewhere in the tower right now, a swanky zombie is calling room service and getting no answer. In other respects, the Carlton’s facilities for spectral or undead tourists are world-class. Where else can you wander 32 floors of inky darkness, with easy access to the nightlife of downtown Johannesburg?
It makes no sense, but it also makes perfect sense, that South Africa’s grandest hotel of the ’70s and ’80s has stood empty for the past 16 years. The Carlton has become a cenotaph to the twisted opulence of mid-apartheid Joburg.
Standing 119m tall in its socks, the dead hotel is a wormhole to another city and another country. It was raised between 1966 and 1972, during the fever of the gold boom, when Sandton was rustic and white rule seemed immortal. It might as well be a ziggurat.
By some accounts, the bronze-tinted mirrors that lined the famous ballroom are still in place, eyeballing each other through the shuttered gloom and thinking about that summer night in ’94 when they reflected the satin-gloved arms of Whitney Houston.
Some say a flock of Vegas-esque chandeliers hovers above the ballroom, jonesing for voltage. A grand piano may or may not hibernate in the foyer, dreaming wet dreams about living fingers.
I can’t confirm all this, because Transnet, which owns the joint, would rather I didn’t snoop around. The other day I sent the parastatal’s property mandarins a request for comment on the future of the building, and also asked nicely for a chance to peek at the interior.
The reply was a lesson in taut prose to all bureaucrats: “Dear Carlos, I am sorry to inform you that your permission was not granted.” That was it. No offers of placatory, useless information. No referrals to higher gatekeepers. Just no. Voetsek . Apparently the blanket ban is a recent thing, after an officially sanctioned visitor was slightly injured while inside the building.
The truth is that Transnet’s chieftains don’t really give a hoot about the hotel, partly because the parastatal paid so little for the whole complex. By writing a cheque for R33-million — a fraction of its real value at the time — Transnet took it off the hands of a desperate Anglo American back in 1997, when the city seemed to be decaying irreversibly into anarchy.
When Anglo American bankrolled the construction of the complex, it spent R23-million — equivalent to somewhere north of R1-billion today. The renowned US architectural firm that designed it — Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) — was and remains the pharaoh of the elite skyscraper business. The Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, is its biggest erection to date.
So it was an epic property coup for Transnet: the company bagged nearly 7 hectares of A-grade office space for its headquarters, an expanse rivalling all the comparable stock in Sandton. In 2007, then CEO Maria Ramos wanted to shed non-core assets and had the complex valued at R2.5billion, but a potential buyer backed off when the financial crisis hit.
Insiders say Transnet’s bigwigs are not keen on having anything but a luxury hotel on their doorstep — they’d rather it was serenely empty than crammed with working people. A similar snootiness has deterred luxury developers: there’s too much poverty in the CBD to rouse their avarice.
Retail business is brisk in the adjoining Carlton Centre basement mall, so a
WHITNEY, JAGGER, HILLARY AND THATCHER CRASHED THERE
mixed-income apartment block might be a viable proposition for a ballsy developer. But how many such investors have the ready cash — as much as R1-billion — required to refurbish a 600-room brutalist palace, let alone buy it?
Johannesburg architect Brian McKechnie says the idea of a superblock between Commissioner and Main streets, with a plaza commanding dizzying views of the two towers, was to echo the vaulting grandeur of New York’s Rockefeller Centre. (An ugly perspex-and-steel roof over the plaza, added later to shelter the retail mall, pretty much ruined the effect.)
“The hotel is a classic example of an SOM style, particularly the upside-down Y shape,” says McKechnie. “There’s an SOM building on Bryant Park in New York called the WR Grace that is almost indistinguishable from the Carlton.”
Veteran architectural historian Clive Chipkin remembers being gobsmacked when he first saw the designs commissioned by Anglo American. The sheer scale of the complex promised to be a game-changer. “It was out of all proportion to the whole city. It was a monster.
“They intended to have a whole series of modern skyscrapers around it, but then something went wrong with Johannesburg. The Soweto uprising in 1976 shook the state, but Joburg was
already changing, even without political events. Because it’s an American type of city, it was decentralising. There wasn’t enough parking in the CBD — there was only street parking. And by the ’80s, the area didn’t have much life.”
