Sea Point of Late

Hotel Ocean View

Sea Point Hotels of Yesteryear

There was a time when there were numerous hotels along the Sea Point Beach Front. Not modern glitzy hotels, but old fashioned hotels, two or three storeys high.

Many of these were residential hotels. In an era before old age homes were common, elderly middle class people who didn’t always have a great deal of money, like my Great Aunt Enid, could afford to live in genteel comfort in establishments like the Ocean View Hotel (pics 1, 2 and 3) where she lived very happily, surrounded by fellow residents who were here best friends, until it was demolished in the early 1970s and her world came to an end.

Three meals a day were served in the dining room and teas were served on the enclosed stoep. There was something slightly colonial about the place.

There were many other hotels in varying styles. In pic 4 is the Millroy, situated where Twin Towers is today. At Saunders Rocks was the Surfcrest where my grandmother Ivy Sonnenberg had a suite for 21 years. Mercifully she died before they demolished the hotel. Her best friend since the 1920s, Aunty Nita Marcus, moved into a suite a few years after Granny, taking her baby grand piano and her Mazda Capella automatic with her.

Ten years later, her son paid one one of the staff to steal the battered car and crash it, as they couldn’t stop her driving and she had become a menace. She claimed to be the first woman in South Africa ever to have got a driver’s license and that she had driven ambulances during World War 1.

Both claims were dubious but sounded good.

How much nicer to spend one’s autumn years in a residential hotel where there were both residents and ad hoc visitors, than in an old age home. Sadly these establishments have all been bulldozed and replaced by high rise apartments.

Thanks to Graham Sonnenberg for the images and text contribution