Something else that St. Louis fucked up....



John M. Burke
December 6, 2001
Poverty and Unemployment
Pruitt-Igoe: Failed High-Rise Public Housing In St. Louis
St. Louis, in the 1930s, was one of only four cities in the United States to decrease in population. By the end of World War II, civic leaders were becoming more and more desperate to save their dilapidated and vacated cities. Their first instinct told them they had to rebuild them and quickly. In this desperation came plans for many public housing projects and in St. Louis came the plans for the infamous Pruitt and Igoe high-rise public housing projects (Hoffman).

Joseph Darst was elected mayor of St. Louis in 1949 and was in favor of “large-scale physical building programs including highways, airports, and especially downtown and neighborhood redevelopment” (Hoffman). Prior to Darst being elected, the City Plan Commission had devised a comprehensive physical plan to bring people back to St. Louis. They found the DeSoto-Carr neighborhood, located at Jefferson and Cass Avenues, to be “extremely obsolete” and, thus, drafted detailed site plans for its reconstruction. Originally, the commission proposed clearing the area and constructing two to three story row-type apartment buildings with a large public park. However, lack of support and funding put the project on the back burner. Once Darst was in office, there was pressure to move forward on the project and the City Plan Commission’s redevelopment scheme for the neighborhood was revived under the St. Louis Housing Authority in January of 1950 (Hoffman).
The project was supervised under Captain W. O. Pruitt and William L. Igoe, hence the names Pruitt Homes and Igoe Apartments were given to the projects. In 1951, an updated, new-age, high-rise design was unveiled. The high-rise design was considered to be experimental and was created by Minoru Yamasaki, a renowned architect. This was a design never before used in the city of St. Louis, but Mayor Darst, upon visiting New York City and seeing similar designs, liked the idea (Frank).
In Pruitt and Igoe, “conception changed from small and frugal to mean, cheap, and shoddy” (Meehan 35). The project funding had been greatly streamlined and called for the most number of units for the least amount of cost. The final design of the project consisted of thirty-three, eleven story buildings; twenty buildings in the Pruitt apartments, situated on 31.8 acres and having a density of 54.6 dwellings per acre. Thirteen identical buildings in the Igoe project were built on 25.5 acres and had a density of 44.4 dwellings per acre (Meehan 36). This was the highest density public housing ever built in the U.S. “The 12,000 inhabitants housed within a few city blocks created a small city within the larger city” (McGill).
Each building was about 170 feet long with a square section attached to one or both ends of the buildings. The structures were composed of reinforced concrete with brick facades and steel sash windows. In the center of each building was located an elevator and a staircase with additional staircases at each end of the buildings. The staircases had wide passageways connecting them across the front of the buildings in the first, fourth, and tenth floors. These open walkways were designed to be the community centers for each building and provided access to the laundry rooms. Additionally, the elevators only stopped on these floors (Meehan 36). The living arrangement of tenants was very crammed. Eugene Meehan explains:
In the projects built after 1953, bedrooms smaller than 100 square feet in area were common; few bedrooms exceeded 115 square feet of useful space. Even the bathrooms were pared from 7’4” to just over 6’ in length. Taken in conjunction with Housing Authority policy which prescribed occupancy at a level of up to two persons per bedroom, the social implications of cramming nine or ten persons, mostly minors, into some 900 square feet of living space can hardly be imagined, even if the St. Louis climate and the absence of cross ventilation in the projects is ignored (Meehan 37).
Pruitt-Igoe opened in 1955, and, at the time, its design was award winning for its building layouts and modern high-rise design by a world-renowned architect. They were seen as revolutionary in the public housing business and were predicted to be very successful, yet twenty years after Pruitt-Igoe’s construction they were demolished by the city of St. Louis at a loss of nearly thirty million dollars. What factors caused Pruitt-Igoe to fail?
The first key problem with Pruitt-Igoe was its major building and design flaws. According to Meehan, “Niceties were ignored to the point of endangering health—hot water pipes, for example were not adequately shielded and concealed, and danger spots in the building were not fenced properly” (Meehan 35).
The craftsmanship of the buildings was shoddy at best. Many corners were cut because of stripped funding, some of which were legal and some of which were not. Some apartment door locks and door knobs broke the first time they were ever used, even before tenants had moved into them. Window panes blew out. One elevator broke on the opening day. “On the day they were completed, the buildings in Pruitt and in Igoe were little more than steel and concrete warrens, poorly designed, badly equipped, inadequate in size, badly located, unventilated, and virtually impossible to maintain” (Frank).
 Secondly, also because of cut funding for the project, the grounds never took on the role they were first intended for. Pruitt-Igoe was originally intended to be surrounded by a "river of trees winding through the open spaces” (McGill). The idea was to connect the project to the surrounding neighborhoods through the aesthetics of the landscape. Instead, the site from day one was barren of any vegetation, trees, or landscaping of any kind.
The actual floor plans of the buildings were also ill conceived. In early planning discussions, features like open galleries and skip-stop elevators were touted as patentable innovations that would help to create a neighborhood atmosphere among tenants. According to Yamasaki, the architect,
Galleries were envisioned as places for children to play, mothers to meet for conversation and laundry, and places to store items such as bicycles. The early drawings depict middle-class white women strolling in plant-filled, sunlit galleries pushing baby carriages. Galleries, open horizontal space every third floor, 11 x 85' and oriented south, created spaces for neighborhood-like interaction among tenants, while skip-stop elevators, 
elevators stopping only at gallery floors, (and requiring tenants to walk up or down stairs to their apartments), assured that the gallery space would be used. In addition, laundry and open air drying facilities were also placed on gallery levels, as was space for storage. The design called for screening along the galleries to allow for summer breezes, but shutters to block winter winds. Such a space was meant to encourage interaction among tenants, safe spaces for children and families, and clean, sunlit areas for recreation and neighborhood life (McGill).
Clearly, the tenants did not see these amenities in the same light as the architect. In reality, they were barren (not decorated as in preliminary illustrations) gray concrete block enclaves with windows that looked more like something out of a prison than a neighborhood breezeway. They soon were vandalized, detracting even further from the aesthetics and became dangerous as they were used for criminal activities. Also, it was more of a nuisance than anything to have to walk three flights of steps after taking an elevator (that is if the elevators were in working condition at all).