McKechnie says the Carlton project may itself have decentralised the city. “Anglo American’s vision in building the Carlton complex was to lure Johannesburg’s big money eastward, away from the financial district,” he says. “It never quite worked and, in a way, it was the death knell for the city. The Carlton was too far from the banks and the other financial giants, so it was always difficult for the big corporates who did move in. Eventually KPMG moved out, and then Anglo left.”
But the hotel was undimmed throughout its life. It was a teeming vertical town, serving 600 breakfasts every morning. An ice rink topped the parking basement, across Main Street, and a swimming pool sparkled on the roof, protected from thunderstorms by a retractable shelter.
The Carlton boasted six restaurants — including the renowned Three Ships — and employed 1 200 people at its mid-’70s peak. Their elite ranks included a platoon of expatriate Germans and Swiss, notably the giant executive chef Wolfgang Leyrer, who now lives in the Cape winelands and gives tough love to hospitality companies who hope to achieve the Carlton’s standards of service.
Less uptight was a 17-year-old room-service telephonist from Northern Ireland called Tim Ecott, now a successful writer.
In Stealing Water, Ecott’s memoir of his stint in early-’80s Joburg with his semi-criminal mum, he recounts his Carlton days with wry pleasure. He fell in lust with an alabaster-skinned Swiss waitress and sent coffee and booze to sanctions-busting stars such as Sylvia Kristel, of soft-porn series Emmanuelle fame, and Patrick Duffy, aka Bobby Ewing in Dallas.
Ecott once paid a brief visit to the room of legendary Russian tennis lunatic Ilie Nastase, “in a yellow Hawaiian shirt, flanked by two young, attractive women, his arms clutched around their waists”. Nastase invited him to stick around but he skedaddled.
Thanks to his velvety Irish tones and his knack for intimate small talk, Ecott got many nocturnal invitations to guests’ rooms, notably from a rampant cougar called Mrs Apfelschimmel, who threatened to get him fired if he didn’t come up to the 17th floor and bonk her. He refused but it’s safe to assume that many other staff-guest interactions were butt naked.
The Carlton radiated glamour. Limousines would drift along Main Street like ships, disgorging the rich and the beautiful into the custody of doormen in tailcoats manning the
porte-cochère . The cosmopolitan atmosphere was heightened by the Carlton’s exemption from the dead hand of petty apartheid — the loophole being its status as an “international hotel”, operated by an American chain, Western International, now Westin.
So Jesse Jackson was a guest in 1979, and many other black American politicians, journalists and entertainers patronised it. But former staffers can’t remember serving any black South African guests, barring the odd Bantustan politician. Defiant black millionaires of the era, such as Richard Maponya, had their own Soweto mansions in which to crash.
When the transition to freedom came, the Carlton retained its mystique, despite the downtown crime wave. The ANC’s 1994 election-victory bash was held there. Whitney, Mick Jagger, Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher crashed there. Mbongeni Ngema name-checked the complex in his mbaqanga classic S’timela saze Zola.
So will a pulse ever return to the Carlton? That depends on the economic future of the CBD and by extension on the quality of the leadership in the Union Buildings. Mayor Parks Tau wants to lure new corporate investment and middle-class residents by making the downtown streets clean and
MRS APFELSCHIMMEL THREATENED TO GET HIM FIRED IF HE DIDN’T COME UP TO THE 17TH FLOOR AND BONK HER
pedestrian-friendly: last month’s purge of informal traders was a crude, violent and ill-planned attempt to do that. The Maboneng Precinct, east of the Carlton, offers a gentler model for gentrification: a creeping fungus of hipster enterprise.
The thing is, no matter how sweetly you approach the inconvenient underclass, they will not go away. And Johannesburg’s wanky official fantasy of being a “world-class city” can only ever be realised at ground level: in classrooms, charge offices and maternity wards. Glittering skyscrapers are just holographs of urban power. At best, they are by-products of progress; they are not progress itself.
But still. If and when Joburg ever becomes a “world-class city”, it could do worse than light up the Carlton Hotel.