Top of Africa

This guide to Top of Africa, the fiftieth-floor observation deck in Johannesburg, traces the fall of the Carlton Hotel it sits above, once a six-hundred-room palace where guests like Whitney Houston and Hillary Clinton stayed, and the tallest point in Africa for forty-six years after opening in 1973. You'll hear how downtown Johannesburg emptied out through the 1990s until the hotel closed for good in 1998, leaving its rooms mostly silent ever since. A listening tip: look east toward Pretoria, and down at the pale mine dumps ringing the skyline from the 1880s gold rush.