The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments, known together as Pruitt–Igoe (), were joint urban housing projects first occupied in 1954 in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. The complex of 33 eleven-story high rises was designed in the modernist architectural style by Minoru Yamasaki. At the time of opening, it was one of the largest public housing developments in the country. It was constructed with federal funds on the site of a former slum as part of the city's urban renewal program. Despite being legally integrated, it almost exclusively accommodated African Americans.
Although initially viewed as an improvement over the tenement housing it replaced, living conditions in Pruitt–Igoe began to deteriorate soon after completion. By the mid-1960s it was plagued by poor maintenance and crime, particularly vandalism and juvenile delinquency. Numerous initiatives to reverse the decline failed, and by 1970 more than two-thirds of the complex was vacant. Demolition of the complex began in 1972 with a televised implosion of several of the buildings. Over the next four years, the rest of the complex was vacated and demolished.
In the aftermath of its demolition, Pruitt–Igoe became a symbol of the failings of the society-changing aspirations of modernist architecture, as the project's problems were widely attributed to architectural flaws that created a hostile and unsafe environment. Critic Charles Jencks described its demolition as "the day Modern architecture died". More recent appraisals have placed a greater emphasis on St. Louis's precipitously declining population, and fiscal problems with the local housing authority. The Architectural Review states in a summary of the modern consensus that the project was "doomed from the outset". , a large portion of the Pruitt–Igoe site remains vacant, although new development is pending.
Description Pruitt–Igoe consisted of 33 eleven-story concrete apartment buildings, clad in brick, on a site, on St. Louis's north side, bounded by Cass Avenue on the north, North Jefferson Avenue on the west, Carr Street on the south, and North 20th Street on the east. Each building was long; most contained between 80 and 90 units, although some buildings had up to 150. The complex totaled 2,870 apartments (1,736 in Pruitt and 1,132 in Igoe) housing more than 10,000 people at full occupancy.
The apartments were deliberately small, with undersized kitchen appliances, and few units were designed for larger families. The apartments were not equipped with balconies.James P. Hubbard, Decent, Safe and Sanitary Dwellings: The National Conversation About Public Housing, 2018. "Skip-stop" elevators stopped only at the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth "anchor" floors in an attempt to lessen elevator congestion, forcing many residents to use the stairs. The same anchor floors were equipped with large south-facing communal corridors called "galleries", as well as laundry rooms and garbage chutes.
History Background During the 1940s, the city of St. Louis was overcrowded, with housing conditions in some areas being said to resemble "something out of a Charles Dickens novel". Its housing stock had deteriorated, and more than 85,000 families lived in 19th century tenements. An official survey from 1947 found that 33,000 homes had communal toilets. Middle-class, predominantly white, residents were leaving the city, and their former residences became occupied by low-income families. Black slums in the north and white slums in the south were expanding and threatening to engulf the city center. To save central properties from an imminent loss of value, city authorities settled on redevelopment of the inner ring around the central business district. Due to the state of decay, neighborhood gentrification never received serious consideration.
The first generation of St. Louis public housing was enabled by the Housing Act of 1937 and opened in 1942 as two identical but racially segregated low-rise developments: Carr Square in the northwest for African Americans, and Clinton Peabody in the southwest for whites. The projects, intended for the working poor rather than the truly destitute, were successful.
In 1947, St. Louis planners proposed to replace DeSoto-Carr, a run-down neighborhood with many black residents, with new two- and three-story residential blocks and a public park. The plan did not materialize; instead, Democratic mayor Joseph Darst, elected in 1949, and Republican state leaders favored clearing the slums and replacing them with high-rise, high-density public housing. They reasoned that the new projects would help the city through increased revenues, new parks, playgrounds and shopping space. Darst stated in 1951:
We must rebuild, open up and clean up the hearts of our cities. The fact that slums were created with all the intrinsic evils was everybody's fault. Now it is everybody's responsibility to repair the damage.
In 1948, voters rejected the proposal for a municipal loan to finance urban redevelopment, but soon the situation was changed with the Housing Act of 1949 and Missouri state laws that provided co-financing of public housing projects. The approach taken by Darst, urban renewal, was shared by President Harry S. Truman's administration and fellow mayors of other cities overwhelmed by industrial workers recruited during the war. Specifically, the St. Louis Land Clearance and Redevelopment Authority was authorized to acquire and demolish the slums of the inner ring and then sell the land at reduced prices to private developers in the hopes of fostering middle-class development and luring families back from the suburbs. Another agency, the St. Louis Housing Authority, had to clear land to construct public housing for the former slum dwellers.
