277- Ponte City Tower

Episode Summary

Episode Show Notes

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.

Episode Transcript

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SPEAKER_06: Louis was too young to understand why his parents couldn't be seen together in Johannesburg, or as everyone calls it, Jo-burg. Louis just saw a world that treated them differently. SPEAKER_03: You know, if your mother got sick and didn't have a medical aid, she'd go to a hospital out of the city, whereas with your dad, you'd go to what is the Jo-burg-Gen, which was around the corner from where we stayed. SPEAKER_06: Healthcare, like almost everything else in South Africa, was decided by race. Louis' father was white. His mother was colored, a local term for people of mixed race. They'd gotten married in neighboring Swaziland, but back home, their marriage was against the law. SPEAKER_02: When Louis 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. SPEAKER_06: This is Darshan Mudli. He's a South African journalist. SPEAKER_02: Black people, on the other hand, lived in the crowded outskirts, which were far from just about everything you'd want in a city. The country's ruling white minority called this system apartheid, which literally translated to separateness. Our policy is one which is called by an Afrikaans word apartheid. SPEAKER_08: 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 neighborliness. SPEAKER_02: Apartheid leaders like Henrik Verfert claimed that segregated cities were better for everyone. And apartheid 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. SPEAKER_06: But the apartheid system was never airtight, and people found creative ways to slip through the cracks. SPEAKER_03: 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 flat land. SPEAKER_06: And over the years, many families like Louise disappeared into one high-rise apartment building in particular, a tower called Ponte City. SPEAKER_03: I don't think there's anybody in Johannesburg that doesn't know Ponte. Might not have been there, but everybody knows Ponte. SPEAKER_02: Even looking at Joburg's skyline now, Ponte's hard to miss. First of all, it's 54 stories tall. It makes it the tallest apartment building on the entire African continent. And it certainly makes it taller than any of the other buildings around it. It's also completely circular. If you were to look at Ponte from above, you'd see that the center is 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. SPEAKER_06: 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 spot it. SPEAKER_02: Ponte's larger-than-life architecture also comes with a larger-than-life reputation. For many, the building symbolizes Johannesburg because over the past four decades, its fortunes have basically mirrored the city's. SPEAKER_12: Because of its scale, because of its size, its checkered history, its toughness, its roughness talks to every Joburg condition. SPEAKER_06: That's Melinda Silverman, an architectural historian who studies inner-city Johannesburg. SPEAKER_12: It has spoken to a city which goes very rapidly through cycles of decline and prosperity and decline and prosperity. SPEAKER_06: Ponte 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. Just before Ponte became a hideaway for interracial families like Louis, 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. SPEAKER_02: 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 labor and its rich gold deposits. We were the major gold producers in the world. SPEAKER_12: And the feeling was that if we could continue being the major gold producers and keep an increasingly restive black population under control, the future was brilliant. SPEAKER_06: Unless of course you were black. SPEAKER_02: 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 fill the gap by recruiting single white men from all over Europe. The country's white population increased by over 50% between 1963 and 1972. These newcomers saw a strong economy and an idyllic life for white people. SPEAKER_12: With a level of privilege that you probably couldn't have found in any other part of the world. If you were a middle class person living in an apartment in England, in America, you would probably have had to have washed your own dishes and made your own beds. Whereas if you were a middle class person living in South Africa, you probably had at least two people doing that stuff for you. SPEAKER_02: And there was one square mile of inner city Joburg, the future site of Ponti Tower, that 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 London's Soho district. SPEAKER_06: But it was also a place that felt almost like it wasn't in South Africa at all. Like most of Joburg's nicest neighborhoods, this area was zoned exclusively for white people. Black South Africans could work there, but unless they were live-in servants, they had to be out by nightfall each evening. SPEAKER_02: 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 Joburg's new high-rises. SPEAKER_12: The other sort of driver, I would say, was ideological. And it was this extraordinary sense of white confidence that this was a great economy, these were good times, this was white people wanting to make their mark on the landscape, South Africa as a modern, progressive, impressive place. SPEAKER_02: 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-ruled. This decade is the decade of African independence. SPEAKER_00: The people of Ghana see their freedom as more than a local triumph, 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. SPEAKER_06: 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 movement's most powerful leaders in jail for life, including a young lawyer named Nelson Mandela. SPEAKER_02: But Joburg'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. SPEAKER_04: Ponte starts off being a tower, a round tower. SPEAKER_02: That's architect Rodney Kroskopf, who was one of the three architects who designed the building. SPEAKER_04: Imagine again this 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 so beautifully down. People once upon a time said it looks a bit like a wedding cake. SPEAKER_06: But not everyone agreed the building was beautiful. Some thought it looked like an ugly, brutalist wedding cake. SPEAKER_04: Right after it was built, it was voted as the second ugliest building in Johannesburg. SPEAKER_06: Not even the honor of being the first ugliest. SPEAKER_04: The second ugliest. We can't even say the second ugliest. SPEAKER_06: Second ugliest or not, Ponte 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 Ponte faced both inward and outward, with entrances wrapping around the central core. SPEAKER_02: From one side of the building, you could see the entire downtown skyline. 