Inside Ponte City Tower

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Inside Johannesburg’s infamous Ponte City Tower shaped by apartheid, urban decay and renewal.

Before arriving at Ponte City Tower, my taxi driver spent the ride warning me how dangerous the neighborhood was.

Even in daylight, he said, he disliked driving through the area known as Hillbrow. He told me that even though he was “their brother,” they would still rob him there. By the time we arrived, I felt that if I stepped out of the car I would immediately become a target.

But when I finally got out near the gate, people were simply living their lives. Children played in the street. Residents stood around talking. Life carried on with the ordinary rhythm of a neighborhood.

Inside Ponte City Tower

I can’t remember when I first heard about Ponte City Tower, but part of my brain stored away the fact that it was in Johannesburg. When I searched online to see whether it was possible to visit, I discovered Dlala Nje, a community organization that runs tours of the building while supporting the surrounding neighborhood.

Ponte City Tower is a cylindrical apartment block located in the Berea district, just next to Hillbrow. Built in 1975 to a height of 173 meters (567 feet), it was the tallest residential skyscraper in Africa for nearly five decades. The talles is now in Egypt.

The tower’s most distinctive feature is its hollow interior, know as “the core.” Instead of a traditional enclosed center, the building opens upward to the sky, creating a massive vertical courtyard that runs through the entire structure.

At the bottom of the core, an uneven bedrock foundation pushes through the ground, giving the space an eerie, cavern-like atmosphere.

Johannesburg’s Luxury Dream

When Ponte City opened, it was the place to live in Johannesburg, called “the New York City of Africa,” it represented the ambition of a rapidly growing Johannesburg.

Hillbrow was then a bustling, cosmopolitan neighborhood of artists and intellectuals, filled with cafes and bookshops. Ponte City Tower was designed as the ultimate luxury address overlooking it all.

It was envisioned as a “city within a city.” Designed with retail stores at the bottom, a planned indoor ski slope on the core floor, and penthouses filled with saunas and chrome bars. A noble ideal that would fall very short of what it attempted to accomplish.

The Architecture Behind Ponte City

Ponte City’s design was borrowed from Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City, and the mid-century fantasy of self-contained urban living.

The circular form wasn’t just aesthetic. At the time, Johannesburg building regulations required kitchens and bathrooms to have a window. To satisfy this, the architects designed the building with a hollow interior, allowing light to enter the apartments from both sides. It was a practical solution that also happened to create one of the most distinctive silhouettes. It kind of looks like a giant cigarette to me.

How Apartheid Changed Hillbrow

As apartheid-era policies intensified during the 1980s, Hillbrow began to change dramatically.

White flight accelerated as Black residents moved into the area. Fear of crime became racialized and politically weaponized, mirroring patterns seen in many American cities during the same period.

At the same time, the government started noticing racial mixing which was against the law at the time, so they shut down power and electricity to the neighborhood. They also enforced mass evictions, and buildings went half vacant overnight. Rents dropped, while maintenance deteriorated. Plumbing systems failed and the building’s decline had begun.

From Luxury Tower to the Most Dangerous Residential Apartment

After apartheid ended, conditions worsened.

Gangs moved in. Management abandoned it. Garbage piled up in the core rising floor after floor to the sky. According to my guide, it once reached as high as the 14^th floor.

Residents on the lower floors looked out from their apartments to mounds of trash

The building became known as “suicide central.”

In 1998 the owner applied to rezone it into a maximum security prison, saying something along the lines of that it was already filled with criminals, all we would have to do is add the bars. An American architect was brought in to assess it and his verdict was: “It’s a lousy apartment building, but a perfect prison.” The plan was dropped, but the fact that it was seriously considered says everything about what the building had become.

When the trash was finally removed years later, bodies were found buried within.

Walking Up 54 Stories

Access to the building is tightly controlled.

A revolving metal gate, like the NYC subway turnstiles, provided first access to the apartment grounds. A second revolving gate inside the lobby, manned by a security guard and backed by facial recognition, controlled access to the elevators and upper floors. Six elevators total: three serving the lower floors, three for above the 30th.

The building has been refurbished and is occupied again, though the interior facing windows are now sealed shut permanently. A reminder, etched into the architecture.

The tour guide mentioned that they host competitions to see how fast people can run up the 54 stories in the narrow stairwell.

After the tour, I decided to find out how long it would take me to walk it and convinced my guide to do it with me. We did it in twelve minutes and thirty-three seconds and arrived to the Dlala Nje event space on the 51st floor in time to catch the sunset.

With an open window and the sound of the neighborhood and the city stretching out before us, it was one of the most memorable moments of the trip.

Did the architecture Contribute to the Decline?

As I walked through the building, one question circulated in my head.

Did the architecture create the conditions for what Ponte City Tower eventually became?

The lower levels of the tower receive almost no sunlight from the interior courtyard and remain in near permanent shadow. Higher apartments receive more natural light, better views and greater desirability.

Wealth and status become physically embedded into the structure itself. Honestly, it’s not too different than skyscrapers around the world today.

At the very bottom of the core, the exposed bedrock creates an almost subterranean landscape. No sunlight reaches the space. Crickets chirp continuously in the darkness while children’s voices echoed off the curved concrete walls.

Ponte City Today

Outside, an abandoned swimming pool sits in decay besides the parking structure.

The kids from the core found their way out there too. One girl noticed my camera and asked if I could take her picture. As I did, others gathered around and I soon had an impromptu photoshoot.

Kids will be kids, no matter where they are in the world. What changes are the opportunities and environments surrounding them.

Apartheid didn’t just shape people, it restructured entire neighborhoods, starved them of resources, and then left them to absorb the consequences when it ended. The Hillbrow that Ponte City Tower was built to crown was a thriving, cosmopolitan area. What it became was a direct result of policy, neglect, and decades of disinvestment.

The building is refurbished now, marketed as safe and affordable, but the surrounding neighborhood is still recovering. Abandoned and Hijacked buildings,properties taken over by crime groups or slumlords who illegally collect rent from tenants who have nowhere else to go.

You can see all of it from the 51st floor as the sun set.

Watch: Life Inside Ponte City

Watch this video on the tower by Phillip Bloom, to get an idea of what it is like from resident’s living there today.

A great article on the building: here