99% Invisible - 277- Ponte City Tower

Episode Date: September 26, 2017

Ponte City Tower, the brutalist cylindrical high-rise that towers over Johannesburg, has gone from a symbol of white opulence to something far more complicated. It’s gone through very hard times, but also it’s hopeful. It’s a microcosm of the South Africa’s history, but it’s also a place that moves on. And to this day, this strange concrete tube at the center of Johannesburg’s skyline continues to play the same role for newcomers that it has for decades: serving as the diverse entry point to the city. Ponte City Tower

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Back in the 1980s, when Louis Smuts was growing up in Johannesburg, South Africa, his family couldn't go outside together without breaking the law. My father would never walk next to my mother. My mother would always walk behind him wherever they went. Louis was too young to understand why his parents couldn't be seen together in Johannesburg, or as everyone calls it, Joe Burke. Louis just saw a world that treated them differently.

You know, if your mother got sick and didn't have a medical age, she'd go to a hospital out of the city. Whereas, when you're dead, you'd go to what is the Joe Burke gene, which was around the corner from where we stayed. Healthcare, like almost everything else in South Africa, was decided by race. Louise's father was white. His mother was colored, a local term, for people of mixed race. They'd gotten married in neighboring swatting land, but back home their marriage was against

the law. When Louise was a kid, only white people could move freely in cities here, live in the nicest neighborhoods, or access the best hospitals, schools, and jobs. This is Dashaan Mudley, he's a South African journalist. Black people, on the other hand, lived in the crowded outskirts, which were far from just about everything you'd want in the city. The country's ruling white minority called this system a partate, which literally translated

to separateness. Our policy is one which is called by an African's word apartheid. And I'm afraid that has been misunderstood so often. It could just as easily and perhaps much better be described as a policy of good-nableness. of good neighbourliness. A partate leaders like Hendrick for Foot claimed that segregated cities were better for everyone. And a partate was strictly enforced. Police would patrol neighborhoods to make sure that white people and black people weren't living together. If you lived in a house, they'd come knocking on your door. But the apartheid system was never airtight and people found creative ways to slip through

the cracks. If you lived in a high-rise building with 500, 600 flats in it, you know, they weren't going to go through each and every flat to come and look for any illegal persons. You could easily disappear into flatland. In over the years many families like Louise disappeared into one high-rise apartment building in particular, a tower called Ponty City. I don't think there's anybody in Johannesburg that doesn't know Ponty might not have been there but everybody knows Poni. Even looking at Joburg's Skyline now, Punti's hard to miss.

First of all, it's 54 stories tall. That makes it the tallest apartment building on the entire African continent. And it certainly makes a taller than any of the other buildings around it. It's also completely circular. If you were to look at Punti from above, you'd see that the center's just this open hollow

core designed to allow natural ventilation and to let in daylight. The building looks kind of like a massive concrete toilet roll. It's also got this glowing red billboard for a cell phone company wrapping around the top like a crown. So wherever you are in the city, you can easily spawn it. Punti's larger than life architecture also comes with the larger than life reputation. a crown, so wherever you are in the city, you can easily spawn it. Pontis larger than life architecture also comes with the larger than life reputation. For many, the building symbolizes Johannesburg, because over the past four decades, its fortunes have basically mirrored the cities. Because of its scale, because of its size, its chick at history, its toughness, its roughness, talks to the

Jobo condition. That's Melinda Silverman, an architectural historian who studies inner-city Johannesburg. It has spoken to a city which goes very rapidly through cycles of decline and prosperity and decline and prosperity and decline and prosperity. Ponti has always been kind of a vertical waiting room for admission to South African society, but it's also been a laboratory, a place where the city seems to try out new versions of itself. Years before Ponti became a hideaway for interracial families like Louise, it attracted a much different clientele and to understand who first lived there and why. We have to go back to the 1960s before Ponte was even built. At the start of the

60s, the apartheid system had been firmly in place for more than 10 years and South Africa's economy was a rising star in the world. It had just given birth to a new currency, the Rand, which was already stronger than the US dollar. The country's success was largely driven by its access to cheap black labour and its rich gold deposits. We were the major gold producers in the world and the feeling was that if we could continue being the major gold producers and keep an increasingly raced of black population under control, the future was brilliant. Unless of course you were black.

