Why They Built the Pruitt-Igoe Project

Why They Built the Pruitt-Igoe Project
Alexander von Hoffman
Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University.

St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe housing project is arguably the most infamous public housing project ever built in the United States. A product of the postwar federal public-housing program, this mammoth high-rise development was completed in 1956.

Only a few years later, disrepair, vandalism, and crime plagued Pruitt-Igoe. The project's recreational galleries and skip-stop elevators, once heralded as architectural innovations, had become nuisances and danger zones. Large numbers of vacancies indicated that even poor people preferred to live anywhere but Pruitt-Igoe. In 1972, after spending more than $5 million in vain to cure the problems at Pruitt-Igoe, the St. Louis Housing Authority, in a highly publicized event, demolished three of the high-rise buildings. A year later, in concert with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, it declared Pruitt-Igoe unsalvageable and razed the remaining buildings.

Pruitt-Igoe has lived on symbolically as an icon of failure. Liberals perceive it as exemplifying the government's appalling treatment of the poor. Architectural critics cite it as proof of the failure of high-rise public housing for families with children. One critic even asserted that its destruction signaled the end of the modern style of architecture.

Yet for all the criticisms, little is known about why Pruitt-Igoe was designed as a massive high-rise project in the first place. One popular theory blames the Swiss architect, Le Corbusier, and his influential conception of a modernist city of high rises. Another points to segregationist policies aimed at confining African-American residential areas to the inner city. Perhaps the most widely accepted theory holds that the federal Public Housing Administration's (PHA) restrictive cost guidelines for public-housing construction required the construction of a megalithic high-rise project.

An examination of what really happened in St. Louis, however, reveals that the essential concept of Pruitt-Igoe arose from the desperation of civic leaders to save their city by rebuilding it, a bricks-and-mortar type mayor who sang "I'll take Manhattan," and an ambitious young architect with no place to go but up.

As they surveyed their city at the end of World War II, St. Louis's business and political leaders had reason to be anxious. The city was one of only four in the United States to have lost population in the 1930s. In 1947 the City Plan Commission devised a comprehensive physical plan to bring people back to St. Louis. The plan designated the DeSoto-Carr neighborhood, the eventual site of Pruitt-Igoe, as "extremely obsolete" and provided detailed site plans for its reconstruction. The commission proposed clearing the area and constructing "two- or three-story row type apartment buildings" and a large public park.

The election of Joseph Darst as mayor transformed these plans. Elected in 1949, Darst typified the new breed of big-city mayors who came to power in the postwar period. These mayors distanced themselves from the old-style political bosses and looked for support from downtown business interests. They campaigned for the revival of their aging cities and promoted large-scale physical building programs that included highways, airports, and especially downtown and neighborhood redevelopment. Darst, in particular, considered the low-rise projects built by his predecessors to be ugly. Instead, he greatly admired the new high-rise public housing projects that New York mayor William O'Dwyer had shown him on a visit to that city.

Under pressure from Darst to move forward, in January 1950 the St. Louis Housing Authority revived the City Plan Commission's redevelopment scheme for the DeSoto-Carr neighborhood. Meanwhile architects George Hellmuth and Minoru Yamasaki -- who had been hired at Darst's insistence -- persuaded the authority to adopt modernist-style high-rise designs for public housing. The first of these was Cochran Gardens, which later won architectural awards. This was followed by a much larger-scale plan for Pruitt-Igoe which, when completed, contained 2,870 dwelling units in 33 eleven-story buildings.

These structures were no anomaly. Instead, the Pruitt-Igoe project was the product of a larger vision of St. Louis government and business leaders who wanted to rebuild their city into a Manhattan on the Mississippi. Other redevelopment schemes of the time, for example, placed middle- and high-income residents in buildings that actually rivaled Pruitt-Igoe in height and scale.

There is, moreover, no evidence that redevelopment plans intended to make an all-black, all-poor enclave at DeSoto Carr, which had been a poor area housing both whites and blacks before it was razed. An early scheme would have produced a majority of middle-income black residents. The final plan designated the Igoe apartments for whites and the Pruitt apartments for blacks. Whites were unwilling to move in, however, so the entire Pruitt-Igoe project soon had only black residents.

Nor is there any truth in claims that PHA cost limits forced the authority to increase the project's scale. On the contrary, building contractors inflated their bids to the point that public-housing construction costs in St. Louis were 60 percent above the national average. When the PHA would not raise its unit cost ceilings to accommodate the contractor bids, the city responded by raising densities, reducing room sizes, and removing amenities.

Ultimately, the massive, destructive, and expensive effort at redevelopment that produced Pruitt- Igoe failed to stem or even noticeably slow the city's decline. From 1950 to 1970, the city's population fell by 234,000 people, and its share of the St. Louis metropolitan area's population plummeted from 51 percent to 26 percent. This sad fact adds what may be the largest failure to the formidable list of failures associated with Pruitt-Igoe: even if it had been built as proposed, Pruitt-Igoe, the child of a grandiose vision that failed, probably would have failed anyway.