The individual apartments, themselves, were small and cramped. They were not at all conducive to the multi-generation living arrangements that were very common in the African-American and lower class cultures. As a result, many families were forced to squeeze in family members, making for a very crowded living environment. This was “a restriction of human resources for the needs and demands of lower class living” (Stromberg, A Comparison 17).
Soon after occupancy some residents were already complaining about these problems. In a comparison survey study conducted by the Social Science institute of Washington University in 1966, a list of common resident complaints was compiled, which included: ‘people use the [elevators] [stairways] and halls to go to the bathroom’ and ‘the heating pipes in the apartments aren’t covered so people can burn themselves’ and ‘there’s too much broken glass and trash around outside’ just to name a few (Stromberg, A Comparison 47-49). The once award-winning project was quickly becoming an eyesore.
Another failure of Pruitt-Igoe was the management that was put in place to oversee the project. As the project’s operating budget was so stripped down, management was always sub-par and never really catered effectively to the needs of the tenants. According to Stromberg in his study of Private Problems in Public Housing, he points out that “In several respects, the administrative structure of public housing hinders the development of strong interpersonal ties among the residents” (Stromberg, Private Problems 53).
It became a “them” and “us” mentality between residents and management as many of the problems tenants face, they were expected to remedy on their own. Tenants were required to take care of certain things on their own such as cleaning of the apartments and corridors, which probably would not have been a problem, except management set ground rules that made it impossible for tenants to work together in the task, but rather turned it into a tense problem stemming from poor planning.
As an example, tenants were responsible for cleaning and sweeping the area in front of their doors and the stairs down to the next floor. Theoretically speaking, this would ensure that the halls would be cleaned from the top floor down to the first floor in that order, thus all dirt and trash would end up on the first floor where it could be easily removed by the management (if they so chose to remove it). Tenants who didn’t comply with this rule could be fined or evicted. The problem, however, occurred when some tenants would clean their area early in the day and an upstairs neighbor would clean their area later in the day, thus depositing the dirt back in front of the downstairs neighbor’s door. This, of course, created conflicts between neighbors (Stromberg, Private Problems 53). As a result, two frequent complaints of tenants were the presence of mice and cockroaches and problems of trash and broken glass in and around the buildings (Stromberg, A Comparison 48). Obviously, very little thought went into this and other management policies.
There were also problems of maintenance. One woman interviewed stated ‘I had a bad lock on my door and couldn’t unlock it from the outside’. She went on to say that management took over an hour to respond and that nearly three-fourths of the time they did not respond to problems of this nature at all. Another woman who was interviewed complained to management about an open door on her floor which had exposed wires hanging out of it and then stated nothing was ever done about it (Stromberg, Private Problems 18).
This problem can be directly attributed to the policies of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. According to the federal rules that were established, tenants’ rents had to be able to cover the costs of building maintenance. Of course, these tenants of public housing were already strapped for cash and, not surprisingly, could not afford to pay the rent, so the city simply cut maintenance. The problem was worsened even further in 1965, after the Department of Housing and Urban Development amended its rules, thus allowing identified problem families with large numbers of children, many of whom, came from rural backgrounds, into public housing. This further breakdown of planning, coupled with inappropriate regulations, resulted in a lack of maintenance which quickly created many safety hazards and lowered living conditions to that of nineteenth century tenements (Frank).
Crime has always been synonymous with public housing, but planners of Pruitt-Igoe felt they had, of course, solved this problem by providing for a private police force for the project. Of course, this brilliant idea was doomed for failure as well. As with other aspects of the project, survey respondents had a long list of complaints about the private police force; the biggest complaint being their lack of responsiveness to residents’ requests for assistance. Other complaints on the list included police being rude and verbally and physically abusive to tenants, unwillingness to help, and intoxication of officers (Stromberg, Private Problems 18). This caused a great distrust of the police by residents as the felt they had no one to rely on for help. Crime increased virtually unchecked and residents became the victims of many crimes. As a result, residents could not trust their own neighbors out of fear.
Many social problems with tenants arose as a result of their backgrounds, their situation, and their living conditions. Many of the African-American residents came from rural areas of southern states and definitely had never been exposed to the living conditions of such high densities of people and more or less were massed together with people from virtually all walks of life, thus they did not necessarily come from common backgrounds. When interviewed, residents stated that they had much more in common with their neighbors in their old neighborhoods prior to living in public housing. This feeling of displacement and not belonging resulted in a general negative attitude that is found to be common among all residents of high-rise housing. (Stromberg, A Comparison 38).
Treatment by police also greatly affected the sentiments of residents. Of residents interviewed, a large majority stated they were treated with much more respect by police in their former neighborhoods than they were in the Pruitt-Igoe community (Stromberg, A Comparison 45). A curfew was imposed on residents by police, which made them feel as if they were not trusted by police or management, further stripping them of self-esteem (Stromberg, A Comparison 16). This overall feeling of low-self worth, feeling of not being trusted, and living in an environment where they feel unnatural in prompted many residents to not trust Pruitt-Igoe and many of them saw it as a very hostile place (Stromberg, A Comparison 56).
Another problem that plagued Pruitt-Igoe from the beginning was the high number of vacant apartments. When Pruitt first opened it had a rather high occupancy rate at around 95 percent, but continually dropped in significant numbers in following years with an all-time low of 34 percent in 1970. Igoe, on the other hand “failed from the outset to attain full occupancy and remained consistently one-third empty during the 1960s” with its lowest occupancy being 36 percent, also in 1970 (Meehan 49, 54).
“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” (Hoffman). The huge vacancy percentage indicated that even poorest of poor people preferred to live anywhere but in Pruitt-Igoe.
In 1972, after throwing more than $5 million into a seeming bottomless pit of irreversible problems at the Pruitt-Igoe project, the St. Louis Housing Authority, faced with no other choices, demolished three of the high-rise buildings. A year later, with the help of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, it declared Pruitt-Igoe unsalvageable and demolished the remaining thirty buildings (Hoffman).

