From high-rise slum to toweringly trendy

DAYLIGHT filters through the ether in Africa’s tallest residential building, a brutalist cylindrical skyscraper with a hollow core that drops 54 floors to a ragged base of exposed bedrock. The view into the interior is eerie, a dim light giving it a sci-fi feel that recalls the film “Blade Runner”. But the outward-facing windows offer breathtakingly clear views, some of the best in Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial capital.

Ponte City was a posh address when it opened in 1975 at the edge of what was then the trendy inner-city district of Hillbrow, during the race-segregated era when central Johannesburg boomed. Ambitious developers planned to add an indoor ski slope inside the building.

But as apartheid crumbled, white South Africans and multinational firms abandoned the inner city because of crime. The tower, like much else, was left to decay. Hillbrow became a slum, filled with dirt-poor immigrants who had at last been allowed the freedom of movement to seek work. Ponte City became home to gangsters and drug dealers, its central core at one point piled five floors high with trash tossed from windows. In the 1990s, Johannesburg’s authorities discussed converting the place into a high-rise prison; wisecracks noted that it was already full of criminals.

But after years of ruin, Johannesburg is slowly changing from one of the world’s most dangerous places into an agreeably cosmopolitan city. Much of Hillbrow is still dodgy, but other pockets of the inner city are gentrifying, with fashionable rooftop bars, weekend markets and artists’ studios in newly chic warehouses. As usual, there are complaints about an excess of urban hipsters.

This new Johannesburg is apparent in the tenants of Ponte City, the emerging middle class of Africa hailing from every corner of the continent to seek safe, affordable housing in the big city. The building boasts biometric fingerprint access points and strict house rules, as the management strives to change its reputation. A two-bedroom penthouse at Ponte, with a kitchen renovated from 1970s linoleum floors to swish granite work-tops, costs a mere R4,500 ($525) a month, though this still means it is out of reach for most. And it will not turn pristine overnight: residents say you still have to dodge the odd dirty nappy chucked from high above.