Alexander von Hoffman is an urban historian. This piece is excerpted from his working paper, "Why They Built Pruitt-Igoe." For information on how to order the paper, visit the Taubman Center Publications Page.

http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/PruittIgoe.html

Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History

It began as a housing marvel. Two decades later, it ended in rubble. But what happened to those caught in between?

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and the St. Louis residents who called it home.

At the film’s historical center is an analysis of the massive impact of the national urban renewal program of the 1950s and 1960s, which prompted the process of mass suburbanization and emptied American cities of their residents, businesses, and industries.

Those left behind in the city faced a destitute, rapidly de-industrializing St. Louis , parceled out to downtown interests and increasingly segregated by class and race.

The residents of Pruitt-Igoe were among the hardest hit. Their gripping stories of survival, adaptation, and success are at the emotional heart of the film. The domestic turmoil wrought by punitive public welfare policies; the frustrating interactions with a paternalistic and cash-strapped Housing Authority; and the downward spiral of vacancy, vandalism and crime led to resident protest and action during the 1969 Rent Strike, the first in the history of public housing.

And yet, despite this complex history, Pruitt-Igoe has often been stereotyped. The world-famous image of its implosion has helped to perpetuate a myth of failure, a failure that has been used to critique Modernist architecture, attack public assistance programs, and stigmatize public housing residents.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth seeks to set the historical record straight. To examine the interests involved in Pruitt-Igoe’s creation. To re-evaluate the rumors and the stigma. To implode the myth.

Public housing has a bad name.

Although the reasons for this are complex, a few widely publicized housing projects have created a lasting negative impression in the minds of many Americans. One such project is the Pruitt-Igoe public housing development in St. Louis, Missouri. A famous image, circulated worldwide, of the implosion of one of Pruitt-Igoe’s buildings has come to symbolize the failure of government-sponsored housing and, more broadly, government-sponsorship at large.

Completed in 1954, the 33 11-story buildings of Pruitt-Igoe were billed as the solution to the overcrowding and deterioration that plagued inner city St. Louis. Twenty years later, the buildings were leveled, declared unfit for habitation.

What happened in Pruitt-Igoe has fueled a mythology repeated in discussions of many urban high-rise projects. Violence, crime, and drugs, so the story goes, plagued the housing project from nearly the beginning as it became a “dumping ground” for the poorest city residents. According to one standard account, it was quickly torn apart by its residents who could not adapt to high-rise city life.

Widely circulated images of “Pruitt-Igoe” reveal this legacy. Vandalized hallways. Acres of broken windows. A building imploded. These images of destruction are periodically interrupted by images of a different kind: hopeful images of a massive, newly-built housing complex in the mid-fifties, the scale and grandeur of the buildings reflecting the optimistic spirit out of which Pruitt-Igoe came.

The quick, unexamined transition from hope to disillusionment is the standard structure of the Pruitt-Igoe narrative. But there is another Pruitt-Igoe story, another approach.

It is a story of a city and its residents. A city in many ways at the forefront of postwar urban decline. In the years of Pruitt-Igoe, St. Louis lost half of its population and most of its prestige in less than a generation. An analysis of Pruitt-Igoe has to begin in this milieu, and yet it so rarely does.

A more thorough examination of Pruitt-Igoe should take into account the ways in which public housing was used as a tool of racial segregation and as a justification for the clearance of poor and working-class neighborhoods. It should look at the dominant culture of the time, which stressed uniformity and “hygiene” in the domestic sphere, political life, and neighborhood composition. It should question the priorities of the legislation that created large-scale public housing but failed to adequately fund it.

The individual stories of the residents’ struggles and successes have almost universally been ignored; the texture of life in the projects too often reduced to melodrama. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth has, at its heart, the experiences of its residents, adding a human face to a subject that has become so depersonalized.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells of a declining city; a suburbanizing nation; a changing urban economy; a hope for the future; and residents who fought back in their own ways, refusing to be passive victims of these larger forces aligned against them.

The documentary has two goals. One is to inform and enhance the ongoing debate over public housing and government welfare programs. The film uses Pruitt-Igoe as a lens through which a larger story about affordable housing and the changing American city can be viewed. It untangles the various arguments about what went wrong in Pruitt-Igoe and dispels the over-simplifications and stereotypes that turned Pruitt-Igoe into a symbol of failure. Second, the film illustrates how conclusions are dangerously and erroneously drawn when powerful interests control debate.

History is a contested space. .Arguments become flattened, rather than expanded, available evidence discarded, rather than sought.

This is why Pruitt-Igoe matters – why we made this documentary. So much of our collective understanding of cities and government and inequality are tied up in these 33 high-rise buildings, informed by the demolition image. Too much of the context has been overlooked, or willfully ignored, in discussions of public housing, public welfare, and the state of the American city.

Children in a clean tidy kitchen

It’s time to get the facts straight and present the Pruitt-Igoe story in a way that will implode the myths and the stigma. Pruitt-Igoe needs to be remembered and understood in a different way than it has been.

The city will change again, and affordable housing will continue to be an issue. When that happens, the complex lessons of Pruitt-Igoe must be remembered by society and by the architects, developers, and public officials we will task with solving future housing issues.

Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History