[imagesource: Twitter/askashbroker]

Once upon a time, a famous Sea Point hotel was known for its innovative design, including its revolving restaurant, giving patrons a 360-degree view of the city.

That UFO-shaped restaurant still crowns The Ritz today, marking the iconic location for all to see…and remember its fall from grace. Now the hotel remains dusty and abandoned, merely housing memories of its heyday, including wild parties in the 80s, along with a couple of ghosts of the people who died there.

Property broker Ash Müller shared some interesting details on the “real story” of the once-glitz hotel in Cape Town on her LinkedIn and Twitter pages.

The real story about the once-glitz hotel in Cape Town – ✨The Ritz✨

🏨 Storeys: 23
🏨 Height: 80m
🏨 Penthouses: 2
🏨 Hotel rooms: 213
🏨 Year construction ended: 1970
🏨 Location: The Ritz Hotel, corner of Main & Camberwell Roads, Sea Point, #CapeTown, #SouthAfrica

This was… pic.twitter.com/wPpPwFtVxm

— Ash Müller (@askashbroker) November 24, 2023

She noted how the hotel started in the 1970s, going on to win many awards for how it was constructed. It was an innovative hotel for its time as it was built in a modular form, meaning the bathrooms and bedrooms were all prebuilt off-site and dropped in one by one from the top of the hotel.

This is what The Ritz originally looked like before it was converted into a 23-storey hotel:

At the time, the hotel was owned by Barney Hurwitz, a pharmaceutical company tycoon who contracted Protea Hotels in the mid-80s to manage, market and administrate The Ritz for many years. The hotel shot to success pretty soon, welcoming a plethora of celebrities and sports stars who also enjoyed the hotel’s popular night clubs – Paschas and In-Excess to name a few, which were on the ground floor and basement, respectively, during the mid-80s.

Nelson Mandela was one of the guests who stayed at The Ritz sometime after his release from Victor Verster Prison in 1990. Ash notes that during his 2.5-month stay, the hotel manager at the time told her that he was the only guest that he ever encountered who would make up his own bed and clean his own room every day.

“He also mentioned that Mr Mandela would go for a walk outside on the Sea Point promenade every morning at 4:30am, accompanied by his security. When Mr Mandela would return from his walks, he would have tea with the hotel manager. He would tell him how The Ritz was the one building that he could always see above the skyline from Robben Island and how sitting in The Ritz and looking back at Robben Island was fascinating for him.”

That must have been quite a turn in perspective for the Apartheid hero.

Then, in 1989 – 1994, Bernard MD Cassar joined the Protea Hotels board of directors and became a shareholder. He mentioned to Ash that during his time as the General Manager, the hotel was running in excess of 80% room occupancy. He said there was even a weekend stay special where hotel guests would pay R19.50 for the entire weekend. Good grief, that makes inflation look disgusting right about now.

While the famous revolving fine-dining restaurant at the top of the hotel, which made a full rotation every hour, called the ‘Top of The Ritz’, put this hotel on the map, The Ritz was also on the front page of South African newspapers for seven days straight thanks to a terrible occurrence that took place in one of the rooms.

IOL notes how a man named Wynand Van Wyk was beaten to death by an unknown assailant in 1993. It is this axe murder that took place in room 1803 that dominated national headlines for several days at the time and added a rather creepy twist to the hotel’s iconic status.

Van Wyk’s is not the only ghost to haunt the once glam halls of The Ritz, as some guests were also reported to have jumped out of the hotel bathroom windows, falling 21 stories down to their deaths.

“For many years, this hotel was infamous for the amount of suicides that took place in the building,” added Müller.

In 2014, The Ritz hotel was renovated and in 2006, it was refurbished, which is when Cape Town’s only revolving restaurant re-opened. Something must have happened to stop that because skip to 2016 when celebrity couple Nicky van der Walt and Lee-Ann Liebenberg injected a substantial amount of pocket money into the hotel in an effort to reopen it properly.

Ash said they planned to transform the hotel by investing R110 million into hotel renovations, hoping to revive the top-floor restaurant, renamed Casa, with the head chef set to be Cape Town’s well-loved, Bertus Basson. The hotel was going to have its own nightclub where Nicky says Black Coffee would perform. There was also going to be an exclusive Dom Perignon Champagne Lounge.

Nicky’s hotel management company signed a 20-year lease agreement and rental for the building was R1.3 million per month.

However, the reopening did not happen.

After a soft launch with media, including a swanky opening party, the Cape Town High Court ruled Nicky’s management company had displayed “chutzpah of the first order” by occupying the Sea Point hotel since March 2017 without paying a cent to Ritz Plaza‚ which owned the property. They were thus ordered to vacate the landmark building.

Some shots of the room, pool and restaurant renovations that Nicky van der Walt’s management company did. The hotel’s interior would still look like this as it has not been touched since. pic.twitter.com/4YsjaGynfo

— Ash Müller (@askashbroker) November 24, 2023

More recently, Nicky van der Walt is said to own and operate the award-winning TANG restaurants, with one in Johannesburg and another at the V&A Waterfront.

As for The Ritz – it has been closed and left semi-abandoned since 2018.

The building is owned by Ritz Plaza (Proprietary) Limited – a family-controlled entity – and is currently allowing a couple of retail shops to operate on the ground floor while the rest of the hotel remains completely empty.

[source:iol]