Twenty years of inadequacies in housing left no other choice.
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 (Hoffman).

On a personal note regarding the research for this paper, I found several things to be true. First of all, I found much of the research, namely the surveying that was conducted by the Pruitt-Igoe Project at Washington University to be, at times very biased in nature. The questions were leading and speculative and the results of the data were interpreted in a very one-sided manner at times. It seemed as though the research may have been carried out for the St. Louis Housing Authority or some other affiliated agency in order to “make a case” that Pruitt-Igoe was not as bad as it may have seemed.
Secondly, I ran into some strange dead ends while trying to find information about the project. Some documents were somehow just not in existence anymore or were reported as lost. Many of the website hits brought up links that were missing, deleted, or not found. In my opinion, it seems certain authorities would like to see the huge failure of Pruitt-Igoe erased from the history books some fifty years after it was constructed and nearly thirty years after it was demolished.
Works Cited
Frank, Joe. “The Faults and Failures of Urban Planning Theory and Practice”. 11/04/97
online posting. 11/18/01 http://joefrank.tripod.com/petehall.html.

Hoffman, Alexander von. “Why They Built the Pruitt-Igoe Project”. Taubman Center
for State and Local Government online posting. 11/18/01 http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/taubmancenter/udt/pruitt.

McGill, H. “Pruitt-Igoe”. 11/18/01
http://proteus.architecture.mcgill.ca/phs/lecture13/pruitt-igoe.html.

Meehan, Eugene J. Public Housing Policy. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Center for
Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, 1975.

Stromberg, Jerome S. A comparison of Pruitt-Igoe residents and their non-public
housing neighbors. St. Louis, MO: Pruitt-Igoe Project, Social Science Institute, Washington University, 1967.

Stromberg, Jerome S. Private problems in public housing: a further report on the
Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project. St. Louis, MO: Pruitt-Igoe Project, Social Sciences Institute, Washington University, 1968.






Posted: Sat - August 28, 2004 at 11:34 AM        

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