Brutal Ponte City cleans up its act
Amy Maas takes a tour of Johannesburg’s most terrifying building, which is now a symbol for hope and change.
It was too dangerous to play outside and there was nowhere else to go. So two little boys kicked a soccer ball to each other in the corridor of their high-rise building. But when it crashed through the glass barrier that separated them from the hollow core, one went with the ball. Straight from the 20th floor to the rocky bottom.
Everyone has a story about Johannesburg’s Ponte City Tower.
And like all those stories about this apocalyptic tower, this one might be true. Or it might not.
But it’s part of the reason why former resident Michael Luptak and his business partner created a safe haven for children.
Dominating the South African city’s skyline, Ponte – or Ponte City – is the tallest residential tower in Africa, standing at 54 storeys with a completely hollow core.
Its past is brutal and terrifying, but what once stood as a symbol of the city’s growing urban decay, now symbolises rejuvenation for Luptak, and those who live there.
He moved into the tower as a resident in 2012 because, he said, it ‘‘was something a white South African wouldn’t do’’.
‘‘We soon realised there was a lot of vacant space, and that the children who live here don’t have a space and inspiring place to play,’’ he said.
‘‘At first, we opened an arcade and filled the space with games, but it wasn’t sustainable, so we decided to open a community centre.’’
Although the arcade is still there, the community centre and the business that has become central to it, Dlala Nje (or ‘‘just play’’ in Zulu), has become a safe space for the tower’s 300 children.
Tours of the tower and the surrounding Hillbrow area have become central to the ‘‘social enterprise’’ running out of the centre and, with admission for one person costing more than NZ$80, it helps sustain the centre, and cultural and sporting activities for the children in the community.
But Ponte never used to be – and still isn’t for some – a place where you’d want to tour.
Built as a luxury building for the city’s white elite in the 1970s, during the height of Apartheid, it had spacious apartments, a shopping mall, a movie theatre, and even a bowling alley.
It was meant to be a ‘‘village’’ within the city where residents wouldn’t have to leave. And, for a time it was, but as Berea and the neighbouring Hillbrow became crime-ridden and drug-infested, residents fled to the suburbs and the drug lords moved in and hijacked the building.
It became a place where you could buy anything from a bag of crystal meth to a gun and where brothels took up entire floors. It was a place where old TVs, glass bottles and junk were simply thrown out of windows.
It was also a place where no-one bothered to take the rubbish out. Instead, stinking bags were thrown right down the centre of the hollow core until the mess stood five storeys deep. A place where that same core served as a suicide drop, where the bodies – if you believe some stories – were only pulled out during the eventual clean up. It became the world’s tallest urban slum.
It was originally built to house around
3500 people, but was home to more than 10,000 at the peak of its ‘‘hijacked’’ years.
But things slowly turned around for Ponte when owner, London-based property group Kempston Group, hired an eviction company to turf out the drug lords and others by 2001. The building
changed hands again but, by 2011, Kempston had taken charge of the building again.
It hired a fulltime caretakers and a crew to clean out the building’s core – a disgusting job that apparently took around three years and hundreds of men and machinery.
A team of people still regularly cleans out rubbish thrown into the core. Slowly, it’s become one of the ‘‘safest’’ places in the area, where its residents – now mostly middle-class city workers and students – can only gain access by using their fingerprint at entry points.
It has 24/7 security and some very harsh rules – overnight visitors need to be registered with security, and others have to leave by 9pm. That includes people visiting on the tours. On the day we go, we’re carefully processed, and eventually allowed through.
We take a creaky lift up to the 52nd floor to Dlala Nje’s event space, which used to be Luptak’s apartment, and are given a history of the building and neighbourhood while looking out across the view, which apparently, on a clear day can stretch into neighbouring city Pretoria.
Then, we’re led into the hallway, where it’s too terrifying to look up or down past the glass, before taking the elevator down to the car park, and the steel stairs into the core.
It’s the exact spot that’s become synonymous with apocalyptic movies such as District 9 and
Chappie. And it was turned into a zombie wasteland for Resident Evil: The Final Chapter.
While Ponte might now boast about being the ‘‘safest’’ place in what’s known as one of Johannesburg’s most unsafe neighbourhoods, it’s easy to imagine its past and wonder about the myths that plague it, when you’re standing in its core.
As we round out the tour, and circle the exterior of the building, a glass bottle is hurled by someone from a floor above, narrowly missing our heads, and crashing to the concrete mere metres away.
Ponte might be ‘‘safe’’ now, but that makes it easier to imagine which of its stories are true.