Inasmuch as Fran Lebowitz would come to mythologise New York in her Netflix series, "Pretend It's a City", Lin Sampson "hangs" in Cape Town's historic and cultural core, playing witness to its ongoing rise and rise...
Let me confess: I am a sucker for cities.
Great cities are disappearing with their compacted layers of history, the scattershot of life, the grit and intertwingle of survival.
Cities have a raw immediacy, full of fractures, ambiguities, contradictions and eccentricities. It is in a city that you can glimpse the salt mines of grief, depression, narcissistic injury, alienation and pure joy.
One day there will be no more cities, many have died or failed to thrive, but Cape Town centre has experienced a new awakening.
Today it is under blue skies, as usual. Table Mountain, that old symbol, looks brisk as if it has lately had a wash and brush up.
Walking in the city I break through the membrane of memory. The flicker of danger matadors around me, bordering on what was once a slit-throat neighbourhood.
But today the city is well protected with safety officers on every street. There are few retail stores but streets of Nordic Noire (the trend shade) buildings like sepulchral vaults, some voluminous, expanding towards the horizon, warehouses, hairdressing emporiums where the art of braiding reaches new levels.
I am in Church Square, the very polite, corporate part of Cape Town, where rich girls at my school collected their trust funds every month and where blue-chip companies like Woolworths and Truworths had, and still have, their headquarters.
Church Square used to house the Natural History Museum, now moved to Queen Victoria Street and worth a visit with its glass cases full of insects, tiny pinned beetles, crusty locusts, frail dragonflies with faded wings. The natural history of South Africa is gold.
Today Church Square glitters with new-found sophistication marked by internationally recognised restaurants like FYN that perches in a glass box on top of what used to be Speaker's Corner, a lowish-rent eatery loved by journos. The whole building has become a cathedral of fine dining, a word that needs a smack.
Peter Tempelhoff, half Canadian, half South African, is patron chef at Fyn, a real doll, easy going, hard working, realistic.
FYN, made it onto the list of the World's 50 Best -- ranking at number 37 and being named Best Restaurant in Africa.
"I love this area, the history, the atmosphere of a big city. It is only a matter of time and I just wanted to get in on the ground floor. I see centre Cape Town as a place of massive opportunity," says Tempelhoff.
Passing FYN on a rainy Thursday lunchtime, it is bursting.
Labotessa Hotel is the jewel in the crown, this 18th century, bijoux small hotel with honey coloured floors, duck egg coloured walls; a home away from home atmosphere, just a sandwich there is exotic, a brioche with cheese, soft as cake plus a linen napkin.
This part of town is still posh. There are jellied relics wearing industrial strength makeup and young women in stripper heels and wild top knots as layered as milles feuilles. What a friend calls, 'Girls filthy with erotic mystery.'
There are ancient crones and an interracial vaudeville of Capetonians because beneath the layers of Dutchness, Afrikanerdom, British and Xhosa, the true people are a mixture of race, tribe and ethnicity.
Cape Town is a Creole city, often found on the coastal regions in Africa, an ethnic group formed during the European colonial era when indigenous Africans first interacted with Europeans, producing a heady mix of race.
I pass the pink flushed Ballet & Dance Emporium where I spent a lot of my youth squeezing my feet into pointe shoes. The image of myself flitting across the stage in a tutu persists. Why didn't someone tell me I was built like the Voortrekker Monument?
The Wellington Fruit Growers is now an eatery known by some as Heartburn Central. I recall Wellington's past bowls of gleaming crystallised fruits. My ma every year sent a box of waterlemon konfyt to her relatives in England. After ten years they said, "Please don't send any more. We loathe them."
Why has this city on the tip of a vast continent, held me in such a vise-like grip, all my life? Okay we can agree -- there is consensus is there not? -- that it is beautiful, lying in a location, edged by mountain and sea, geographically dramatic with its world class harbour that welcomes international ships like floating hotels and lone round-the-world sailors in shattered yachts and smoothly luxurious motor launches belonging to high-net-worth individuals.
My friend says it is like living in Monaco at a fraction of the price.
