[9] The suburb's origins lie in the Turffontein farm set up by Colonel Ignatius Ferreira, a Boer adventurer from Cape Colony.

[11] In 1886 Hans Sauer, who combined a medical practice with prospecting on Cecil Rhodes’s behalf, was guided from Ferreira’s Camp to the main group of gold reefs by a son of the widow Petronella Oosthuizen, the owner of a farm at Langlaagte, on which the main gold reefs had first been discovered.

[10] Already at the time of Rhodes' visit, a little crowd of diggers were at work, and in the week that had passed since Sauer had been away, an Englishwoman had run up a reed and mud building called Walker's Hotel.

[13] On September 8, 1886, Landrost Carl von Brandis read President Paul Kruger’s proclamation, confirming the gold fields of the Rand as public diggings.

[18] By the 1890s, the western side of Commissioner street, where the Johannesburg Central Police Station is now located, had developed a reputation for its brothels and the gangs that controlled them.

[2] In the late nineteenth century, a significant number of Eastern European Jewish immigrants settled in the area and neighbouring Marshalltown.

This allowed these residents to leave the poor conditions of the district and migrate to middle-class Jewish areas such as Doornfontein, Hillbrow and Yeoville.