Rissik Street Post Office Citichat 13 September 2002

CITICHAT 36/2002 - 13 September 2002


Rissik Street Post Office

The good news is that a small task force has been appointed to look at the refurbishment of and possible uses for the rapidly decaying Rissik Street Post Office. The bad news is that it is not just the clock that has been stolen (Citichat 28 of 19 July 2002) but that everything of value has been systematically pilfered, from brass window fittings and door handles to even some of the wooden flooring and stair balustrades. Whilst the latter has probably been used for firewood, the former must surely have been sold to antique dealers. Sounds like a great opportunity for Carte Blanche to do another expose through their excellent investigative reporting which doesn’t merely end in the perpetrators being apprehended and unscrupulous merchants being exposed, but a greater awareness of these types of crimes being being nationally aired. And then it is also not just that parts of the building have been stolen, I believe that even the plans of the building were removed from the city council by someone who claims to have saved them from the incinerator in the 1970's!

When Cape Town was in its initial establishment phase (mid-to late-1600s) post office ‘stones’ and trees under which letters were left for collection and/or onward movement, Johannesburg’s postal service two centuries later started through the appointment of A.B.Edgson as the first postal agent for the city. He kept a canteen in Ferreira’s Camp and the post was kept, appropriately enough for a mining city, in a gin box! Towards the end of 1886 postal services were introduced three times a week. The addressee’s names were read out from an open window and the public claimed their post! At the end of the first year of this service there were 10 000 unclaimed letters (130 being for the Smith Family!).

In 1888 a single storey government building was erected on the site of the current building and the post office relocated from Ferreira’s Camp into a wing of this new building. The first pillar boxes were erected in 1889 and the first house-to-house deliveries started in 1896 however these were stopped when the Volksraad refused to approve funds to cover the cost of deliveries. In 1887 the first telegraph service was instituted. In 1892 the entire building was made available to the postal services but in 1895 it was vacated so that the building could be demolished whilst the new Post Office was erected. During that time the Post Office relocated to the Goldreich Building in Joubert Street between Fox and Commissioner.

The new three storey building was designed by Sytze Wierda, the state architect for the Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek (ZAR) and construction started in 1896. The contractor was NCA Meischke and the contract price sixty five thousand pounds. Meischke also later built the City Hall directly opposite and to the west of the Post Office.(The building next door to our own building, 90 Market Street, is known as Meische’s Building and, rumour has it, was built from materials surreptitiously dropped off delivery wagons as they rode down Maeket Street to the two building sites!) The corner-stone of the Post office building was laid by the then Postmaster I.N.van Alphen on the 27th February 1897 and the building opened to the public on 1 July 1898. Chipkin’s “Johannesburg Style” reflects the following: “The ZAR architecture of Johannesburg, originally part of the public works programme carried out by a reluctant Boer government, possesses a fascination deriving from its sound architectural qualities as well as from its archeological remoteness. The most prominent example was the Rissik Street Post Office , a wide three storey edifice , which defined the eastern perimeter of the vast Market Square like a nineteenth century version of the Renaissance Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome.

Sytze Wierda, a Hollander, was the engineer-architect who, as head of the Public Works Department “interpreted President Paul Kruger’s “vision of the new Republic”. Wierda’s major work is at the Raadsaal (1890) and the Palace of Justice (!897) both in Pretoria and at the Post Office in Johannesburg. Wierda’s monumental style was Renaissance in context, Francophile in derivation but understandably Netherlandish and north-western European flavour, and formed part of an unacknowledged yet persistent Europeanising process on the Highveld looking not to Victorian England for inspiration but to the nation states of the Continent.” “The routine ZAR buildings designed by the Public Works Department under Sytze Wierda were distinguished by their Dutchness embodying the strong Hollands influence and discipline operating within the Kruger administration in the last decades of he nineteenth century. These facebrick constructions revealed in their details – decorative walling insets, triangular gable forms with Flemish strapwork and pinnacle elaboration, French roof silhouettes – an understated nineteenth century Gothic Provenance. In essence they were good honest brick statements of intent whose modernity derived from underlying Arts and Crafts modes of production.”

