JOHANNESBURG LETTER:Violence has prompted many locals to flee the heart of the city for the security of the suburbs, writes KEITH DUGGAN

NO BUILDING in Johannesburg makes you stop and stare like the Ponte building. It is a 50ft cylindrical tower in the Hillbrow area of the city, with a hollow core in its centre.

The drive down to Ellis Park stadium takes fans directly past it for every World Cup match and you can see them trying to make sense of the place; this freakishly attractive building whose windows are now either boarded up or covered in blankets to obscure the light.

Vodacom, the communications giant, have a huge neon advertisement on the top of the building. Usually it dominates the nightscape in central Johannesburg, but Fifa insisted they should refrain from using it for the duration of the World Cup. So the building stays dark; few of the apartment windows are lit at night.

Like many places in Johannesburg, it demanded the question: what happened here? Every local I asked about the Ponte building laughed darkly, as if it held all the answers for the demise of the downtown area. When it was built in 1976, the same year as the Soweto uprising, the Ponte tower became the exclusive address of the day. In theme, it went for 1970s excess, and descriptions make it sound as if they hired Huggy Bear as the interior decorator: shag-pile carpeted walls, lurid tiles, huge windows offering 360 degree views of the city. For a while, it held the most desirable postal address in the city, but then residents began drifting away.

Impressive as it was, the building somehow felt wrong. It acquired a reputation as a suicide spot, for not quite working, and leases there tended to be short- term. Twenty years ago, Hillbrow was a kind of a fraternity-type hangout for white South Africans in their college years. Now, it is somewhere they drive through with locked doors and memories of what such-and-such a building used to be.

The Ponte building became a base for newly returned immigrants after the tumultuous elections of 1994 and, in the years after that, it became the visible landmark for the more notorious episodes of violence that prompted the wealthier Johannesburgers to flee the city for the fenced-off, security- controlled streets in the suburbs.

The Ponte only recently had its bullet-proof doors removed and there has been a concerted effort to reclaim it in the build-up to this World Cup. But hosting the World Cup has forced locals to turn their eyes to the old city centre in a way they have avoided doing for years.

Right across the road from Ellis Park is a beautiful theatre called the Alambra. Its doors are secured with wrought-iron gates and the foyer is strewn with cardboard boxes. The paint is peeling. It is closed indefinitely.

Before the Brazil-North Korea match, fans posed in the freezing late afternoon for photographs. And Ellis Park, too, retains the veneer of the more sedate years in Doorfontein’s past with its beautiful wooden-framed hospitality suite and the red rafters on the stand roof. The stadium was designed with pride.

But World Cup staff advise against jumping in taxis in this part of town. The streets near Ellis Park become busy for the few hours around the matches and are then deserted again as people head to the safer areas.

It is the same in downtown Johannesburg. From the safety of the motorways, the old centre looks attractive and modern. An illumination of Ronaldo dominates the entire gable wall of the Carlton Centre, the tallest building in all of Africa. It is hard to imagine it as anything other than normal, prosperous. But the advice never varies. Best not go there, particularly after dark.

“If you are looking for a bad experience in Johannesburg,” one local said, “Then you will find it.”

And so the above-board taxi firms name their price for this tournament and for out-of-towners the cost is worth the security of ghosting through parts of the city that have been abandoned, both civically and spiritually, in the last 20 years.

Those with means moved to the outer rings of the city, where armed response units patrol their tree-lined streets at night.

Every so often stories fly about the city, the latest involving two Englishmen – BBC crew – who were halted by a gun barrel as they exited a bar in downtown Johannesburg and were relieved of wallets, passports, jewellery, the works. Such an incident can do much to destroy the goodwill and the anxious wish of most locals to see their city understood as something more than a study in how a city can go wrong.

Because for all of the problems, it is impossible not to warm to the energy and optimism of the people who will live here long after the World Cup has ended.

For now, though, the World Cup brings a daily and nightly cavalcade of fans past the heart of the old city and its ghost streets.