Parkview

In December 2021, the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation and Fran Haslam of Zoo Lake welcomed the installation of a second blue plaque at the Zoo Lake, commemorating the centenary of the Lake. The new plaque, installed on an original giant quartzite rock, gives far greater prominence and visibility to this Johannesburg beauty spot. The Zoo Lake area has been a much loved and well used city green lung for over a century and has always been open to all people.

Blue Plaque installed on the Zoo Lake rocks (Kathy Munro)

The inscription on the blue plaque reads as follows:

In 1890 Eduard Lippert established a forest, known as the Sachsenwald, on part of the farm Braamfontein. Part of this was given to the people of Johannesburg in 1904 for the specific use as a public park and named the Herman Eckstein Park after a leading mining pioneer. In 1906 the City Council built a lake on this section, which was marshland. It immediately became a major attraction...

When Johannesburg’s august Mayor, Harry Graumann (later Sir Harry), welcomed the Duke and Duchess of Connaught on 28 November 1910 he presented the Royal couple – who had come to South Africa to open the first Union Parliament – with a lavish commemorative book. This described the Town Engineer’s duties in terms of roads, parks, gas, electricity provision and other grand projects, but there was not a word about sewage, such were the Edwardian sensitivities to this delicate subject. Yet the disposal of human waste has determined the size and success of cities for millennia. Delta Park owes its existence to the expansion of Johannesburg’s sewage scheme during the 1930s when rural farmland on the outskirts of the city was transformed into the Delta Sewage Disposal Works.

Johannesburg is situated on the Witwatersrand watershed and rivers flow either to the south (into the Klip River, thence into the Vaal River, and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean) or to the north (feeding into the Crocodile River, the Limpopo River and disemboguing into the Indian Ocean). The city is somewhat unusual in always having separated waste-water (including sewage) from storm-water. Until a Town Engineer’s Department was established in 1902 after the South African War, sewage was collected in tarred buckets and removed beyond the town’s boundaries by horse-drawn night-soil carts to be used as fertilizer on neighbouring farms. Naturally, disease was a regular hazard.
             
Between 1902 and 1910 a very large gravity-fed sewage scheme (at...

In the fascinating article below, journalist Lucille Davie explores the history of four landmark Joburg castles. The piece was first published on the City of Johannesburg's website on 23 July 2003. Click here to view more of Davie's work. Unfortunately, in 2018, the Three Castles Building has deteriorated significantly and remains endangered. Local heritage organisations are concerned by the lack of information about the state of the Kensington Castle. They were able to ascertain that the cannon and a brass plaque were stolen a couple of years ago. The Kyalami Castle now belongs to the Church of Scientology.

For a town that started on a dusty, open patch of veld 117 years ago to be able to boast a number of castles seems incredible. But it’s true – Johannesburg has four “castles” around the city and suburbs, the oldest having been built in 1898 and opened by President Paul Kruger, when the town was barely 12 years old and still a rough, raucous place where men believed they would make their fortunes from gold.
 
But don’t expect to see grand, medieval castles that would have housed kings and princesses and knights, with a moat and impressive battlements. Johannesburg’s castles are very modest, two of them are homes with one or two turrets, one is a hotel and conference centre, the other a burnt-out shell of a building, one of its wings operating as a business.
 
The Three Castles Building, Marshall Street
 
The Three Castles Building, on the corner of Marshall and Goud...

In November 1987 members of the Johannesburg Historical Foundation paid a visit to the 'village' of Parkview. I use the word 'village' deliberately because this has always been a friendly suburb with a particular character of its own where I lived as a child and never visit without a feeling of nostalgia. After all, don't street names like Kilkenny, Kerry, Roscommon, Westmeath, Kildare and Wicklow evoke visions of somewhere green as shamrocks, fresh and soft as Irish mist, where the road rises to meet you and the sun shines warm upon your face?

Not all the names are Irish, however - inevitably, as one approaches the golf course, the Scottish influence becomes evident - Kinross, Selkirk, Crieff. The name of the suburb itself came about simply because it had a view of Herman Eckstein park, better known as the Zoo, which had been given to the people of Johannesburg in 1903 by the Wernher, Beit Company in memory of Hermann Eckstein who had died ten years previously.

All of the area had originally been part of the Geldenhuys farm, Braamfontein. Zoo Lake had been the main farm dam, the water coming from the Parktown Spruit, which arose in the Sachsenwald. The hippo pool in the Zoo is at a particularly strong eye of the Spruit.

Zoo Lake (The Heritage Portal)

When it was realised...