I’ve written about the Ponte Tower in Johannesburg before. At 54 storeys, it is the tallest building in Africa. It’s located in Hillbrow, which is an inner city neighborhood known for its crime and poverty.
In the 1970s when the tower was built, Hillbrow was an Apartheid-designated white-only neighborhood and the tower was filled with affluent residents. But that didn’t last long and eventually the wealth fled for the suburbs.
Here’s a brief 6 minute video talking the Ponte Tower. Let’s call it the real estate perspective. Click here if you can’t see it below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EIKmmSifqw?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
Now, here’s a Real Scenes documentary talking about the thriving electronic music scene in Johannesburg. I think it’s fascinating to look at a city from a particular subculture and, compared to the first video, I get a very different feel for the city. Click here if you can’t see it below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykt2f6o7-e8?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
Urban Land Magazine recently published an interesting article on the Hudson Yards project in New York, which is the largest private real estate development project ever undertaken in the United States. Click here for the article. Thanks to my friend Evan Schlecker for passing it along. It’s a good read.
The project is being co-developed by Related out of New York and Oxford Properties out of Toronto, and when it’s all said and done, it’ll be over 17 million square feet of commercial and residential space. It’s a $20 billion development project.
But beyond just being massive and epic, there are a bunch of other things that make this project unique. You can read about them all in Urban Land, but I’d like to share a few snippets with you all here:
The first is about the project’s placement on top of a rail yard:
In order to make use of a site already occupied by a working rail yard—including more than 30 tracks for the Long Island Rail Road and three train tunnels, with a fourth under construction—most of the development will be built atop two steel-and-concrete platforms. That base, and the buildings on it, will be supported by hundreds of concrete-filled caissons, which will be drilled between the rail lines into the bedrock.