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 SPEAKER_04: average small town, and it had more people than the average small town in South Africa. SPEAKER_06: The developers saw it that way, too. On Ponte's ground floor, they built an elaborate shopping mall and schemed about putting a miniature ski slope in the open core. SPEAKER_04: So we had restaurants, butcher, baker, candlestick maker, designed in that space. And we really did see it as a little city. SPEAKER_06: But even as Ponte's new residents were moving in, the city around them was cracking apart. At this time, Johannesburg's inner city was almost exclusively white. Six South Africans lived on the edges of the city, in communities called townships. And 12 miles southwest of Ponte, in a black township called Soweto, a new revolt against apartheid had begun. SPEAKER_09: What began as a black protest against being taught in Afrikaans, a language they regard as useless and that of their masters, is now a manifestation of urban black frustration. SPEAKER_02: It 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. SPEAKER_09: As a pall 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. SPEAKER_02: The Soweto uprising also sent Joburg's 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. SPEAKER_06: 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. First of all, the flats there would have been more affordable. Really good location, the SPEAKER_12: ability to be really near to the workplaces that still existed in the inner city. SPEAKER_02: 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. SPEAKER_12: I think the anonymity, that really high density living offered, which meant that people would have been less conspicuous if they were illegal. SPEAKER_03: There was an Italian gentleman who had a black lady as a wife. There was a French gentleman who also had a colored wife. SPEAKER_02: That's Louis Smuts again, 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, South Africans coined a new term for the phenomenon. They called it graying. SPEAKER_06: For Louis, gray areas were an escape. Ponte was a place where his family could be together freely without fear of arrest or public scrutiny. SPEAKER_03: I don't even remember seeing any building raids or anything like that. You almost had 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. SPEAKER_02: But that didn't mean that there weren't stresses associated with life in Ponte. Police regularly set up checkpoints to monitor who came in and out of black and white areas of the city. When Louis's family went through these checkpoints, his mother would sit in the back seat, posing as the family's maid. SPEAKER_03: She'd have to sit in the back. It was plain as simple as that. She sat in the back. SPEAKER_02: Black and colored people who were legally settled in the inner city also struck a hard bargain. Landlords would turn a blind eye to the color of the residents' 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 SPEAKER_12: you are an illegal tenant, 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. SPEAKER_06: 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. Eventually, legend spread that the trash had piled up so high it reached the 14th story of the building. SPEAKER_02: 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 neighborhood, called Hillbrow, probably depended a lot on the color of your skin. SPEAKER_12: White suburbanites would have been terrified to go into Hillbrow, and Hillbrow would have been a place of fear and blight and darkness. Whereas I think for people in the townships — that is, mostly black and colored people — Hillbrow would have been this great beacon SPEAKER_12: of opportunity, your way into the city, your way of experiencing urban life. SPEAKER_02: 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 2nd, 1990, then-President F.W. de Klerk went in front of Parliament to give his annual State of the Nation speech. SPEAKER_11: Today, I'm able to announce far-reaching decisions. SPEAKER_06: 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. SPEAKER_11: The prohibition of the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party is being rescinded. The government has taken a firm decision to release Mr. Mandela unconditionally. SPEAKER_06: 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. SPEAKER_14: I think it was 1991, the year that we came back in. SPEAKER_02: That's Lenswe Mohatle, an anti-apartheid activist who fled South Africa in 1981. Like many other returning exiles, Lenswe took advantage of the centrality and cheap rent of the inner city and moved into a friend's 24th floor apartment in Ponte Tower. Ponte and the surrounding neighborhood were still run down, but Lenswe was surprised to find the area felt a lot like the Western cities where he'd spent the past decade. SPEAKER_14: That's where the music was happening. 24-hour food outlets that we had not seen anywhere else were there. So the lights were on throughout. Yeah, it was like being in New York. SPEAKER_06: Some of the old European cafes from the 50s and 60s were still standing, serving late night espressos 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. SPEAKER_14: So if you wanted to find anybody who were around today, we never used to sleep. SPEAKER_02: Instead, Mokhaetle says they stayed up all night, talking about the future of their new country over beers and brandies. Thabo Mbeki, 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. SPEAKER_06: But the end of apartheid didn't represent the end of Ponte Tower's 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. SPEAKER_02: Throughout the 1990s, immigrants began arriving in Johannesburg by the tens of thousands. And many of them landed in Ponte. SPEAKER_03: I'm from Malab. SPEAKER_01: To Maui. SPEAKER_14: Nigeria. I'm from Zambia. SPEAKER_02: That's footage from a film called Africa Shafted by Ingrid Martins. 