Carlton Hotel (Johannesburg)
| Carlton Hotel | |
|---|---|
Carlton Hotel
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| General information | |
| Location | Johannesburg, South Africa |
| Address | Main Street |
| Opening | October 1, 1972 |
| Owner | Transnet |
| Technical details | |
| Floor count | 30 |
| Design and construction | |
| Architect | Gordon Bunshaft |
| Developer | Anglo American |
| Other information | |
| Number of rooms | 670 |
| Number of suites | 64 |
The Carlton Hotel is a historic hotel in the Central Business District of Johannesburg, South Africa. It opened in 1972 as part of the enormous Carlton Centre complex, and has been closed since 1998.
The first Carlton Hotel was located two blocks away, at the corner of Eloff Street & Commissioner Street. Conceived in 1895 by mining magnate Barney Barnato as a huge, world-class luxury hotel with a theater, construction was finally begun by Barnato's heirs in 1903, without the theater, after delays caused by Barnato's death and the Boer War. The Carlton was constructed by the Barnadot-Joel Mining Company and opened on February 20, 1906. The six-story hotel was the finest in southern Africa, with a telephone in every room and an early form of air conditioning. It hosted many celebrities, including King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in 1947. The original hotel was demolished in 1963.
South African Breweries planned to replace the old Carlton with a new hotel on a sprawling double-block site they owned nearby at Main Street & Kruis Street, where the Castle Brewery had been located, and where the current hotel now stands. However, Harry Frederick Oppenheimer, chairman of Anglo American, convinced SAB to rethink the project as an immense commercial development to rival New York's Rockefeller Center. The two companies, each among the biggest in South Africa, secretly assembled a six-acre parcel covering five and a half city blocks. The city council gave permission for the two blocks of the brewery and the two blocks north to be consolidated into one superblock for the complex.
The enormous, modern Carlton Centre, built at a cost of R88 million, would contain a fifty-story office tower, the tallest in Africa; the thirty-story luxury Carlton Hotel; a five-story Garlicks department store; a huge three-and-a-half-acre public plaza with a two-story underground shopping centre beneath it containing 140 shops; parking garages with space for 2000 cars; and an adjacent 57,000 square-foot exhibition centre with an indoor ice skating rink on the top level. The complex was designed by noted American architect Gordon Bunshaft, of the internationally renowned firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, working in conjunction with the local Johannesburg firm of Rhodes-Harrison Hoffe and Partners. Anglo American bought out SAB's share of the project in 1969, while it was still under construction.
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