Let the memory live again: a trip through time as Sea Point's Ritz Hotel changes hands

IOL News

7 hours ago

The Ritz Hotel in Sea Point was sold this week. The new owners OKU Hotels buy not only a building but also over 50 years of memories.
Image: Armand Hough
"Memory, All alone in the moonlight, I can dream of the old days, Life was beautiful then, I remember, The time I knew what happiness was, Let the memory live again..."
It was the 80s, just before Nelson Mandela was released from prison, close to the time of the-then apartheid president PW Botha's Rubicon speech, and about a decade before South Africa held its first democratic elections.
Despite what it looked like on the outside, the wheels were moving, and the country was on its way to freedom.
The Ritz Hotel Cape Town - a building from the 70s - still had all its glitz, a 'to-die-for' penthouse and some murder and mayhem.
And Brian van Hansen was on piano.
The restaurant was revolving and it was the talk of the town.
Brian van Hansen playing the piano at the Top of the Ritz in the 80s.
Image: Supplied
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Guests, dressed up, still smoked cigarettes and cigars indoors, and dined amid flickering candles, tuxedos and silky gowns at the Top of the Ritz, the name of the revolving restaurant where desserts flambéed dramatically at tables, recalls Van Hansen.
It was all high-end, plush and - of course - it was the 80s so there was a bit of kitsch, he recalls.
"Everyone wanted to go to the Top of the Ritz. It was the place to see and be seen. In advertising they used the fact that they had a resident pianist to attract visitors. They were great days,' says Van Hansen.
Today, the Ritz is a far cry from the days Van Hansen remembers.
@iolnews
The Ritz Hotel is up for sale. This derelict Sea Point landmark has turned from icon, to eyesore in recent years. Since the pandemic, illegal occupiers have settled in the top few floors of the once-luxury hotel with breathtaking vistas. But the Revolving Restaurant may still get its turn again. Located on the popular Atlantic Seaboard, the Ritz Hotel Cape Town is on the brink of being sold for R240-300 million to either a Chinese or Russian company. VID: Armand Hough / Independent Newspaperschennal ♬ original sound - IOL NEWS
It sits empty now, a Titanic of sorts in Sea Point. The building was condemned as unfit in 2022 after it was taken over by building hijackers including alleged drug dealers and sex workers during Covid. The hijackers were evicted a few years back after a long and arduous legal battle. Not the first legal battle the owners have had to fight.
Now the only candles seen flickering at the hotel, say surrounding neighbours, is that of the odd unwanted guest who manages to slip past security and make the hotel their home for the night.
This week, Spanish OKU Hotels - known to be one of the trendiest hotel groups internationally - signed the deal to buy the Ritz. It has its headquarters in Ibiza, Spain.
They are a collection of boutique hotels focused on "laidback luxury, targeting modern travelers". OKU Hotels also has properties in other locations such as Bodrum, Turkey. The brand is known for its design-focused yet relaxed spaces.
It has been a long negotiation between owners - the company of the Roffey Hurwitz families - and OKU Hotels, said Bruce Hendricks, MD of Hendricks Harmse Attorneys, one of the representatives of the previous owners and whose company is managing the Ritz Hotel building.
New owners
OKU Hotels is known for their imagination - for going into a more rundown part of town and becoming the most high-end hotel in the area.
In OKU Ibiza they've done just that. Their hotel there, while unaffordable to the average traveller, has high occupancy but is also built in an area that's more - well - 'casual'.
Their Cape Town acquisition - believed to be about R300 million - would have been something the late Barney Hurwitz - who owned the hotel before his death in 2017 - wanted.
During a court case with Nicky van de Walt's company who had leased the hotel to jhooz it up in 2016 but then had to lawfully vacate it when they didn't pay rent, Hurwitz insisted the Ritz deserved 'a brand, not just some fly-by-night operation".
Left: During the revamp and soft opening era of 2017/2018. Right: how it looks today.
Image: Supplied
The news of OKU Hotels acquisition was this week met with bewilderment.
'I can't possibly imagine what they'll do with the Ritz. It doesn't seem like an OKU vibe,' said one local.
Can OKU Hotels turn the Ritz' poolside (right) into the magic they have created in Ibiza (left)....?
Image: Instagram and Armand Hough
But maybe they're forgetting the Ritz in its heyday. The days when Van Hansen, donned in tuxedo, would tickle the ivories.