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. SPEAKER_06: Martins found people from dozens of countries living in the building, mostly in crowded 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. SPEAKER_00: I just want to give my little boy the life that I never had. SPEAKER_06: 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. SPEAKER_02: 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 apartheid, 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. 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 wads of bubble gum. It's a sort of analogue Craigslist. A message board for newcomers searching for accommodation in Ponte and around Hillbrow. SPEAKER_02: And the list goes on. Sifting through the messages, the demand feels limitless. SPEAKER_06: 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 Joburg skyline continues to play the same role for newcomers that it always has. SPEAKER_12: The diversity is the same. You know, there might have been Czechoslovakians, Portuguese, Italians and Danes living in Hillbrow then, but now there are Cameroonians, Angolans, Nigerians, Zimbabweans, etc. It always has been your entry point into the city. SPEAKER_06: So did Ponte 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 epilogue about Ponte's life on screen after this. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant-based super blend made up of superfoods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients. In a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein-packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Kachava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. 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The second reporter is Ryan Brown and she was a resident of Ponte Tower and has done a lot of reporting on the place. And one of the things about Ponte 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 SPEAKER_13: other popular culture. Most recently in the last Resident Evil film as a site of the zombie apocalypse. It was in District 9 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 sort of gritty and messy going on. SPEAKER_06: 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 SPEAKER_13: 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, you know, 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 SPEAKER_06: of films where it's not necessarily Ponte or it's not necessarily Johannesburg, but there's this, the idea of a tower that's a city in and of itself that is its own sort of dark place. Dread, for example, reminds me of the way that people talk about Ponte City as well. Yeah, exactly. And an interesting thing about Dread is that the movie itself SPEAKER_13: was filmed in Johannesburg and they didn't use Ponte as a set, but then there's a sort of a massive apartment tower in the film, a 200 story building that has a hollow open core. So you have to wonder, you know, sort of where they got that idea. Right. Why do SPEAKER_06: 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? You know, I think SPEAKER_13: 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 onto 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, is the aesthetic of the building is 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 in this sort of shaft of light. It's almost otherworldly. So it has this very cinematic quality to it. But I do find the, you know, 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 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 Joburg or of Ponte as these really dangerous, gritty, crime-ridden 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. SPEAKER_06: And you lived there for a time, right? SPEAKER_13: I did. I lived there for about a year coinciding with the filming of the Resident Evil movie. 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 endpoint to this Ponte metaphor. In what way? Well, if Ponte sort of represents the sort of chaotic way that Johannesburg has evolved since the end of apartheid and the disarray of the city in that period, I mean, what represents disarray more than a zombie apocalypse? SPEAKER_06: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Ryan Brown and Doshan Mudli with Delaney Hall. Mix and tech production by Sharif Yousif. Music by Sean Rial, with an additional song by Jenny Conley-Drizos, John Neufeld, and Nate Creary. Our senior producer is Katie Mingle. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. But we all add in our two cents, including Emmett Fitzgerald, Avery Truffleman, Taron Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to Ingrid Martins, 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% Invisible is part of Radio-Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by the Knight Foundation and coin carrying listeners just like you. You can find 99% Invisible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars, and the show at 99pi.org. We're 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.org. SPEAKER_07: At Discount Tire, we know your time is valuable. Get 30% shorter average wait time when you buy and book online. Did you know Discount Tire now sells wiper blades? Check out our current deals at DiscountTire.com or stop in and talk to an associate today. Discount Tire. SPEAKER_04: With the McDonald's app, you can get your favorite thing delivered to your door so you SPEAKER_10: can eat your favorite thing while you watch your favorite thing at home. Order McDelivery in the McDonald's app. By participating in McDonald's, delivery prices may be higher than at restaurants. Delivering SPEAKER_05: other fees may apply. Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit? Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops, the same way you say studio. That's not how we say it. Fruit Loops, find the loopy side.