I recently imported my Johannesburg Posterous blog to WordPress as Posterous is closing down in April.

Although the process was fairly easy and pain-free,  it did result in some format issues, especially with the photographs. WordPress gives much greater control whereas Posterous just dumped everything into a gallery without the option to properly name the pictures.

So: First-time visitors to this blog please be aware that I’m going back to the first post and fixing/adding/updating all posts and pictures. In some instances I’ve taken or acquired better pictures and/or information and will update accordingly.

Click on all images for the full-size and better quality picture.

Please feel free to follow this blog. I only post every other month due to the amount of time and research it takes to prepare the posts.

Visit my own site for more info or find me on Facebook.

While researching the story and these posts,  I often come across some amazing pictures and facts that fall outside my area of immediate interest.

This one is particularly interesting as it shows Johannesburg in the late 1940s or early 1950s BEFORE the highway was built and Parktown was decimated – all way before my time! There is no Killarney,  Joburg General Hospital, Ponte or Carlton Centre. Follow familiar roads like Empire, Jan Smuts Avenue, Oxford or Harrow to see how it all looked 60 years ago. Barry Hertzog Avenue didn’t even exist then.

I suspect it was taken in the late 1940s because the Johannesburg railway station is already being expanded over what was originally the first Wanderer’s stadium before it moved to present day Illovo. The move happened in September 1946.

The scan is 5MB and one can zoom in quite far. I picked this up from the Africana Museum archives.

It’s uncovering old photos like this and looking, in detail, back in time that makes this all worthwhile for me.

16 Mar This entry was published on March 16, 2013 at 11:05 am. It’s filed under Johannesburg and tagged 1940, 1950, Aerial photographs, Barry Hertzog Avenue, Early Johannesburg, Empire Road, Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.