“If you lived in a high rise building with five or six hundred flats in it,” explains Smuts, “they weren’t going to go through each and every flat to come look for any illegal persons.” And over the years, many interracial families like the Smuts disappeared into one high rise apartment building in particular—a tower called Ponte City. “I don’t think there’s anybody in Johannesburg that doesn’t know Ponte,” Smuts says. “They might not have been there. But everybody knows Ponte.”
Looking at Johannesburg’s skyline, the 54-story tower is hard to miss—it is the tallest apartment building on the African continent. It is also distinctively shaped, a massive cylinder with an empty central core. The billboard wrapping its top like a crown also helps it stand out. For many, the building symbolizes Johannesburg—because over the past four decades, its fortunes have reflected the changing city around it. [...]
It was still illegal for black, colored, and Indian South Africans to live in these areas, but the scale and density of the inner city made the laws harder to enforce. A new term was coined to describe the increased mixing going out on—”graying“—and for many, gray areas were refuges, impossible for the police to close down and search all at once. Landlords would turn a blind eye to skin color, but, in exchange, illegal residents had to deal with rent increases and poor maintenance.
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