Over the next decade foreign investment in South Africa doubled, but skilled workers were in short supply. Because the government had denied the majority of the population a decent education, it had to full the gap by recruiting single white men from all over Europe. The country's white population increased by over 50 percent between 1963 and 1972. These newcomers saw a strong economy and an idyllic life for white people. Whereas if you were a middle class person living inside Africa, you probably had at least two people doing that stuff for you. And there was one square mile of Inner City Joberg, the future site of Ponte Tower,

there was a regular landing place for these European migrants in the 1960s and 70s. It was home to the city's most famous bars and live music joints. A place where specialty stores sold French magazines, Italian shoes and American rock and roll, it had a shiny, vibrant, bohemian edge that people compared to New York's Greenwich Village or Blendon's Soho District. But it was also a place that felt almost like it wasn't in South Africa at all. Like most of Joe Berg's nicest neighborhoods, this area was zoned exclusively for white people.

Black South Africans could work there, but unless they were living servants, they had to be out by nightfall each evening. Developers could hardly satisfy the demand for high rise apartments in this part of the city. Buildings kept getting bigger and taller, but that wasn't the only thing fueling the development of Joe Biggs new high-rises. The other sort of driver, I would say, was ideological, and it was the extraordinary sense of white confidence that this was a great economy, these were good times. This was why people wanted to make

them more on the landscape. South Africa has a modern progressive, impressive place. Of course, South Africa was neither truly modern nor progressive at this time. This was the era of African independence. Across the continent, old colonies were falling like dominoes, and by the mid-1960s, most African countries were black-roared. This decade is the decade of African independence. The people of Ghana see their freedom as more than a local tribe. For they are now the only all-African dominion in the British Commonwealth. In the new Africa, one more independent country, the state of Uganda.

To much of the world, South Africa's white government was starting to look pretty backwards, and it didn't help that the country had recently thrown several of the anti-apartheid movements most powerful leaders in jail for life, including a young lawyer named Nelson Mandela. But Jobberg's new buildings kept getting bigger and more audacious, almost as if the government was trying to prove its worldliness. By the early 1970s, huge skyscrapers were sprouting up across central Joburg, including Ponte. Ponte starts off being a tower, a round tower.

That's architect Rodney Crosscoff, who was one of the three architects who designed the building. So now I imagine again, there's tall tower, 54 stories tall, with a hole down the middle. And the whole outside of it, it is made out of raw concrete, unpainted, unpolished, and then at its foot, it's really anchored, it's so beautifully done. People, once upon a time, said it looks a bit like a wedding cake. But not everyone agreed the building was beautiful. Some thought it looked like an ugly, brutalist wedding cake.

Straight after it was built, it was voted as the second ugliest building in Johannesburg. Not even the honor of being the first ugliest. The second ugliest. When can even the second ugliest? Second ugliest or not, Ponti Tower was popular. Residents started moving in even before the building was finished, lured by its furnished flats and panoramic city views. All the units in Ponti faced both inward and outward,

with entrances wrapping around the central core. From one side of the building, you could see the entire downtown skyline. From another, you could catch entire Red Bee matches at the city's main stadium. By the time Ponti was completed in 1975, From another, you could catch entire rugby matches at the city's main stadium. By the time Ponte was completed in 1975, its 470 flats were in high demand. There were all sorts of analogies about how it was going to use as much electricity as average small town and it would have more people than every small town in South Africa. The developers saw it that way too.

On Pontys' ground floor, they built an elaborate shopping mall and skimmed about putting a miniature ski slope in the open core. So we had restaurants, butchabaka, candlestick maker designed in that space. And we really did see it as a little city. But even as Pontys' new residents were moving in, the city around them was cracking apart. At this time, Johannesburg's inner city was almost exclusively white.

Black South Africans lived on the edges of the city and communities called townships. In 12 miles, Southwest of Ponty, in a black township called Soweto, a new revolt against apartheid had begun. What began as a black protest against being taught in Soweto, a new revolt against apartheid had begun. What began as a black protest against being taught in Africa, a language they regard as useless and back of their masters, is now a command of the station of urban black frustration.

