When it first opened in 1973, Sandton City had a Gross Lettable Area of 50 000 square metres, 120 stores over four levels and 2 500 parking bays.
Sandton’s director of Urban Planning and Development, Barry Briston said in support of an upgrade in development 1981, “It appears that ideas put forward 14 years ago for the town centre were realistic and that Sandton City has proved its worth as a nucleus of the town’s development.”
The Sandton City Office Tower consisted of 21 levels and 25 000 square metres Gross Lettable Area (GLA) according to Mel Urdang, Liberty properties retail director.
Urdang explains that in 1971 was busy with the final stages of planning and construction was about to begin.
Major tenants including OK Bazaar, John Orrs and Stuttafords had already been leased as had a number of banks.
Rapp attended the spring International Council of Shopping Centres conference in the USA together with his architects Rick De Beer and Syke Margolis of Gluckman, De Beer and Margolis in order to study the latest shopping centre trends and development.
While there, he met Leigh Speakman, who at the time was a junior partner in the Canadian firm D.I. Design a firm which specialised in retail planning and development headed up by principal partners Brian Cranfield and Colin Stephens.
Rapp asked D.I. Design to review the plans for Sandton City.
“They wanted to confirm that their concept was the best and that they could be confident that it would be a success,” Speakman explains.
When D.I. Design presented Rapp and the architects with their thoughts and suggestions on the plans, Rapp asked if they would send a representative to Johannesburg to work directly with the architects and contractors on site.
Speakman himself moved there and although the original timeframe was six to eight months he and his family eventually returned to Canada four years later after a wonderful stay in South Africa.
“In the 70s the design trend for shopping centres was quite different and the concept for the public space was to have a low level of lighting and limited skylights,” says Speakman.
He says this placed emphasis on the stores as they had a much higher level of lighting.
The overall design and custom storefronts created a dramatic and exciting environment and were very much the style of the 70s.
Natural materials were used and so was wood and quarry tiles giving the feel of a covered street, he says.
Speakman says the office tower was the first major decentralised office space in Johannesburg and when it was opened it attracted some high-profile tenants, with one advertising agency occupying a full ten floors.
However, before the decision was taken to add the distinctive cap onto the tower’s roof, the twenty-storey building looked completely featureless.
The cap was inspired by the landmark building in London’s Canary Wharf which boasts a similar feature. Once it was in place, Sandton City would achieve its distinctive place in Johannesburg’s skyline.
After all his all-consuming efforts to create the first phase of this iconic centre, Rapp remembers that during his speech at the first-ever opening, he said: “I have worked for my heart attack… I deserve it!” Thankfully he has still not suffered one, notes Speakman.
“The second level of the Sandton Centre will have 130 000sq feet of shopping space. Through the heart of this will be a 50ft wide boulevard lined with pavement cafes, trees and shrubs and two central plazas of 20 000sq ft each.” This boulevard was never built.
In 1982, work began on Sandton City phase two and this expansion was triggered by the growth of retail centres in the surrounding suburbs.
Rapp worried that unless Sandton City was expanded to become a truly dominant centre, there would be trouble from competing developments.
The concept was to treble the centre’s size from 30 000 square metres to 100 000 square metres, to build additional offices which would be known as the Twin Towers and to build what would become the Sandton Sun hotel as well as adding more parking.
The Liberty Properties team believed that in order to be successful, the centre needed the premier retailer Woolworths to take major space.
The problem was that Woolworths had recently opened a very large store in Rosebank and their board believed there would not be enough business in the area to support two stores.
In his efforts to negotiate, Wolf Cesman, then managing director of Liberty Properties ended up striking the most audacious property deal and one of the biggest gambles in the group’s history.
He offered Woolworths Sandton a contract with a normal turnover-related rental clause as well as a special additional clause which stated they would only pay R100 000 a year, which at the time was peanuts.
The terms of the contract were that if the Rosebank store’s turnover dropped below its current level, which would mean that its business had been adversely affected by the new store opening, then the normal rental clause in Sandton City would not apply.
Woolworths Sandton City would pay only the bargain-basement rental specified in the additional clause, no matter how high the Sandton store’s turnover actually was.
Cesman remembers being extremely concerned about how well Woolworths in Rosebank was doing.
