Jo'burg's 'Bridge of San Luis Rey'

The winding road that connects the valley with the top of the ridge is Johannesburg’s ‘Bridge of San Luis Rey’.  


The road was named after Joseph Stewart, a socially concerned and active man who devoted himself to the community for 25 years. The beautiful arched walls, built of stone from the koppie, still exist.  Once there was a plaque marking the outcrop of the ‘Brixton Qaurtzite’ which forms the Observatory Ridge, but it was apparently shot to smithereens by vandals in a passing car during the apartheid era at about the time when David Webster was assassinated.

One story of the origins of Stewart Drive is that it was built by Italian prisoners of war (the 1939-1945 War); another is that it was part of the city engineer’s work programme for the unemployed during the Depression and was completed in 1935.

The road winds its serpentine way through dense gum-tree forests, though the protecting fence has long been dismantled and sold - ‘shipped to China’ as they say at the all-accepting, turn-a-blind-eye scrap dealers in the valley. This is the final destination of almost all the man-hole covers and fence-posts in the district.  Another fence, only partially stolen is the more recent initiative of a local politician. It separates the park at the top of the road from the ‘jungle’ below.

Benches for weary travellers, thoughtfully constructed by the road’s builders at key points on the steep path, have also been stolen. Only one or two concrete legs remain.

Once there was a pedestrian route up the ridge, coming out at the corner of Beatty and Hill streets, but the story goes that long ago, an ‘Italian megalomaniac developer’ filled it in with rubble from the demolished white elephant ,’Von Brandis Garage’ in Jo’burg City, thereby blocking the watercourse and precipitating his bankruptcy (so it is said). Such paths in the city (like the path up Houghton ridge) have, in any event long become too dangerous for walking.

‘Robber-barons’  come down a well-trod path at a lonely dark bend in the forest, from wherever they dwell with impunity (from all accounts), when they see travellers wending their way fearfully upwards. Sometimes, it is said, they place rocks in the road, late at night, to puncture the tyres of cars of unsuspecting travellers.

It’s a quarter of a kilometre of utter lawlessness, a real fairy tale world of bandit kings, a piece of Johannesburg that exists apart. Anyone who takes the time to offer a lift to people waiting fearfully at the top or at the bottom of Stewart Drive will meet all the characters of a modern fairy-tale: Beautiful young maidens; goodly parents shepherding small children to and from the crèche at the bottom of the hill; wise old folk; children like ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ on an errand; two angels from the Celestial Church of Jesus Christ, and a band of pilgrims almost robbed by two leather-jacketed men with guns.

I have met a Franco-African maths teacher on his way to and from a part-time post at the High School  below the imposing stone abandoned Sir Herbert Baker built Observatory , and a tutoring job in the valley; a Congolese former diplomat, Japanese and Spanish-speaking, hoping to go to London; a French teacher; a schoolboy who left his  ragged school blazer in my car (still hanging hopefully in my cupboard); an artisan who lives in a house of safety for people with mental instability; and a young business and family man, on his way to a Hillbrow pharmacy to buy 'family planning items'.

'Don’t stop to give people a lift any more, and keep your doors locked. You may be hijacked!' a local politician, cautioned. 'You can’t trust anybody these days'