Protests escalated, and on June 16, 1976, police killed at least 176 high school students during a peaceful protest march. Images of the massacre quickly circled the globe, inspiring renewed calls to end white rule. As a Paul of smoke rises over this black community, so rises African anticipation. Throughout South Africa, they see minority white regimes falling or coming under greater pressure.

The Soweto uprising also sent Joe Bugs urban planning dreams crashing. The June 16th uprising and the international sanctions and boycotts that followed helped destroy the country's economy. It became difficult to keep all the newly constructed high rises fully occupied. And it wasn't just the crashing economy. Like many cities around the world, Johannesburg had started to experience a wave of suburbanization with white people moving out of the inner city and into new suburbs. Meanwhile, many Black South Africans were fleeing from the poverty and violence of the townships.

For them, the inner city was an alluring option, especially Ponte. If it were all flats, there would have been more affordable, really good location, the ability to be really near to the workplaces that still existed in the inner city. In the 1980s, it was still illegal for black, Indian and colored South Africans to live in these areas, but the scale and density of the inner city made the laws harder to enforce. I think the anonymity that really had density living offered, which meant that people

could have been less conspicuous if they were legal. There was an Italian gentleman who had a black lady as a wife. There's a French gentleman who also had a coloured wife. That's Louis Smetzigan, whose parents were in an illegal interracial marriage. He's talking about some of the other families who also lived in Ponte in the early 1980s. As the lines between black and white began to blur in buildings like Ponte, so the Africans coined a new term for the phenomenon.

They called it graying. For Louis, gray areas were in escape. Ponte was a place where his family could be together, freely without fear of arrest or public scrutiny. I don't even remember seeing any building raids or anything like that. You almost had a protection being in the flatland, you know, because there were so many places going to a flat here, going to a flat there, you know,

they weren't going to close down a whole block of flats at once. But that didn't mean that there weren't stresses associated with life in Ponty. Police regularly set up checkpoints to monitor who came in and out of black and white areas of the city. When Louise family went through these checkpoints, his mother would sit in the back seat, posing as the family's maid. She'd have to sit in the back. It was plain as simple as that she sat in the back. Black and coloured people who were legally settled in the inner city

also struck a hard bargain. Landlords would turn a blind eye to the colour of the resident's skin and residents would have to turn a blind eye to rising rents and poor maintenance. Their status of illegality, I think, was absolutely critical to the decline because the minute you are an illegal tenet you have no protection of the law. So rents can be ramped up. Then if rents are ramped up, how do you afford the rent?

You sublet. And then the rents go up even further and then you sublet even more. Inside Ponte, apartments started to get crowded and grimy. Plumbing broke down. Trash began to fill the open core in the center of the building like an oversized concrete garbage can. There were giant piles of old mattresses, furniture, and rubble.

The eventually legend spread that the trash had piled up so high it reads the 14th story of the building. Pretty soon, banks stopped issuing home loans in the area and white people kept moving out. By the late 1980s, what you thought of Ponte and the surrounding neighbourhood called Hilbrough probably depended a lot on the colour of your skin. What's a bourbon arts would have been terrifying to go into Hilbrough and Hilbrough would have been a place of fear and blunt and darkness whereas I think for people in the townships that is mostly black and

coloured people. Hillbrough would have been this great be kind of opportunity your way into the city your way of experiencing urban life. And all these changes in the inner city were foreshadowing a much bigger change that was about to happen to all of South Africa. On February 2, 1990, then President F.W. Declarek went in front of Parliament to give his annual state of the nation's speech. Today, I'm able to announce far-reaching decisions. For three decades, the apartheid government had banned many anti-apartheid political parties. They arrested their members and sometimes forced them into exile.

No one was expecting the President to announce the end of that practice. He shocked nearly everyone watching. The first vision of the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party, is being resumbed. The government has taken a firm decision to release Mr. Mandela unconditional. This speech would change the course of South African history. A week later, after 27 years in prison for treason, Nelson Mandela was free. And after decades of struggle, the end of apartheid was suddenly imminent.

