When built, Ponte City was seen as an extremely desirable address due to its location and views over Johannesburg, but it became infamous for its crime and poor maintenance in the late 1980s to 1990s.

[7][8] At the time, Johannesburg bylaws required kitchens and bathrooms to have a window, so Grosskopff designed the building with a hollow interior open to the sky, allowing light to enter the wedge-shaped apartments from both the street and the atrium.

[6] At the bottom of the immense building were retail stores and initial plans to include an indoor ski slope on the 3,000-square-metre (32,000 sq ft) inner core floor.

[6] The building is located 35 minutes from the OR Tambo International Airport and almost within walking distance of the inner city with theatres like the Market and the Civic within 5 km (3.1 mi).

[9][6] There was speculation in the mid-1990s that Gauteng province might turn the building into a high-rise prison but, despite the decay, Ponte City was home in this period to many migrants, especially from Francophone West and Central Africa.

Over the next few years, the Johannesburg Development Agency planned to invest about R900 million in the areas around Ponte City such as the Ellis Park Precinct project as well as an upgrade of Hillbrow and Berea partly in preparation for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

[13] South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky and British artist Patrick Waterhouse won the Discovery award at the Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in 2011 for their three-year project "Ponte City", published in 2014.

[17] More nuanced treatments include The Foreigner (1997), an evocative short by Zola Maseko about a Senegalese migrant living in Ponte City, which opens with a night-time shot taken from a helicopter of the neon Coca Cola ad that wrapped around the top of the building at that time.