99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-44- The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Episode Date: January 6, 2012

The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis became most famous at the moment of its demise. The thirty-three high-rise towers built in the 1950’s were supposed to solve the impending population crisis in inner city St. Louis. It was supposed … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentry.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. These developments are run by the St. Louis Housing Authority. This is a far cry from the crowded collapsing tenements

that many of these people have known. Here in bright new buildings with spacious grounds, they can live. The Pooit Igo Myth begins here. This is Chad Fredericks. So, Pooit Igo was a public housing project that existed on the north side of St. Louis. Chad Fredericks is the director and producer of the documentary, The Pooit Igo Myth. It was 33-eleven story buildings, and it was part of a larger urban renewal campaign that the city was undergoing in the 1940s and 50s.

It was touted as a solution, a cure for the disease. It was viewed kind of as a replacement for low-rise, tenement housing. People who had been living where they literally never saw the sun. And so Pruitt Igo was supposed to be everything different. Now, they would have more magnificent views than the richest people in St. Louis. It was high rise, whereas the private market housing was low rise.

It was federal, and therefore you wouldn't have the creeping influence of slum lords coming in and basically being derelict landowners. It was an opportunity to present four residents with light and air. That was really the driving factor behind crewdye goes design. Tall modern buildings would give access to fresh breezes and sunlight. The sensible remedy to the unhealthy conditions in the inner city's loans.

At least that was the thinking. Crewdye would rise above the Puzuz loans. It was a very beautiful place, like a hotel resort, I'd say. It's plenty of green grass, trees, shrubbery, and all the works. What happened? Well, one day, the woke up and was all gone. In the middle of 50, St. Louis thought it had solved its low-cost housing needs, but instead, a monster was created.

In the film The Prud I Go Myth, it's made very clear that the project wasn't just a monster. In the beginning, especially, it represented hope to thousands of people who never thought they'd live in a clean new home. But things went downhill very fast. 12,000 people were originally jammed into these 33 buildings, on the 2500 people still linger in the remaining shells. Maintenance dropped off. Elevators and trash and generators broke and remained broken. Vandalism and crime rates rose.

The one thing you always ask yourself is why? Why is it like this? Why do I live here? What did I do wrong? I think it created a mindset for the inhabitants that they weren't cared about and I think that that manifested itself in a way that caused more harm to the tenants than in the other industry. The vandalism that existed in Prudigo came from that environment. The things allowed to just deteriorate and people not really caring.

It's easy to look at Prude Igo and think that almost every decision that was made was a bad one. The vandalism led the housing authority to install a bunch of unbreakable designs in the towers. Instead of trying to enhance their existence, we'll just make things so they can't be destroyed. Everything had to be protected. Light fixtures, no light exposed. That was shields around them with mesh metal protecting the bulb. The city made a big deal about this. Their PR department actually came out and they had the installation of these new unbreakable lights that were going out. And, you know, they brought in all these people in the press. The only human reaction to being presented with an unbreakable object is to try and break it.

You know, the fact that it was indestructible made you wanted to try to destroy things. There was a screen around the light bulbs that kept you from breaking them, but you know, kids will be kids. Find way to break it. And we just put water in it, throw it up. And the light would get hot, and it would break.

Lights are out. Two decades after opening Pruitt Igo, the government gave up. Because they are so desperate, they are willing to try desperate things. The housing authority blew it up. The press was invited. It started with three buildings in 1972. The rest followed. The image of the implosion with this St. Louis gateway arch in the background became infamous. The Pooidago myth begins here. It was viewed as symbolic. It was kind of viewed as an end of an era. So then several

years later Charles Jenks writes his book on postmodern architecture and he opens his book with Prudai Go's implosion as the death of modern architecture. Which leads to this question, how well known would Prudai Go be if you didn't have that implosion image? You know, if it's not blown up

and you don't have that image with the arch and the background and it's so poignant, would we be discussing Prudai Go? And I don't think so. You know, I mean, it's something becomes an icon and it's so poignant. Would we be discussing Prud I go and I don't think so. You know, I mean, something becomes an icon because it's been visually recorded. There's something about that building and free fall that acts as better evidence than anything else for failure. That image was so powerful, so full of emotion, that it could easily be used to support