Design and construction By 1950, St. Louis had received a federal commitment under the Housing Act of 1949 to finance 5,800 public housing units. The first large public housing in St. Louis, Cochran Gardens, was completed in 1953. It contained 704 units in a mix of medium- and high-rise buildings. It was followed by three more projects: Pruitt–Igoe, Vaughn, and Darst–Webbe. Pruitt–Igoe was named for St. Louisans Wendell O. Pruitt, an African-American fighter pilot in World War II, and William L. Igoe, a former US Congressman. Originally, the city planned two partitions: Pruitt for black residents and Igoe for whites, as St. Louis public housing was segregated until 1955.
In 1950, the city picked Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth, an architectural firm based in St. Louis, to design the new public housing complex. The project was led by architect Minoru Yamasaki, then early in his career, and performed under supervision and constraints imposed by the federal authorities. His initial proposal, which included walk-up and mid-rise buildings as well as high-rises, was accepted by the St. Louis authorities, but exceeded the federal cost limits imposed by the Public Housing Administration; the agency intervened and imposed a uniform building height of 11 floors. Shortages of materials caused by the Korean War and tensions in the Congress further tightened federal controls. Overall density was set at a level of 50 units per acre, higher than in downtown slums. Although each row of buildings was supposed to be flanked by a "river of open space", landscaping was omitted from the final plan and few trees were planted.
Construction began in 1951. Pruitt accepted its first tenants in November 1954, Igoe in July 1955. When the two projects opened, they were one of the largest public housing developments in the country. Even under federal cost-cutting regulations, Pruitt–Igoe initially cost $36 million (equivalent to $ million in ), 60 percent above the national average for public housing; one factor was the installation of an expensive heating system. Despite the poor build quality, material suppliers cited Pruitt–Igoe in their advertisements to capitalize on the national exposure of the project.
Early years Pruitt–Igoe was initially seen as a breakthrough in urban renewal. One early resident described her 11th floor apartment as a "poor man's penthouse". Pruitt–Igoe was officially desegregated by a Supreme Court decision in 1954, and as many as 40 percent of the initial tenants were white, but by the mid 1960s it had become exclusively African American.
Decline By 1958, just four years after the opening of the project, deteriorating conditions were already evident. Elevator breakdowns and vandalism were cited as major problems—Yamasaki later lamented that he "never thought people were that destructive". Ventilation was poor during St. Louis's hot and humid summers. Meanwhile, the St. Louis Housing Authority was in the midst of a decades-long problem with inefficient and costly maintenance of its buildings, partly attributed to the power of labor unions. The stairwells and corridors attracted muggers, a situation exacerbated by the skip-stop elevators. Its location in "a sea of decaying and abandoned buildings" and limited access to shopping and recreation (ground-floor businesses had been eliminated from the design to save money, and the complex had no public mailbox) contributed to its problems. The huge, 11-story buildings of the development were reportedly a magnet for criminals and vagrants from the surrounding low-rise slums; a 1959 audit reported that most of the vandalism was committed by transients rather than residents, and a 1967 report similarly found that a "relatively large proportion" of crimes were committed by outsiders. Large criminal gangs were not common in the project.
The Recession of 1958 led to increased crime, vacancy, and rent delinquency in the development, which cut into the housing authority's revenue. In response, the authority reduced maintenance by 10%, and the reduction in maintenance coupled with a grand jury report that criticized crime levels in Pruitt–Igoe caused a significant drop in applications to the development. Increasing vacancy rates set off a feedback loop where the loss of revenue from rent forced the housing authority to curtail maintenance, further reducing the project's desirability. Occupancy at both Pruitt and Igoe peaked in the first years, at 95% and 86% respectively. In the 1960s, Pruitt remained about 75% full and Igoe 65%. In 1969, those numbers fell to 57.1% and 48.9%. At one point the vacancy rate was higher than any other public housing complex in the country. The annual turn-over rate was 20%.
After 1960, the rental income from Pruitt–Igoe failed to cover the cost of operation, forcing the housing authority to tap into its reserves and causing cutbacks at other developments, which were themselves profitable. Attempts by local authorities to improve living conditions were handicapped by lack of resources, though numerous programs, including the hiring of private security, rent incentives to attract new tenants, and grants for academic studies, were tried. As the financial position of the authority worsened, it raised the minimum rent from $20 a month in 1952 , to $32 in 1958 , $43 in 1962 , and $58 in 1968 . The increases forced some families to devote as much as 75% of their income to rent. In addition to the rent increases, tenants were charged for basic services like replacing fuses and door locks. The rent increases were a major factor in a nine-month rent strike by tenants in 1969. The strike began on February 2 at other public housing projects in the city and spread to Pruitt–Igoe by April 1. It ended with a settlement under which the board of commissioners of the housing authority resigned and tenant organizations were granted more influence.