Grand Opening: The local newspaper, the Sandton Chronicle had a piece on the week of the opening of Sandton City: “Opens Sept 12, The wonderful world of Sandton City” Excerpt from the article: “Come and explore South Africa’s biggest regional shopping centre! It’s the most beautiful, most exciting you’ve ever seen with 120 shops enclosed under one roof in a totally climate-controlled environment. Escalators whisk you from one level to another and along the spacious Malls. Flowers, plants and trees create an atmosphere of natural surroundings. You’ll have no traffic or parking problems, no bad weather worries, no busy streets to cross. Yet you’ll be able to make the same purchases here as you would in the whole central area of Johannesburg.” At the bottom of the article, there was this tagline: “All roads lead to Sandton City. And when you get there, there’s free parking for 2 500 cars.
He told his wife to shop there and to ask all her friends to do the same.
“I even contemplated hiring a bus to ferry shoppers from Sandton City to Rosebank,” he jokes.
In spite of Cesman’s misgivings, Woolworths Rosebank’s turnover actually increased that year, so the low rental clause never came into effect.
Woolworths Sandton did exceptionally well right from the start and paid full turnover rental from the first day onwards.
The Sandton City extension was designed with the same look and feel as the original centre.
Quality materials were used during construction and maintenance was scrupulously carried out.
The original centre lasted for more than 26 years without requiring major refurbishment, taking it all the way through to 1990, when the decision was taken to lighten and brighten the centre to bring it in line with international trends at the time.
That refurbishment was done in a very different way from the most recent one.
Cesman explains that although the customers were not put off by the noise, mess and rubble, the process was unsightly.
At one stage, shoppers walked on one side of the mall’s corridors while workers on scaffolding replaced tiles on the other.
The two were separated only by a line of red and white barrier tape.
One day, Cesman brought visitors from a construction company in the UK to Sandton and they were shocked when they saw how things were done in South Africa.
“What about health and safety regulations?” one of them asked.
Cesman’s tongue-in-cheek reply was: “We do it faster than you can, our shoppers don’t object and not too many people die!”
There is an interesting twist to the story’s end – when a colleague of Cesman’s went over to visit a site in the UK, despite all the stringent health and safety rules in place he ended up falling down a manhole when its cover gave way.
In 2004, Speakman returned to Johannesburg for the first time since 1983.
“I was in total awe when my taxi arrived at the Sandton hotel as I did not recognise anything and had no idea where I was.”
When phase one opened, Sandton City was not a city but a good shopping centre and office building in a pleasant suburban area.
Today it is a city with a capital C and the size of the shopping centre, the selection of stores, the entertainment and food, the hotels, offices and public spaces is all part of what makes it special.
Michael Rapp was a visionary, but even he must be amazed at what Sandton City has become, says Urdang.
In 1983, 10 years after it opened, Sandton City added 44 000 square metres taking the total centre GLA to 94 000 square metres, 250 stores, Sandton Sun and Towers was now complete offering 564 rooms, Sandton City Towers also complete with 20 000 square metres and the centre had a total of 8 000 parking bays from 2 500 in 1973.
In the same newspaper edition, then anchor tenant OK Bazaar had sizzling opening specials, oh my, how things have changed. Ladies Fancy Nylon Briefs were 30 cents per pair and Printed Floral Mini Half Slips 50 cents, Men’s Hankies were priced at 15 cents and Men’s Shorts were R2 per pair. Children’s clothes were priced between 35 cents and R4.50 and the opening specials prices were no more than R5.
The local newspaper, the Sandton Chronicle had a piece on the week of the opening of Sandton City: “Opens Sept 12, The wonderful world of Sandton City”
Excerpt from the article: “Come and explore South Africa’s biggest regional shopping centre! It’s the most beautiful, most exciting you’ve ever seen with 120 shops enclosed under one roof in a totally climate-controlled environment.
Escalators whisk you from one level to another and along the spacious Malls.
Flowers, plants and trees create an atmosphere of natural surroundings. You’ll have no traffic or parking problems, no bad weather worries, no busy streets to cross. Yet you’ll be able to make the same purchases here as you would in the whole central area of Johannesburg.”
At the bottom of the article, there was this tagline: “All roads lead to Sandton City. And when you get there, there’s free parking for 2 500 cars.
In the same newspaper edition, then anchor tenant OK Bazaar had sizzling opening specials, oh my, how things have changed. Ladies Fancy Nylon Briefs were 30 cents per pair and Printed Floral Mini Half Slips 50 cents, Men’s Hankies were priced at 15 cents and Men’s Shorts were R2 per pair.
Children’s clothes were priced between 35 cents and R4.50 and the opening specials prices were no more than R5.
In the next article, we look at Sandton City expansion and growth in the Millennium.
Credits: Special thanks to Mel Urdang, Liberty Properties retail director and his team as well as the Sandton Central Management District (SCMD) for providing the historic pictures and captions of Sandton City and Marie Human who was the curator of the SCMD Heritage Project.
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