Ponte City Apartments

Ponte City is a skyscraper in the Berea suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, just next to Hillbrow. It was built in 1975 to a height of 173 m (567.6 ft), making it the tallest residential skyscraper in Africa. The 55-storey building is cylindrical, with an open centre allowing additional light into the apartments. The centre space is known as "the core" and rises above an uneven rock floor. When built, Ponte City was seen as an extremely desirable address due to its views over all of Johannesburg and its surroundings. The neon sign on top of the building is the largest sign in the southern hemisphere and advertised for the Coca-Cola Company prior to 2000. It currently advertises the South African mobile phone company Vodacom.

History

The principal designer of Ponte was Mannie Feldman, working in a team together with Manfred Hermer and Rodney Grosskopff. Grosskopff recalled the decision to make the building circular, the first cylindrical skyscraper in Africa. At the time, Johannesburg bylaws required kitchens and bathrooms to have a window, so Grosskopff designed the building with a hollow interior, allowing light to enter the apartments from both sides. At the bottom of the immense building were retail stores and initial plans were to include an indoor ski slope on the 3,000-square-metre (32,000 sq ft) inner core floor. The building is located 35 minutes from the OR Tambo International Airport and almost within walking distance of the inner city with theatres like the Market and the Civic within 5 km (3.1 mi).

Decay

During the late 1980s, gang activity had caused the crime rate to soar at the tower and the surrounding neighbourhood. By the 1990s, many gangs moved into the building and it became extremely unsafe. Ponte City became symbolic of the crime and urban decay gripping the once cosmopolitan Berea area. The core filled with debris five stories high as the owners left the building to decay. The "Mysteries of the Abandoned" TV show said a lot "debris" was garbage thrown down the empty core and in the 5 story high mound they found over 20 bodies either from suicides or killed by gang activity. "Mysteries of the Abandoned" also said one of the higher floors was well known for the illegal criminal activity that occurred.

There were even proposals in the mid-1990s to turn the building into a highrise prison. In 2001 Trafalgar Properties took over management of the building and began making numerous improvements.

New Ponte

In May 2007 Ponte changed ownership and a re-development project "New Ponte" was put in motion. David Selvan and Nour Addine Ayyoub under Ayyoub's company, Investagain, planned to revitalise the building completely. The planned development would have contained 467 residential units, retail and leisure-time areas. Over the next few years, the Johannesburg Development Agency planned to invest about R900 million in the areas around Ponte City such as the Ellis Park Precinct project as well as an upgrade of Hillbrow and Berea partly in preparation for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

The subprime mortgage crisis caused the banks not to provide the funding required to finish the revitalisation. The project was cancelled and ownership was given back to the Kempston Group.

Current status

As of 2017, the building has been totally refurbished, and is now "desirable" and "affordable". The population is reported to be approximately 80% black, and to include immigrants from various countries.

Text imported from Wikipedia article "Ponte City" and modified on February 21, 2022 according to the CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license.