From all over the world, exiled political activists began to return. They wanted to help shape a dramatically changing country. I think it was 1991, the year that we came back in. That's Lensware Mojatle, an anti-apartheid activist who fled South Africa in 1981. Like many other returning exiles, Lensware took advantage of the centrality and cheap rent of the inner city and moved into a friend's 24th floor apartment in Ponti Tower. Ponti and the surrounding neighborhood were still ran down, but Lensware was surprised to find the area felt a lot like the Western cities where he'd spent the past decade.

That's where the music was happening. 24 hour food outlets that were not seen anywhere else were there. So the lights were on throughout. Yeah, it was like being in New York. Some of the old European cafes from the 50s and 60s were still standing, serving late night espresso's and thick schnitzels. But alongside them were new shops and nightclubs, including one run by the famous South African trumpeter, Hugh Masakela, who had recently returned from his own exile. So if you wanted to find anybody who were around you, we never used to sleep. Instead, Mochatlis is the state of all night, talking about the future of their new

country over beers and brandy's. Tabor and Becky, who would later become president of South Africa, lived in the building next to Ponte. At the time of the first democratic election in 1994, one observer counted 50 of the new members of parliament, staying in Ponte and the surrounding area. But the end of apartheid didn't represent the end of Ponte Towers' evolution. The transition to black rule in South Africa also meant the end of the country's tightly closed borders, which for decades had cracked open only for white immigrants and a few laborers

from the surrounding countries. Throughout the 1990s, immigrants began arriving in Johannesburg by the tens of thousands, and many of them landed in Ponte. I'm from Malawi. Do you know me? I'm from Zambia. That's footage from a film called Africa Shafed by Ingrid Martens. She filmed entirely inside of Ponte's elevators.

That's why it sounds like there are doors opening and shutting in the background all the time. Martens found people from dozens of countries living in the building, mostly encrowded apartments shared by several families. Some had come for work. Others were fleeing political persecution, but they shared one important experience with past residents. For them, Ponte was a place you could start over. Over the years, Ponte, like South Africa itself, continued to have its ups and downs. By the late 90s, the building's physical decline made it a haven for criminals, who moved into the building and ran it like a vertical slum.

But Ponte still remained a place of big ideas and wild experimentation. Developers made a few attempts to gentrify the tower and turn it into luxury apartments again. But ultimately, those plans didn't really work. Ponte today remains a lot like it was at the end of a part aid, a home for recently arrived immigrants from all over Africa. On a recent Saturday morning, a pair of kids are battling it out on a foosball table at the base of Ponte city. You can tell it's a close game. Oh, come on! Come on, come on! Just down the road, people are crowding around a wall

that's covered in hundreds of scribbled slips of paper in several different languages. Some are torn or stuck over older ones with wides of bubblegum. It's a sort of analog craigslist, a message board for newcomers searching for accommodation in Ponte and around Hillbrough. I'm looking for a lady or a guy to rent a bedroom or a balcony at 801 Metropolitan Tadop.

And the list goes on. Sifting through the messages, the demand feels limitless. Like South Africa itself, Ponte has gone from a symbol of white opulence to something far more complicated. It's hopeful, and it's a little rough around the edges. It's a microcosm of the country's history, but it's also a place that moves on. And the strange concrete tube at the center of Joeburg

Skyline continues to play the same role for newcomers that it always has. The diversity is the same. You know, there might have been chicks, leverkins, pochabies, Italians, and daines living in Hillbrough, then, but now the etc. etc. It always has been your entry point into the city. So did Ponty Tower seem vaguely familiar but you can't quite put your finger on it? It's because you probably saw it or a tower inspired by it in a movie. I have a little apple hog about Ponty's life on screen after this. Even though we only heard Dasha and Moodleys voice in this episode, it was reported by two people, actually.

The second reporter is Ryan Brown, and she was a resident of Ponti Tower, and has done a lot of reporting on the place. And one of the things about Ponti, that is pretty interesting, is that even though you might not know its actual history or even know its name, you might feel like it's kind of familiar as a place. And the reason is is because it has been depicted in movies in different ways. And I asked Ryan to talk to me about that. Well, Ponte has actually made quite a number of cameos in film and other popular culture.