any previously held beliefs or prejudices about federal housing or modernist architecture or even the poor themselves. And so people use it constantly as such. That's what people think when they think of public housing, when they think of large-scale federal program. It's just an architectural failure and here's a building that's being imploded because it was bad architecture. Bad architecture is one of the major citeded reasons for why Prudigo failed, but that actually isn't a factor that Chad Fredericks puts a lot of stock in. Architecture was a marginal influence if any on Prudigo's demise. Perhaps this is an overreaction, but I tend to look as far away as I can from the design

of the building simply because I've seen so many other compelling factors in Prudigo's decline. I don't like to try to take Prudigo out of the city in which it resides. And I think many of the discussions that people have about Prudigo tend to do that. They tend to look at Prudigo as something that's somehow divorced from the city of St. Louis

and what it went through in those years. What St. Louis went through was a completely un-predicticted population decline. You have to remember Prudayo comes out of the 1949 Housing Act and in 1949 the population of most major cities in the urban core was rising. It was rising relatively rapidly, people coming into the cities for jobs from rural areas. And so St. Louis was undergoing the same process where they just had crowds and crowds of people coming into the city.

And so the idea was, well, we need to find a place to put all of these new people in a way that doesn't lead to the kinds of slums that you had in earlier years going all the way back to the 19th century factory city. The understanding among city planners and city officials was that the population would continue to rise to a population of about a million from 800,000 from 1950 to 1970. And so over the course of those 20 years, there was an expectation that the city would rise maybe 20% in terms of its population. What happened was the exact opposite. The bottom dropped out of the city's population as a population started to move to suburban areas out of the city.

And this process was aided by the exact same 1949 Federal Housing Act that offered federally underwritten loans to buy houses in suburbia. You really started to see populations dip. Prud Igo was undercut by the very law that created it. To the point where we're by 1980 St. Louis had half the population that it did in 1950. And that trend continues to this day. What happens is you you build this massive project to house all these people who are coming into the city and when those people don't come and the people who you attended to be living there move out all the sudden you have a vacancy crisis and that's really

what gripped St. Louis during these years. So given that, the major architectural or design flaw that chatted tributes to the demise of Prudigo was the sheer scale of the project. It was built so big and there just simply weren't enough people to populate it by the 1970s and so that's the real tragedy of Prudigo but it's something that was very difficult to predict as well. The scale doomed Prudigo from the start. The high vacancy rate meant that the house authority couldn't collect enough money to pay the maintenance bills.

The money for operating and maintaining the buildings was to come from the incomes of the rents from the tenants. Things began to break, conditions deteriorated, more people left, less rent could be collected, everything just got worse and worse. I mean, I often like to say that prudigo is an easy scapegoat. rent could be collected, everything just got worse and worse. I mean, I often like to say that Prudigo is an easy scapego. It's high rise and then that's something in our mostly low-rise society is viewed negatively in some circles. It's public housing is opposed to private market housing and its demographics are

extraordinarily poor and almost 100% black. And so what I like to do when discussing Prudigo is to try to think about a different scenario. And conveniently that scenario happened across the street. You were to enter Prudigo in the late 1960s. And you were to travel due west out of Prudigo. And so what you would do is you would cross Jefferson Avenue. You would cross the street into the low-rise private market housing that existed across the street.

What you would see would be similar levels of poverty. You would see the same kinds of maintenance issues in those low-rise private market buildings. You would see the same kinds of vandalism that existed in Prudigo and oftentimes you would actually see higher crime rates in the surrounding neighborhoods than you saw in Prudigo and no one really ever talks about those low-rise private market houses that existed around Prudigo. It's always Prudigo. People focus on it. The focus on Prudigo is understandable when you see an aerial photograph of St. Louis at the time. The impact of Port Aigo, those 33 buildings the footprint that they make in the city,

is just enormous. To me, it had very little to do with the fact that Port Aigo was public housing, very little to do with the fact that it was high rise. It had almost everything to do with the decline of the city in which I reside in. 99% Invisible was produced by me Roman Mars with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW 9.7 local public radio in San Francisco, the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design. 99% Invisible is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange making public radio more public find out more at grx.org. The 99% Invisible Intern, his name is Sam Greensman. To find out more about this show, see some pictures of

Prude Igo and watch the trailer of the Prude Igo myth, go to our website, it's 99%invisible.org. you