Citichat November 2009

November 2009

Ending the year in elation and despair.

On the last Saturday of October, I took a 6 hour stroll through the inner city basically from Newtown to Ellis Park. Wow! The progress overall has been quite startling. If you want to really see a city, by foot is always best. At ground level you always get such a better perspective. (Back in 1992 my favourite view of the inner city was in a passing plane from 3 000 metres up in the sky!) How that has changed in 17 years - you can now walk with confidence and pride through a pulsating, living, bustling city and see something new happening on just about every corner. Sure, the sinkholes have got more familiar and many of our citizens (and city officials) don’t seem to care, but the overall metamorphosis has been extraordinary and both public and private sectors can take a bow.

I went along a specific route which is the one that developed for taking folks to see what is really happening in the inner city. This time, on my own, I had time for lots of side forays, and took a couple of hundred pics along the way. I reckon one could quite comfortably double or triple that number if one criss-crossed the inner city but I wanted to record a specific route. The reason was to finalise a “Manual for Teaching Tour Guides” which  Urban Inc was appointed to do for the JDA.  Amongst other things, it records regeneration that has taken place along the route over the past ten something years. A decade ago the tour was quite short consisting of me saying to skeptical groups “this is what we are going to do!” and getting the “Ja, right!” kind of look on many disbelieving faces. By contrast, tours over the past two to three years have been three-and-a-half to four hours and it is now a case of what to leave out rather than what to include in the time!

Seeing the sheer volume of work accomplished in the past decade makes me think back to an ad I saw in New York when it was coming out of its urban struggles years back to the effect that “this city has been labeled dead for so many years by so many people that no-one saw that the patient had recovered and is off life-support”. Rather like the local headlines we got for so many years when any firm left the city – “Another nail in the coffin!” – the Joburg coffin was so full of nails that people didn’t realize that there wasn’t a body in there anymore!

But now is a good time for others to take over the fun and exhilaration of sharing with groups of people the achievements of so many over the past decade, the believers, the appassionato, the community workers, the investors with vision beyond this year’s balance sheet, the providers of accommodation and the providers of homes and communities and, of course, the Council.

As part of the Tour Guide Training Manual my colleagues have also catalogued all the public art in the inner city, now some 54 pieces with an estimated installation cost of R18 million.  Another sign that we’re on the up!

So everything in the garden is rosy?

No way, we still have some serious, serious problems!

The first is how quickly the newly upgraded public environment is being allowed to deteriorate. Some of the beautifully restored footways with inset mosaic artworks look drek. One would think that restored sections of the public environment would be targeted for special treatment but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Just the normal once a week, once a month, once a year or never programme (unless we’re having a blitz!)! Sure, a great effort will be put on for 2010 – I actually saw people scraping billposters off poles on my walk-about, reminded me of pre-World Summit preparations in the early 2000s! My friend, Pule, sent me some pics of what has happened to parts of Hillbrow since the R140 million public environment revamp last year. Looks like nothing happened at all, still as shambolic as ever before! The City still relies on special “operations” and “task forces” to “blitz” an area and move on whilst the area slumps to its old form quicker than the blitz that attempted to put it right. I’d love to be privy to the costings of some departments who consistently follow this approach. I’m sure it would be more economical to do it right first time around and then have a consistent follow through. Inter-department strife and competition that duplicates expenditure seems to be the order of the day and then we hear that the city is ‘financially stretched’!

On the Saturday of my jaunt around the city, in the early morning, I came across a traffic light that had been flattened, really flattened like a beer can crushed by a Bafana fan after one of their recent losses – plus lots of glass and a large pool of blood. Obviously an awful accident had taken place. I was in the city again on Monday morning – the glass was gone and the blood had dried up but the pole was still flattened. A world class city would have had the traffic light up and running by the next day, Sunday or not, and the pavement spotless. The ‘new’ refuse bins in some areas in the city have been mangled beyond recognition whilst other have been used as braai bins! Littering remains such a problem – around the Constitutional Court building, in fact around the actual Court section itself, foam plastic fast-food containers and wrappings – imagine taking a group of tourists there and having to talk with pride about this truly great building and what it stands for amongst such detritus. Yet officialdom was quick to stop me wandering into Number Four for five minutes to take a few pictures because I wasn’t prepared to pay for a full tour.

A warm and welcoming attitude and attention to detail is sorely lacking – yes, someone will hopefully teach it to the 2010 ambassadors but what about the officials who come into contact with the public all the time? Are we going to stop our tourists from taking pictures of the old City Hall because it is a Government building or the ruins of the Rissik Street Post Office. Instead they should be offering to take pictures of the visitors in front of the buildings, well maybe not the RPO in its present state!