After the War and the resultant end of the Transvaal Republic, the accession of King Edward VII in 1902 was commemorated by the addition of a fourth storey to the building. This was on the instructions of the newly appointed Governor of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, Lord Milner. The English architect Wilfred Tonkin was responsible for the design of the new floor and of the clock tower marked with the cypher “E.R.” Arnold Benjamin, “A Lost Johannesburg” wrote of the additions, “Yet the structure familiar to Johannesburgers of today is substantially different from the original 1897 version. The addition of an extra storey in 1905 badly spoiled its looks….that addition unfortunately destroyed the original proportions and replaced the charming variation of the roof line with one that was straight and functional, dominated by a heavy clock tower (and a large square watertank!).”

Many years later an article stated; “Besides the Old fort in Kotze Street, the Rissik street post Office is the only remaining structure of importance built in Johannesburg by the government of the South African Republic. Historically and stylistically it is interestingly counterbalanced by the City hall Complex and together these two buildings also form one of the most important building complexes in the city.”

In 1940 an agreement was entered into between the national government and the city council to the effect that ownership of the land would be transferred to the council and that the government would be responsible for demolishing the building. As a result of strong preservation voices, the Council waived this clause in 1976 and the building was declared a National Monument in 1978. The responsibility for the maintenance of the building remained that of the Post Office in terms of the long term lease agreement which was now entered into between the Post Office and the City. The ‘rental’ was R49 per year! The Post Office despite requests, instructions and threats of court action never fulfilled its obligations in regard to maintenance and the building deteriorated from year to year. In 1993 an editorial in the Star said: “For Johannesburg to think it is worthy or capable of hosting any prestige event, let alone the Olympic Games, is laughable!…..Have a good look at that National Monument, the Rissik Street Post Office. It is literally falling to pieces….instead of being a monument to the past, it is a national disgrace.” Well, the Star was again wrong, this time on one count as the hosting of the World Summit has proved!

In 1994 the Central Johannesburg Partnership (CJP) proposed to the Provincial Government that it relocate from Pretoria to Johannesburg. Two of the city’s buildings which could be utilised by the Provincial Government were identified as the City Hall building which could be altered to house the Provincial Legislature and the Rissik Street Post Office which could be refurbished for the offices of the Premier. Although the City would make the latter building available, it was not in a position to finance the restoration. A private sector consortium was put together by the CJP, the finance raised and a lease deal offered to the Provincial Government. I have never been able to determine exactly why the deal, at a very advanced stage, was turned down although I have heard that there were ‘political pressures’ brought to bear, whatever that might mean! Before the deal was scuppered, the negotiation with the Post Office to cancel their lease and vacate the building had been completed. The deal included a payment to the Council of R3.5 million in compensation for the lack of maintenance that had led to the poor exterior state of the building at that time. The money was never spent.

In 1988 the Council (in the form of the Southern Metropolitan Local Council) called for proposals for the future use of the building. The Council accepted a Malaysian property developer’s proposal to turn the building into a “five star boutique hotel” at a cost of R35 million. A number of people, including myself, were highly sceptical of the proposal as well as of the feasibility of turning the building into a hotel at that cost. At one meeting with council, I was told that I was just being negative! The deal did nothing other than to block all other possibilities for a number of years and was finally cancelled fairly recently.

The building has thus stood empty since 1995 and continues to decay, its demise assisted by vagrants and profiteers as the building has been stripped unhindered over the years. At last a serious attempt is underway to determine the best possible use for the building and the accurate cost of bringing it back into service. Currently it stands as evidence of much bureaucratic bumbling, hopefully the Executive Mayor’s inner city prioritisation is going to change all that and it may again take its place as one of the city’s icons and symbols to its divergent past.

Cheers, neil