KwaDukuza eGoli Hotel
The KwaDukuza eGoli Hotel is an abandoned twin-tower skyscraper hotel in the Central Business District of Johannesburg, South Africa.
History
The smaller 22-story rear tower was built in 1970 as The Tollman Towers hotel, owned by the prominent hotelier Stanley Tollman.
The property was purchased by Sol Kerzner's Southern Sun Hotels in the early 1980s and totally rebuilt at a cost of R100 million, with the addition of the 40-story main tower, linked to the older building by a four-story podium with a pool deck and a running track. The complex re-opened in 1985 as the Johannesburg Sun and Towers.[1]
As the neighborhood decayed, the luxury hotel was converted to a Holiday Inn, but the lack of demand for hotels in the CBD eventually caused the hotel to close completely, in 1998. It reopened briefly in 2001 as the KwaDukuza eGoli Hotel, a name meaning Gathering Place in the City of Gold.[2] The hotel was owned by Mark Whitehead of Whitehead Enterprises. It hosted 2,000 police officers for the Earth Summit on sustainable development, which was marred by a murder in the hotel and severe problems with the physical syatems of the building.[3] The hotel soon went out of business again. The building is currently "mothballed."