Where is Cape Town? someone in London asked me. Cape Town needs a signature novel like Alexandria in Egypt. Recall Justine (Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet). She annexed a whole generation of schoolgirls' emotions in the sixties with kisses like 'soft, breathless stabs'.
Cape Town does not inspire mythology but it does inspire loyalty. Most people who leave, dream of returning.
The place is kicking.
Robert Silke, the architect de jour of the city, is building a new tower stroke mansion block named Spindle in a dot on the south side of Church Square : 16 storeys, each apartment with its own floor and lift, painted fish belly white.
Church Square has become the new heart of Cape Town and is testament to the tolerance that marks this city, housing the crazy statue of Jan Hofmeyr, once leader of the Dutch Party and a child prodigy, he waves cheerfully over a square now decorated with black marble tomb-like monuments to slaves.
Locals gossiped about the city as if it was an old friend with dicky health. What will become of the centre city? Would it disappear into Africa, another fallen hero, crusty with disrepair? As Silke says, 'It has already been Africanised and you know what? It's better this way."
The evidence is now available, to the eye, the ear, the unterwelt of prostitutes, pick-pockets and pimps has thinned. Church Square remains its old pristine self. Foreigners are flocking to the centre of town, digital nomads slouch on city benches and even statues (they have no respect).
Buildings like the Old Mutual have new life. Lezanne Viviers, well-known designer, who uses her unconventional designs as the language of activism, has moved from Johannesburg into the penthouse.
Many buildings in this part of town have retained their distinction: modern, Victorian with cream washed stucco; buildings the colour of old French linen.
A circular raised dais near Church Square in Bureau Street marks the spot where slaves were auctioned. Walking further North are the Magistrate Courts, well worth a visit if only to hear the excuses people give for not paying a parking fine, 'My daughter had a baby and we didn't know she was expecting'
The centre of the city has changed. Robert Silke: "It is a new world that draws creativity and talent. The thing is, it is a national city, one of the two capitals of South Africa. It is organic. It sprouts and grows all the time."
If it is culture you are looking for, such a horrid word, it is here in shed loads, Everard Read Art Gallery is opening a multi-storey art gallery in Parliament Street. I spent an afternoon in its comfortable library reading Wallpaper Magazine.
Writer Fran Lebowitz, my one-time hero, now turned bore (don't go public after 70) says she just "hangs" in New York.
Cape Town is a great place to "hang". There are a million things to see, such as the rambling Edwardian City Hall just down the road where ex-president Mandela made his world-watched speech which nobody could hear because the Tannoy system didn't work.
I was there and his soft power, brought a long sought after recognition to a city that had suffered years of injury. A must-visit is the Slave Lodge, built in 1679 to house the human chattels of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the Cape's largest slaveholder. At nightfall it became a brothel.
From there walk up the shady Government Avenue, that cuts through the first cultivated garden in Cape Town (I once found a black tulip) and leads straight to the entrance of the Mount Nelson Hotel where you can sip a citron pressé on the sunny stoep.
But before you get there, Government Avenue, the spinal cord of the city, will lead you through some fascinating history, the burnt-out Houses of Parliament, De Tuynhuys, the office of President Rhamaposa who was recently seen sauntering down Government Avenue clutching a bunch of roses and my absolute favourite, the Research Library started by my great-great uncle whose statue still stands because nobody can remember who he was.
And because there is always something new out of Africa, a stone's throw from Tuynhuys is the Freemasons Lodge De Goede Hoop, small and beautifully shaped, it is worth a look, especially the gateway designed by Thibault.
Cape Town is a city full of music, world renowned for jazz, home to greats like Dollar Brand, now called Abdullah Abraham, not so catchy, and the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra. There is a concert happening in the city -- jazz, classical, pop -- every night of the week.
Check Cape Town Jazz Calendar and Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra on the Internet.
Cape Town is really a demon temptress, strong, bereft and touched by danger. It has a languorous, subtle, perverse quality about it, a place of dramatic partings and irrevocable decisions.
Lately it has become the prototype of a modern cosmopolitan city, so few left in the world, I thank God I live in it.
