Ponte City enters a new era

At 51 years old and 54 storeys high, landmark Johannesburg apartment block Ponte City has seen it all.

Not only sweeping views, but also its own evolution from a trendy attraction for the city's well-heeled to a vast drug den teeming with pimps, prostitutes and criminals, a magnate for suicides and, finally, a renovated, secure access and limited-occupancy apartment block. 

Now the iconic cylindrical building on the edge of Hillbrow is about to undergo another reinvention as it goes on sale.

Built in 1973 by architects Rodney Grosskopff, Mannie Feldman and Manfred Hermer, Ponte started out as the crème de la crème of city living in the most vibrant, cosmopolitan and fast-paced neighbourhood, considered the heartbeat of Joburg’s urban scene. 

The building quickly filled up with a diverse mix of young professionals, artists, students, immigrants, and bohemians. But the heyday ended as the Joburg underworld moved into Hillbrow and Berea, and Ponte’s glory days ended. 

A dark era began in the late 1980s as the concrete tower morphed into a den of iniquity.

Residents during that time reportedly said the 11th and 12th floors of Ponte were stripped bare and described the downstairs parking garages and empty spaces as a thoroughfare for vagrants, drug dealers and sex workers.

The lifts stopped working and people living on the upper floors took to tossing their trash into the inner core of the tower that stands on a solid lump of rock. 

Ponte was sold to the Kempston Group in 1994. They cleaned up, renovated, introduced secure access and limited occupancy to one person per bed. “It took them years to sort everything out,” said Norman Raad, part of the Broll Auctioneers team handling the tender sale. 

Sifiso Zikhali, who lives in a two-bedroom apartment on the 50th floor with his wife and small son, was attending school in Berea and lived in the area with his aunt during the week when he saw the transformation happen. 

“That rubbish inside mounted up 14 storeys. Can you imagine that? And the core is small, you can’t drive forklifts in there. Everything had to be pulled out by hand,”  he said. 

After the building was secured, he began attending the aftercare offered at Ponte for youngsters in the area in need of a safe space to do homework and socialise. He now works as a guide for tour operator Dlala Nje (Just play, in Zulu) — a nonprofit organisation offering Ponte and Hillbrow experiences to visitors and tourists, based in premises on the ground floor. 

One of the founders of Dlala Nje is journalist Nickolaus Bauer, whose own links to the building began when he pitched the idea of a big feature on Ponte to then Mail & Guardian editor Nick Dawes. His initial idea of a news piece on drug lords and underworld dealings ended instead with him signing a lease for a two-bedroom apartment on the 51st floor. 

“So there I was, ready to write about gangs and prostitution and the first person I met was a guy going to work at Standard Bank. Then another resident who was off to Spur. Every idea I had melted away, and by June 2012 I had moved into the building myself,” he told the Sunday Times.

“This haven in the clouds outclassed my shoebox in hipsterville (Maboneng precinct) ... Where else would the entire city be laid out before me while sipping my morning coffee, where else could I live in a plush 120m² two-bedroom pad in the sky, complete with granite counter tops and a sunken bathtub, all for only R4,500 a month?” Bauer said — quoting the current rental.

After some rough starts with friends who refused to visit out of fear of being hijacked in Hillbrow, Bauer saw the building begin to appeal to more young professionals. Within a few weeks Bauer and his connections in the building started Dlala Nje — a small business they believed could make money out of the 2,000-plus Ponte residents. 

But after losing out on a lease opportunity for a laundromat, and a failed effort at a games arcade for children, the venture morphed into the social enterprise that Dlala Nje is today — an outfit offering aftercare services; a social area and entertainment facility for teens, a computer centre and skills workshops for adults which they fund through their other offerings: guided tours, experiences and the three-monthly Ponte Challenge. 

The Ponte Challenge came about after a 2017 visit to the building by Kennedy Welani Tembo of Joburg Micro Adventures, who arrived when the lifts weren’t functioning and agreed to climb all 980 stairs to the top of the building. 

“That wasn’t so bad. And I know some crazy people would even enjoy this,” Tembo said at the time, prompting the start of the now regular event that sees fitness freaks climbing the building in an effort to beat the young boy who set the record at five minutes and 46 seconds back before Covid.

Spanish architect Marta Postigo, who was in Joburg on assignment for work and staying at a residential hotel, was intrigued by Ponte and moved in next door to Bauer. They became friends, then started dating, had a child and in September 2023 got married on the rock at the bottom of the Ponte core. 

“We both loved the place, and it was part of our history. What better place to start your commitment as a family than to get married where you fell in love?” Bauer said, admitting that they have since ditched apartment life for a house with a garden and a dog. 

Ponte management has since made Bauer’s Penthouse 5101 available to Dlala Nje as a clubhouse for tourists. It's been redecorated African style with Ponte artworks by local artists on the walls and offered for sale. It features a large cement bar counter and tables covered in flattened pilchard tins surrounded by stools made of beer crates joined with cable ties topped with bright cushions covered in shweshwe fabrics. 

Visitors to the building, while mostly international tourists, now include locals “who got bored during Covid and started looking for stuff to see and do around here”. 

According to Zikhali, when Nelson Mandela died in 2013 and South Africa was swamped with journalists from around the globe, Ponte became the focus of many stories on South Africa’s iconic buildings. “Meanwhile, people here had no idea that Ponte was safe again, and there we were being written about in The New York Times and all kinds of overseas media,” he said. 

Now, after taking more than 30,000 visitors through, Dlala Nje rates among the top 10 things to do in Joburg on Trip Adviser, and they have a 94% five-star rating. Students from the Henley and Gibs business schools regularly use them for research and study. 

Ponte residents, according to Zikhali, are mostly middle-class foreigners, families and urban professionals seeking a safe, well-managed, affordable place to stay with children. “This building is very strict, and you can easily lose your deposit. You don’t see people doing wild decorating and things like that here. We are all just ordinary.” 

Ponte is up for sale on a closed auction. The private tender closes on April 10.