Yukon revisited

I’m intrigued by the relationship between light and shadow, the sacred and the profane in the history of buildings. If systems theory could be applied to a building, perhaps the extremes of life in an old building could be seen as a swinging back and forth like a pendulum, a momentum from within to reach a point of integration and balance. When I interviewed Jungian Analyst, Mariaan Nielsen in her Lorentzville home, once a cinema and then a synagogue, she commented: “There are drug dealers in the area who service quite a number of prominent people from the business, media and academic worlds…I live in the shadow of Johannesburg…It is about not being able to keep the shadow out and at the same time trying to find a place of groundedness.”

So, I’ve revisited Yukon http://melodyemmettsbezvalley.blogspot.com/2011/08/yukon.html, the gracious old house, with its verandah almost all the way around, nestling below the Observatory ridge, with a busy, narrow one-way street below it, because there is no doubt that Yukon has embraced between her majestic walls, both light and shadow in Johannesburg’s turbulent history.

I’ve patched together, through off-the-record conversations with people who knew people who once lived there, fragments of memory, hearsay and fact in a sort of mythology of the house. Can one be “honest” about houses, especially imposing ones? There are on-going politics and powerful forces to be disturbed.

Originally occupied by an early mayor of Johannesburg, Yukon was, like the houses of the Randlords, built to impress the wealthy (The name, “Yukon” says it all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_Gold_Rush) and the powerful.  

Johannesburg’s wealthy have always been fickle – fifteen years would be a long time for a suburb to retain prestige.  As the demographics of the city changed influential political and business leaders migrated to suburbs like Parktown, and Troyeville’s mansions soon began to fall into disrepair. Today practically only Yukon remains of those neo- gothic edifices with their terraced gardens. From the top of the ridge, the foundations of one nearby can still be seen, in outline, the only half-wall remaining converted into a basket-ball wall for local children.

For approximately 20 years Yukon was owned by someone named, provocatively, after an angel, a “Bearer of Light,” half Russian, half Greek, a photographer, hunter, arms manufacturer and purported mercenary. I was told that several of the upstairs rooms in the house were used for the manufacture of guns. In another room upstairs, the floor was apparently carpeted with complete lion skins (heads included). The furniture was “Chippendale”, the walls adorned with gold embossed Russian icons.

Other rooms were sombre, furnished with heavy, dark furniture, “sombre like the man…”

When the ‘angelic’ owner bought the house it had been “a cathouse” – a brothel.

Apparently the ‘Madame’ who ran the house had painted out Italian artwork on the ceiling of what is known as the “ballroom”, which leads on to a large veranda on the side of the house. The Italian paintings were lost forever, but the rest of the decor was restored by its new owner to its original condition by means of “gallons upon gallons of paint stripper.”

The “bearer of light” sold the house roughly 15 years ago to a couple who ran it as a poster gallery. Described as “a secretive guy who could get out of any situation,” he is said to be living in a castle today, the hunting and fishing advisor to the “Duke of Cumberland.”

On selling Yukon, he stripped the large room on the opposite side of the house to “the ballroom” of its marvellous leaded stained glass windows and uprooted several Italian marble fireplaces, and shipped them to London. He sold the windows at Sotheby’s in London and “bought a flat with the proceeds.”  One of the fireplaces was apparently sold to a music producer who represented the British beat, rhythm and blues pop band that was popular in the 1960s, Manfred Mann.

Somewhere in its history, Yukon was purportedly, like other houses around and on the Observatory Ridge, hired out for rave parties at which illegal drugs and alcohol were in plentiful supply for people working in the “creative industries”.

My first contact with the house in 2008 – 2009 was when it had been transformed; re-generated into a spirituality centre by an Anglican priest, Jeremy Jacobs and his wife Kim. The room that once contained the lead windows was a chapel.“Wrong place…wrong place…” one confidant laughed, when I told him.

Today there is wood paneling where there were once glorious, north-facing, lead and stained glass windows

This was a time of light, inspiration, and solace in Yukon's history. The Jacobs family succeeded in converting Yukon into a haven of hospitality and prayer and many visitors to the centre benefitted from their efforts. The house was put on the market when Kim Jacobs was expecting her second child. The couple realised that two lively small children and retreatants seeking silence would probably not 'gel'.

Yukon was built to overlook the valley by architects of the day who had little understanding and ambivalent feelings about the African sun. The main rooms all face south and get little natural light. The house is “as cold as hell" in winter, and costly to maintain, one interviewee said. “I wouldn’t live there for love or money.”  

The current owner, Sir Henry Chamberlain, contacted me by email last year to congratulate me on my blog and suggest that we meet for tea. He told me that he had made his money working on an oil rig in North Africa.