The Tragic Demise Of America's Most Ambitious Housing Project

2013-05-22T21:32:00Z

Back in the 1950s, St. Louis commissioned a public housing project unlike any in history.

Designed by Minoru Yamasaki — the architect who would later design the World Trade Center — the Pruitt-Igoe housing project was hailed as "vertical neighborhood for poor people" and named the building of the year by "Architectural Forum."

Things looked great when the building opened in 1956, but within years everything went horribly wrong. For various reasons, Pruitt-Igoe turned into a ghetto, neglected, deteriorating, and dangerous, and by the mid-1970s, the building was demolished.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

A 2011 documentary by Chad Friedrichs called "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" chronicles the rise and fall of the housing project. We've broken out some highlights in the following slideshow. Also check out upcoming screenings in New York, Grand Rapids, Oklahoma City, and Pittsburgh.

Prior to the construction of Pruitt-Igoe, the working class residents of St. Louis were crammed into slums with communal bathrooms (or none at all), unreliable electricity, and streets filled with trash.

Screenshot via The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

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The Tragic Demise Of America's Most Ambitious Housing Project

Prior to the construction of Pruitt-Igoe, the working class residents of St. Louis were crammed into slums with communal bathrooms (or none at all), unreliable electricity, and streets filled with trash.

Reformers wanted to remove people from the inhumane conditions of the slums, and local politicians thought they were an eyesore. So beginning in the late 1940s, federal and state governments began funding massive public housing projects in inner cities.

Pruitt-Igoe was built with that big federal spending push. It cost around $36 million to construct and was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who later designed the World Trade Center towers.

Pruitt and Igoe were originally designed as separate, segregated housing projects. Pruitt, named for a Tuskegee airman, was for blacks, and Igoe, named after a white politician, was for whites.

But segregation was outlawed in 1954 following Brown v. Board of Education, and the complex was integrated. "White flight" set in, and Pruitt-Igoe was soon an all-black project.

The complex was massive, with 33 buildings spread across 57 acres of land, and room for 12,000 residents.

When it was finished in 1956, local politicians said Pruitt-Igoe offered everything the slums lacked: Electric lights, indoor plumbing, and large green spaces where children could play.

People who had grown up in the slums and poor rural communities were amazed by the new 12-story high-rises, and dubbed them "the poor man's penthouse."

Families that had once shared a room suddenly had bedrooms and fresh-plastered walls.

The apartments were small, but seemed far better than the alternative.

For a few years, Pruitt-Igoe ran smoothly, and the project had enough renters to pay for round-the-clock patrols and building maintenance.

Pruitt-Igoe's black community thrived in the late '50s and early '60s. Many residents still have fond childhood memories of the project's early years.

But by the mid-60s, Pruitt-Igoe had become run-down and filthy. The city simply didn't have the money to maintain the projects.

Overflowing trash incinerators would break and never get fixed.

Broken windows were left in shards.

And vandalism and crime rates started to rise. The housing authority eventually installed vandal-proof light-fixtures, because kids broke them so often.

Rents rose as maintenance costs skyrocketed, and residents began to move out because they could pay less for private housing.

The police wouldn't come if you called in a crime and said you lived in Pruitt-Igoe. Newspapers started comparing the project to Watts, the black Los Angeles neighborhood where a massive riot broke out in 1965.

There was even a group of men from the welfare department who would patrol Pruitt-Igoe at night, searching for fathers and arresting them if they were found. Sometimes men would come home at night to be with their families and be discovered, hiding in closets.

By February 1969, the city had raised rents three times in one year, and residents were strapped. They started a rent strike, refusing to pay until their demands for lower rents and better maintenance were met.

The city gave in to the tenants' demands in November 1969, but two months later, a sewer line broke in one of the buildings and flooded everything. Raw sewage spilled into people's homes and across the lawns of the projects.

It was January 1970, and so cold outside that the project's 10,000 broken windows began to freeze from the flooding.

The city declared the flooded buildings a disaster area, and began evacuating tenants. As the projects emptied out, the vacant buildings became known as a dangerous "no man's land."

Drug addicts and criminals began to move into the abandoned buildings, and children started hearing gun shots on the way to school.

The project was declining so rapidly that in 1972, the city decided to implode three of Pruitt-Igoe's buildings with dynamite.

The first demolition was nationally televised, and the images became iconic. They were a reflection of the failures of public housing in every major city.

Two years later, the city demolished the rest of the project's buildings. Once again, 55 acres were vacant in northern St. Louis.

Now see how another country is building public housing.

Singapore's New Public Housing Project Looks A Lot Like A Luxury Condo >