The inside story of the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront
INTERVIEW WITH JAMES ROUSE IN COLUMBIA, USA. PUBLISHED IN THE WATERFRONT REVIEW, Spring 1992, BY CARL MOMBERG James Rouse was chairman of the Enterprise Foundation & Enterprise Development Co. based in Columbia, Maryland, USA. His projects set the benchmark for development at Cape Town’s Waterfront. His story is an inspiration… and if
Bertie Reed had been brought to the V&A’s Dock House offices in August 1989 by Geoff Grylls soon after the veteran and legendary yachtsman returned from Newport, Rhode Island in the USA. Bertie had seen what he wanted — a quayside pub and restaurant at the V&A Waterfront. Bertie’s Landing
Google would have you believe so… But we’re happy to say, The Time Ball Tower still points straight up and the illusion belongs solely to Google. We discovered this in the course of opening a page on CapeInfo for the Waterfront’s heritage sites. A QR code in The Waterfront Story
There are many stories that won’t make it into the book and there is one that I would like to share here. It’s about the Pierhead Festival. Just before Christmas 1984, I invited David Jack and Muller Coetzee (Fisheries Development Corporation) to lunch at one of my favourite restaurants, Rozenhof
I went to visit Gwen Fagan yesterday to make sure that Gawie Fagan’s role in the whole Waterfront story is properly told. It’s the first time I’ve seen Gwen since Gawie died just over one year ago. It was wonderful visiting Die Es — their remarkable house — again, but
Before the Foreshore was reclaimed from the sea, this was the amenity at the bottom of Adderley Street. I haven’t come across a better photograph demonstrating how wonderful Cape Town’s Pier must have been. And what a loss Cape Town’s close connection to the sea must have been. The big
In the early 2000s, the V&A Waterfront company decided to change its logo. This shows a photocopy of the original logo, designed by the late Willem Jordaan in 1989. The brief to Willem was, “It must show the mountain, a ship and must be reminiscent of a rubber stamp, and
On May 1, 1989 the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront opened its office at Dock House and started work. Very few people took the development seriously and even fewer ever imagined what the Waterfront would become. At the start of preparing The Waterfront Story, we brought Brain Kantor, Arie Burggraaf and
Captain Joshua Slocum, from Boston USA, was the first person to sail singlehanded around the world in his yacht Spray. On April 24, 1895, he set sail from Boston, Massachusetts. In his famous book, Sailing Alone Around the World, now considered a classic of travel literature, he described his departure in the following manner:
