Jozi History: Ponte City, Berea, johannesburg

The History of "Pontes" or Ponte city, Johannesburg

I work on the beat as a paramedic for the city fire department, inside the inner city slums of Johannesburg and have taken so many photos of this iconic Jozi building using my Samsung phone. There is so much history, pain and suffering from the glory days to a slum where drug dealers lurked and criminal elements flourished. We used to attend to many suicides by jumping, drug related emergencies and violent crimes. The nightmare when a fire broke out high up on the 34th floor.

The center of the building became a huge rubbish pile and anything from bodies, poo and household rubbish, to discarded furniture could be found here. It stunk, it was dark and dingy. But now a new vibe has taken over, a clean up, making it safe and self-sustainable. The building is under a revamp, urban renewal and you can even book tours, something on my to do list but I have just not got around to doing it yet!.

So what is Ponte City, well its a skyscraper (in case you had not noticed) found in the Berea neighbourhood close to the notorious Hillbrow, Johannesburg, South Africa. Standing at a height of 173m (567/6ft) making it the tallest residential skyscraper in Africa. It was build back in 1975 as a 55 storey cylindrical building with an open center to allow more light to fall into the apartments. The center space is aptly called "the core" and rises above an uneven rock floor, yipe its built on rock!!

Back in its day it was seen as an extremely fashionable place to reside, as it has spectacular views of all across Johannesburg and its surrounding areas. The neon sign on top of the building is also the largest sign in the southern hemisphere and it has had several logos lighting up the skies at night. Currently it is Vodacom, a South African cell phone company, that advertises here. From time to time we can see workman hanging perilously off the roof on its sides, performing maintenance on the advertising boards. Very brave souls!! On the sides of the building hundreds of DSTV satellite dishes attach themselves to the building.

I found out that the main designer of Ponte was Mannie Feldman who worked with a team made up of Manfred Hermer and Rodney Grosskopff. It was Grosskopff, who was the one who suggested to the team to make the building circular and so the first cylindrical skyscraper in Africa was born. During that time, Johannesburg bylaws required all kitchens and bathrooms to have a window, so Grosskopff designed the building with a hollow interior to allow light to enter the apartments from both sides.

At the bottom of Ponte, several retails stores were included and the initial plans were to also include an indoor ski slope on the 3 000 square metre (32 000 sq ft) inner core floor - how cool would that have been!!! Ponte was so tall because developers wanted a large number of units to occupy the very limited piece of land available to them. It is about 35 minutes from OR Tambo International Airport (when traffic is bad soooo much longer - so the Gauteng train is a great option). It is within walking distance of the inner city with theaters namely the Market and the Civic within 5km away, should you feel energetic. We now also have the fantastic Arts on Main and the Moboneng district in Jeppestown a great art and food fare to delight the taste buds and party mood!

Then in the later part of the 1980's, gang activity had caused the crime rate to escalate and it spilled out to the surrounding neighbourhood. By the 1990's, after the end of apartheid, many gangs moved into the building and it became extremely unsafe to live there and decay started to set in. The once majestic building had now sadly become symbolic of the crime and urban decay gripping the once cosmopolitan Berea neighbourhood. Its cylindrical core now filled with debris some five storeys high as the owners left the building to decay and rot.

I also found out that back in the mid 1990's there were proposals flying around to turn the building into a high-rise prison. I am so glad that did not happen it would have been a nightmare and very dangerous for all concerned!! Then in 2001 Trafalgar Properties took over the management of the building and so began the slow clean up.

In May of 2007 Ponte changed ownership and a re-development project "New Ponte" was swung into motion. David Selvan and Nour Addine Ayyoub under Ayyoub's company, Investagain, planned to revitalize the building completely. Their development plan would include 467 residential units and an area dedicated to retail and leisure time spots. Over a period of some years the Johannesburg Development Agency planned to invest a whopping R900 million into the areas around Ponte City, like the Ellis Park Precinct project as well as an upgrade of Hillbrow and Berea as part of their plans to upgrade the areas in preparation for the 2010 FIFA World cup.

If it had gone through what a difference it would have made in the lives of so many but sadly due to a subprime mortgage crisis the banks did not provide the funding required to finish the revitalization and the project was cancelled and ownership was given back to the Kempston Group.

Some interesting arty facts that I did not know about and is really rather cool!!

One of the final shots of the 2009 movie District 9 is of the tower;

Director Philip Bloom dedicated a documentary film titled Ponte Tower;

Ingrid Martens filmed her award winning documentary Africa Shafted: Under one Roof entirely, over two and a half years, in the Ponte lifts;

The skyscraper "Peach Trees" featured in the 2012 South African film Dredd is heavily inspired by Ponte tower;

The final scene of the 2014 movie SEAL Team 8: Behind Enemy Lines was shot in this location;

One of the scenes of the 2015 movie Chappie was shot in this location.

There have even been books based on Ponte!!

German writer Norman Ohler used the Ponte as the setting for his book Stadt des Goldes ("City of Gold"), "Ponte sums up all the hope, all the wrong ideas of modernism, all the decay, all the craziness of the city. It is a symbolic building, a sort of white whale, it is concrete fear, the tower of Babel, and yet it is strangely beautiful".

Photography

The Johannesburg Photowalkers often take photos during their inner city walks.

South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky and British artist Patrick Waterhouse won the Discovery award at the Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in 2011 for their three-year project "Ponte City", photographing the residents, interiors and exteriors of the building, and which produced a series of giant tableaux, made up of hundreds of contact sheets, presented in towering light boxes. Pretty impressive if you ask me!! I will drive past with a renewed sense of awe and wonder and I am now most definitely going to make the effort to go on one of Ponte's tours. So stay tuned to an updated on my little inner Ponte adventure.

My photographs feature in this blog are all taken while on the beat from the outside. Once I have been on one of the tours I will have photos from inside and will blog about my experience as a "tourist" in my own city!