How does one, as a member of the public and a ratepayer, get someone on the City’s budget committee to provide funding so that departments and agencies are forced into providing for ongoing support and maintenance of capital works? Have you visited the Drill Hall lately. It took innumerable fires and at least five deaths for Public Works to hand over the gutted building to the Council. Then it took R10 million to put it back into a practical and usable state – since then, now 5 years on, I don’t believe a further cent has been provided for maintenance or support of the non-profits who utilise the space. This is just plain stupid! We’ll end with a building that needs R20 million to get into shape again and the whole cycle will repeat itself. Or maybe we’ll have a ‘blitz’ to sort out the area and then leave it for another five years.      

Inevitably that all leads me to the Rissik Street Post Office. I’m sure that most of what should be said has been said and repeated ad nauseam in the media. But I’m going to have my say anyway – at first I was shocked and  dismayed but now I am really frustrated and angry.

Does anyone in Council who sits on Braamfontein Hill have any idea, of the value of the Rissik Street Post Office to the City, or even care? Is anyone there aware that, as was written some years back by an expert in city buildings -  “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.”

Sure it represents colonialism and apartheid, but that is the unfortunate history from where we come and the history of the Rissik Street Post Office is synonomous with that of the City.

When Cape Town was in its initial establishment phase (mid-to late-1600s) there were post office ‘stones’ and trees under which letters were left for collection and/or onward movement. When Johannesburg’s postal service started two centuries later it was with the appointment of A.B.Edgson as the first postal agent for the city. He ran 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. Rumour has it, that materials destined for the two projects were surreptitiously dropped off delivery wagons as they rode past Meischke’s personal site in Market Street on there way  to the other two projects.

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.”

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!).”

The clock in the clock tower was made by Gillett & Johnston in Croydon and shipped to South Africa early last century. Its largest bell, named “Little Evelyn” weighing in at 1050 kg, was an exact replica of the smallest bell in London’s Big Ben of which the Rissik Street clock is an exact replica in miniature – absolutely unique! For nearly eighty years, three times a week two apprentices spent the better part of a morning winding the three weights of 225kg; 293kg and 360 kg for the clock movement; hour and quarter hour strike respectively. On two occasions in the past (1936 and 1952) a weight fell due to overwinding, crashing through two floors and landing in the main foyer. In 1980 the winding mechanism was automated, a concrete slab cast under the clock  to avoid such accidents (a similar one in Big Ben is 5 metres thick!) and the four light bulbs illuminating the clock face replaced with 16 neon tubes.

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 was 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.”

In 1994 the Central Johannesburg Partnership (CJP) proposed to the new 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, largely unused from when the council had moved to the ‘hill’ in the 1970s. It could be altered to house the Provincial Legislature whilst the Rissik Street Post Office 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, 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 by that time. The money clearly was never enough but must have got absorbed into the previous Council’s funds and was never spent on the building! I think that was criminal and tantamount to fraud.

It now took the new Council four years to agree on the future of the building and, in 1998, 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 skeptical of both the proposers and the proposal as well as of the feasibility of turning the building into a hotel at that cost. At one meeting with council when I and others raised our concerns, we were slapped down and told that we were just being negative! The deal produced nothing other than to block all other possibilities for a number of years and was finally cancelled. Local Government were thus responsible for further years of neglect.

This was not the first time that Council had let genuine possibilities pass them by whilst they went off into cloud cuckoo land! The history of Turbine Square reflects the same irrationality. In the meantime the building was slowly succumbing to lack of care and maintenance and massive pilferage and theft. The clock was stolen and probably melted down for sale as scrap metal (Citichat 28 of 19 July 2002) and everything of value was systematically pilfered, from brass window fittings and door handles to 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. And it was also not just that parts of the building were 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! The building was surely being held in trust by the Council on behalf of its citizens but appeared to be quite happy to look the other way.

The City then put out another proposal call for the re-development of the building through the Johannesburg Property Company (JPC) and, I understand, received some very good commercial proposals including retail, hotel and commercial uses. However the City were evidently politically heavily ‘leaned on’ and the building was ‘sold’ to the Gauteng Provincial Legislature for something like R25 million. No money changed hands nor did the Legislature have the money to pay for their purchase let alone the cost of refurbishing the building. During this time period I was approached by highly reputable hotel developers and operators who were prepared to put R100 million into the restoration and rebuilding of the building – the answer was that there was a commitment to the Provincial Legislature – to hell with commercial solutions! The Legislature, of course, had never submitted any offer in competition with the private sector who had spent a great deal of money in preparing their proposals in good faith. This under the counter horse trading between different levels of government is immoral, its legality cloaked in unacceptable inter-government levels legislation but, at the end of the day, the financial implications are borne by the rate payers.  

In the meantime the building was ‘secured’ by the Council (after most of the valuable bits of it had been stolen!), a fence erected around it,  and the windows were blocked over with metal sheets and the clock tower wrapped in plastic sheeting to prevent water ingress. Having done that, the Council showed no further interest in the building - the wrapping of the clock tower eventually became loose, vagrants broke through the metal closures and the building continued to crumble and be systematically stripped. A lone security guard appears to have dozed permanently in a hut on the site whilst all this was going on.