Most recently in the last resident evil film as a site of the zombie apocalypse. It was in District nine a few years ago and the robot becoming human story chappy a couple of years ago too. And it's made a cameo in a number of other films too. Interestingly, not always films that are set in Johannesburg, but always films that are set in places where there's something either kind of apocalyptic or just, you know,

sort of gritty and messy going on. Right. It has that vibe. It's not necessarily a Johannesburg vibe. It's the vibe of apocalypse that it gives off. Yeah, totally. But, you know, you have to sort of wonder where did filmmakers get the idea that Ponte would be the scene for the apocalypse? And I think it's rooted in the kind of stereotypes that people have about the inner city of Johannesburg, which are then in turn rooted in, I think, the fears that a lot of South Africans have about the city and what it's become since the end of apartheid.

And there's also a number of films where it's not necessarily, Ponty, or it's not necessarily Johannesburg, but there's this, the idea of a tower that's a city in of itself that is its own sort of dark place, dread, for example, reminds me of the way that people talk about Ponty City as well. Yeah, exactly. And an interesting thing about dread is that the movie itself was filmed in Johannesburg

and they didn't use Ponty as a set, but then there's a sort of massive apartment tower in the film, a 200 story building that has a hollow open core. So you have to wonder where they got that idea. Right. Why do you think it's so evocative and why do you think it's used in this way? Are you troubled by it in any way or are you kind of pleased when you see it depicted? I think the way it's come to be is a combination of two things. And the one is that Ponte has become this sort of metaphor for Johannesburg

and for South Africa and this kind of outsized thing on the skyline on which people can project their fears about the city and what it's becoming. And I think filmmakers have just picked up on that. And then the other thing is, the aesthetic of the building, it's just pretty wild. I mean, it's just the sort of 50 stories of raw, brutal, concrete. It's got these kind of exposed concrete ribs on the inside.

The core is just this crazy, rocky space. You stare up and there's like 50 stories of windows staring back down at you and this sort of shaft of light. It's almost otherworldly. So it has this very cinematic quality to it. But I do find the way it appears in popular culture troubling because I think it sort of freezes in time this very negative vision of Johannesburg and this vision of Ponti. And Ponti and Johannesburg both have changed and are changing, you know, sort of extraordinarily quickly, Ponte. And Ponte and Johannesburg both have changed and are changing, you know, sort of extraordinarily quickly,

I think, and maybe you could say that about any city, but I think Johannesburg is a particularly unsentimental kind of city, and it's because it was started as this sort of mining town. It's always been a place where people just came to make money, to get rich, to get ahead. People don't have this kind of sentimental attachment to home in Johannesburg.

And so the city sort of moves on and forgets very quickly. But then when you have the arbiters of popular culture, when you have filmmakers come in and create this, or you know, sort of reinforce this vision of Joe Berg or of Panty as these really dangerous, gritty, crime-ridded spaces, it kind of freezes that image in people's minds, and that's sort of what they think the city is like,

whether or not it still is. And you lived there for a time, right? I did. I lived there for about a year coinciding with the filming of the Resident Evil movie. So I was treated to a number of days of the zombie apocalypse, and literally zombies wandering through my building screaming,

which seemed a sort of logical end point the zombie apocalypse and literally zombies wandering through my building screaming, which seemed a sort of logical endpoint to this pontymetaphor. And what way? Well, if ponties sort of represents a sort of chaotic way that Johannesburg has evolved since the end of a partake and the disarray of the city in that period, I mean, what represents disarray more than a zombie apocalypse? 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Ryan Brown and Dosh and Moodley with Delaney Hall.

Mix and Tech Production by Sharif Usif, Music by Sean Rial with an additional song by Jenny Conley-Dries-O's John Newfeld and Nate Query. Our senior producer is Katie Mingle. Kirk Colstead is the digital director, but we all add in our two cents, including Emmett Fitzgerald, Avery Trouffman, Taren Mazza and me, Roman Mars.

Special thanks to Ingrid Martens, who allowed us to use audio from her film, Africa Shafted. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. 99% of visible is part of Radio Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by the Night Foundation and coin carrying listeners, just like you.

You can find 99% of visible and joint discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI orc. Or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if you want to read a cool article by Kurt about fictional megacities in science fiction, you have to go to our website. It's 99PI dot org. Radio tapio. From P. from PRX.