'In those days our manager would go do the whole flambée thing at the side of the diners' tables. The women were petrified that their hair-sprayed big hairdos would go up in flames so they always made sure to move away from the performance.'
Play us a song
From his angle at the piano, Brian saw it all for the 11 years he played at the Top of the Ritz.
Today, Van Hansen, who has made a career of being the pianist at the city's best hotels, can be seen playing at the exclusive One and Only Hotel while the city's other top-end hotel, Table Bay Hotel - where he is resident pianist - gets a revamp.
The Top of the Ritz piano, 40 years ago, was at the entrance of the restaurant so it didn't move. In effect the restaurant revolved around Van Hansen and the piano, later painted blue - and of course the views, possibly the best in the area.
"I had an ashtray and a cigarette at the ready near my piano," remembers Van Hansen.'When people passed me as the floor revolved - once every 45 minutes - they would light it up for me. There was also a big box where they could put in requests for songs, when it landed at me I would pick out a request.
Brian Hansen at the Ritz Hotel in the 80s.
Image: Supplied
"I played 'Memories' on most nights. It was the most requested. And of course if I saw a woman wearing red I always played 'Lady in Red' - they always smiled at me when they realised it was about them.
'The food was exquisite - top end,' recalls Hansen.
A walk through the empty hotel this past week with security guard Asive Kantyi revealed anything but glamour.
Inside the Ritz today
The only remnants of a meal at the Top of the Ritz was an empty old KFC box at one of the tables and a dead bird in the kitchen, probably flown in through one of the hotel's broken windows.
Almost every floor in the building is at present condemned as unfit and visitors are warned in big writing not to enter certain floors.
There is an eeriness to the hotel - without water and electricity, no working lift, puddles of indoor water and broken stairs.
In Van Hansen's days it also had its own kind of eeriness: it was then infamous for the amount of suicides that took place in the building.
Van Hansen recalls a sad death at the Ritz once, when someone fell from a high floor. The manager told him: "Don't look out the window and whatever happens keep playing the piano."
And then there was the axe murder in room 1803. "It was a chilling thing, but as always the music had to go on,' says Van Hansen.
He reveals how celebrities and sports stars frequented the hotel and restaurant and the popular night clubs on the ground floor during the mid 80s.
'When I had two days off - I couldn't wait to go back. I wanted to know what was happening while I was not there... there was always something."
His one regret, he says, is that when Mandela stayed at the Ritz in 1990 shortly after his release from Victor Verster Prison, he never got to meet him. "I think he was staying in the penthouse. He didn't eat at the Top of Ritz as they kept things low key."
The Ritz owner at the time, the late Barney Hurwitz - whose main business went on to become today's Netcare Hospitals - had in 1948 opened a pharmacy on the corner of High and Bree Streets in Fordsburg in Johannesburg. During that time it was reported that he befriended anti-apartheid activist Yusuf Dadoo.
When Dadoo, Nelson Mandela and Ahmed Kathrada, were on the run from the security police, Hurwitz took them in and hid them behind a showcase in his shop, until it was safe to emerge.
So it seemed fitting that in 1990, it was Hurwitz's Ritz - a place that Mandela could see from Robben Island - that housed Madiba for a few months after his release from prison.
A place where dreams are made
Van Hansen says it was the Ritz Hotel that got him on his journey as a professional hotel pianist - and it was all because of a conversation he overheard on Clifton beach one day.
'I was just 21, fresh out of compulsory army service, when I was on Clifton beach and overheard two people discussing how the Protea group had taken over the Ritz and they were looking for a pianist.
"I didn't even wait to think. I grabbed my towel and ran to the nearest public phone and called the hotel and offered my services… the rest is history.'
The Ritz certainly has been a place where dreams were made and where they were broken.
One thing is for sure OKU Hotels has not just bought a building.They've bought memories too.
Cape Town looks forward to see how this Spanish-based hotel group will be "puttin' on the Ritz".
"If you're blue, and you don't know where to go to, Why don't you go where fashion sits? Puttin' on the Ritz."
Watch this space.
Read the Weekend Argus on Saturday