In 2008 the Gauteng Legislature advised that they intended proceeding with a massive refurbishment of the building as offices for themselves as well as space in the old postal hall for public consultation usage, etc. In addition they proposed building an eight storey office building on Oppenheimer Park – fortunately for them, that proposal was quickly scrapped. The big question-mark in relation to the Rissik Street Post Office was when this planned refurbishment would happen? Because the then Legislature was nearing the end of its term, there was a reluctance to commit the incoming Legislature to such plans and, the Legislature didn’t have the money anyway. This decision making process is totally beyond me.

A few months back a fire broke out in the building – damage was said to be minimal and the cause was given as the sun’s rays acting on the glass of one of the windows – the building had stood for over a hundred years and this phenomenon had never happened previously – what a load of drivel we are fed!

So in mid 2009, after 13 or fourteen years of sporadic half hearted false starts, this fire evidently prompted the Council to do something and the Johannesburg Property Company put out a fresh call for proposals. These were due to have been adjudicated on Monday 2hd of November. The building was gutted by fire on the night of the 1st November. The Johannesburg Property Company removed their security guards from the 31st October! Witnesses to the fire claimed that their calls to Emergency Services went unanswered for at least three hours and a fire engine finally arrived an hour after the blaze had started. Question, the Central Fire Station is half-a-dozen blocks away from the building or is it unmanned?

The Council have announced that there will be an internal enquiry the results of which will be made public. I assume that means that are are going to be given some cooked up reasons just for the fire and nothing as to culpability for the neglect and disinterest that led to it. I don’t want to know that persons unknown started a fire to warm themselves and it got out of control – I want to know why there were no security guards, why was nothing effective ever done to protect the building from vandalism, why has it taken the Council nearly 20 years and a fire to put the Rissik Street Oost Office on their agenda?  

Meanwhile there is another joker in the pack who must be found equally culpable of neglect. The South African Heritage Resources Agency was established in tems of the South African Heritage Resources Act, 1999 the preamble to which states that the Act “aims to promote good management of the national estate and encourage communities to nurture and conserve their legacy so that it may be bequeathed to future generations.”

That’s a laugh isn’t it.

The General Principles for heritage management set out in the Act require that, 5(1)  “all authorities, bodies and persons performing functions and exercising powers in terms of this Act for the management of heritage resources must recognise the following principles
(a) Heritage resources have lasting value in their own right and provide evidence of the origins of South African society and as they are valuable, finite, non-renewable and irreplaceable they must be carefully managed to ensure their survival.

(1)(7) The identification, assessment and management of the heritage resources of South Africa must-

(b) take account of material or cultural heritage value and involve the least possible alteration or loss of it

(e) safeguard the options of present and future generations.

Clause 8(1) of the Act states that “there is a three tier system for heritage resources management, in which national level functions are the responsibility of SAHRA, provincial level functions are the responsibility of provincial heritage resources authorities and local level functions are the responsibility of local authorities. Heritage resource authorities and local authorities are accountable for the actions and decisions and the performance of functions under this discipline”.

This was a declared Historic Monument  yet since the Act became law in 1994, why had the Council not been instructed by the Provincial Heritage authorities to get their house in order as is required in legislation?

In fact, none of the requirements of the Act, nor many others, have evidently been considered nor appropriate action implemented. In terms of the Act, the owner of the building, the Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, and its agency the Johannesburg Property Company, as well as the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) and in particular the Gauteng Provincial Heritage Resources Authority (G-PHRA) are criminally liable for the current situation in that, despite numerous requests to protect this valuable heritage resource, they have allowed the situation to develop to the extent that a fire has destroyed much of the architectural heritage of this historic structure.

Letters have been written to the Mayor and the Director of the Provincial Heritage authority collectively by the city’s heritage organisations requesting amongst other things that a PUBLiC enquiry be conducted with an independent assessor and a statement be made to the effect that the ruins of the building will not be demolished but restored.  To date no replies have been received.

What do citizens, ratepayers, civil society itself, do when such unacceptable situations arise through neglect by our very government? What does one do when those who are supposed to uphold the law of the land, treat it with disdain? There appears to be only one avenue left to those who have the interests of the city at heart and that is to call for a criminal investigation, after all it is the law that has been ignored, the law that was promulgated by a democratically elected Government. There appears to be no other solution so you are welcome to join a group of people that love the city when they lay charges against the City and G-PHRA for criminal negligence in regard to the Rissik Street Post Office at the Johannesburg Central Police Station (aka John Vorster Square) at 14h00 on Tuesday 24th November.

Well, with that off my chest, as this is the last Citichat of 2009, may I wish you and yours everything of the best over the festive season and may it be a season of peace and happiness. May 2010 end on a more positive note, cheers  neil

 Neil Fraser who trades as ‘Urban Inc.’ is an urban consultant dedicated to the revitalisation and regeneration of cities and of the inner city of Johannesburg in particular. He can be contacted at (023) 614 3806 or by e-mail at neil@urbaninc.co.za

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