Ash Müller@Askash
I finally took a tour of Ponte City.
For years I’ve driven past it, written about it, spoken about it, and used it as a reference point whenever the conversation turns to Johannesburg, urban decay, or the rise and fall of great cities. But I had never actually been inside.
Ponte City opened in 1975.
54 storeys. 173 metres tall.
For 48 years it held the title of the tallest building in Africa, only losing it to a tower in Egypt that beat it by just a few metres.
At its peak, around 1,000 people lived here.
At its lowest point, nearly 8,000 people were packed into the building without proper water or electricity, and Ponte was labelled Africa’s first vertical slum.
The stories from those years sound unreal.
Entire floors used as brothels.
Trash piled up inside the hollow core to the 14th floor.
It took three years to remove the waste, and over twenty bodies were found during the clean up.
Trucks couldn’t reach the site, so workers carried everything out by hand.
Since 2014, the internal windows have been welded shut to stop people throwing rubbish into the centre.
The building was refurbished before the 2010 World Cup, and today around 2,000 people live there.
When I arrived for the tour, my guide warned me not to panic if I heard a loud bang.
Residents sometimes throw nappies or trash out of the windows.
Not exactly the welcome you expect when entering one of the most famous residential towers in Africa.
And yet, walking inside, I was surprised.
Biometric access, 24-hour security and over 480 cameras monitoring the building.
Just past the turnstiles was a box full of house keys on the floor.
A simple system so school kids can collect their keys and go home if their parents are still at work.
We went up to what used to be one of the penthouse suites. Today it’s a shared entertainment space for residents. Baby showers, birthdays, after-work gatherings.
The view from the top is incredible, and also a little heartbreaking.
In the 1990s, this exact penthouse could be rented for about R800 a month. Four bedrooms, two lounges, sauna, jacuzzi, braai area, fully furnished.
From there we went to the community centre, where volunteers help children with homework after school. Downstairs, there’s convenience retail for residents. Fruit and veg shop, takeaway, butcher, tailor, pizza place.
A small ecosystem keeping the building alive.
Then we went to the centre - Ponte’s famous hollow core.
Built on a slope, the circular design made structural sense, but standing there feels like standing inside a monument to everything that went wrong in the Johannesburg CBD.
Cold metal stairs, dark concrete and echoes bouncing up fifty floors.
And then, a bang.
Someone threw a full bag of rubbish into the middle of the core while we were standing there.
My guide didn’t even flinch.
“They clean every day,” he said.
That moment was really profound.
Because you can install cameras, weld windows shut and hire security.
But if people don’t respect the place they live in, nothing really changes.
Standing inside Ponte feels symbolic of what happened to Johannesburg.
A city that was once ambitious, modern, proud. Then hollowed out by neglect, mismanagement, and people who stopped believing the space belonged to them.
And yet, Ponte refuses to die. The building recently went up for auction. It’s still unsold, which tells you someone believes there’s even more value left in it.
The tour ended in the underground parking with rows of cars - some working, some abandoned, some stripped down to nothing but shells.
Ponte is not just a story about urban decay. It’s a story about what happens when a city loses control and what it takes to build that control back.
And walking out of Ponte that day, I couldn’t stop thinking that Johannesburg and Ponte City have something in common.
Both were once symbols of possibility and both went through years that nearly broke them.
Yet, both are still standing, waiting to see if the people inside are ready to rebuild again.
