mrschmidtnms.weebly.commrschmidtnms.weebly.com/uploads/6/8/5/7/68577445/pr…  · Web viewPruitt-Igoe: The Troubled High-rise that Came to Define Urban America . The Guardian, Wednesday

Pruitt-Igoe: The Troubled High-rise that Came to Define Urban America The Guardian, Wednesday 22 April 2015 07.52 EDT

If you suggest a high-rise public housing project in America, your opponents will almost certainly use Pruitt-Igoe as a rhetorical weapon against you – and defeat you with it. The Captain WO Pruitt Homes and William L Igoe Apartments, a racially segregated, middle-class complex of 33 eleven-story towers, opened to great fanfare on the north side of St Louis between 1954 and 1956. But within a decade, it would become a decrepit warehouse exclusively inhabited by poor, black residents. Within two decades, it would undergo complete demolition.

Even before the dust settled from the infamous, widely televised 1972 implosion of one of Pruitt-Igoe’s buildings (the last of which wouldn’t fall until 1976), the argument that the design had doomed it gained serious traction. Architectural historian Charles Jencks cites that much-seen dynamiting as the moment “modern architecture died”.

Comissioned to design a public housing project federally financed under the Housing Act of 1949, the Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki at first came up with a mixed-rise cluster of buildings. Objecting to the price of his plan, the Public Housing Administration insisted on a cost-saving uniform tower height of eleven stories. The Korean War and squabbles in Congress ensured that the construction budget only got smaller thereafter, resulting in poor build quality and cheap fixtures that showed strain not long after the first occupants arrived.Pruitt-Igoe became a synonym for the kind of dysfunctional urban wasteland abandoned by Americans who, during the decades of “white flight” after the second world war, could afford to move to the suburbs. From the safety of their new, suburban communities, they looked upon central cities as too dirty, too crowded, too criminal – and, in many regions of the country, too black.

Not even Pruitt-Igoe’s most forgiving supporters would call it a success. Its 2,870 units reached a peak of 91% occupancy in 1957, a figure that would plummet below 35% by 1971, when just 600 people remained in the seventeen buildings that were not yet boarded up. Reports proliferated of property crime, gang activity, drug dealing, prostitution and murder. Heaters, toilets, garbage incinerators and electricity all malfunctioned, and at one point the failing plumbing let loose floods of raw sewage through the hallways.

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From its fanfare opening in 1954 to its live-on-TV demolition three decades later, the St Louis public housing project remains a powerful symbol of the social, racial and architectural tensions that dogged America’s cities in the mid-20th century

The second stage of demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe complex in April 1972.

Though built for the middle class, Pruitt-Igoe became an economic and racial ghetto soon after it opened, in large part due to bad timing. Drawn up when Missouri still segregated public facilities, the design originally designated the Pruitt half of the complex (named after second world war fighter pilot Wendell O Pruitt) for black residents only, and the Igoe half (after former US Congressman William L Igoe) as white only.

But then came sweeping desegregation following the US supreme court’s 1954 Brown vs Board of Education verdict. In the aftermath, fearful white residents moved out, along with black residents who could afford to, and the entire Pruitt-Igoe complex was inhabited entirely by exclusively black residents who simply couldn’t live anywhere else.

Often, these residents arrived from America’s underdeveloped south, in search of work in the industries that, so they discovered, had already left for the suburbs themselves. Essential building maintenance, paid for by modest rental fees drawn from an ever smaller and more impoverished group of tenants, ended up deferred and eventually denied. And so the people of Pruitt-Igoe made do as best they could in their increasingly derelict homes, feeling abandoned in a city seemingly on its own downward slide.

Why did St Louis take on the public-housing project that produced the likes of Pruitt-Igoe in the first place? In the late 1940s, when the growth of American cities looked unstoppable, officials had predicted a million-strong inner-city population by 1970 that would require high-density “urban renewal.” In reality, St Louis lost a third of its residents over that period – a decline that had begun as early as the 1930s.

Even today, when our eyes have supposedly grown accustomed to all manner of developments meant to shock us with their sheer incongruity, aerial photographs of the Pruitt-Igoe complex give you pause. There it stands, like a poor man’s Ville Radieuse, on 23 freshly cleared hectares of St Louis’s existing urban fabric, looking utterly alien to the miles of low-rise 19th and early 20th-century brick structures surrounding it.

But these images of Pruitt-Igoe have a much less firm a place in the culture than those of Pruitt-Igoe’s destruction, an event that – though commentators have used it in the service of a variety of political points – on balance reinforced the American fear of the type of tall, high-density housing that is so common today in the rich cities of east Asia.

Pruitt-Igoe lets us peek into the terrible problems built into the public housing choices made in many US cities, including Louisville. But a peek is worthless unless you understand what you’re looking at.

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Etta McCowan relaxes inside her Igoe apartment in April 1967. By this stage, the complex was riddled with social problems.

Glowey Word

Synonym Glowey Word

Synonym Glowey Word

Synonym

1. The Glowey Words: For each of the 17 highlighted words in the article, find a good solid synonym, one that you know well, to go with them. I don’t care where you get the synonyms, as long as they’re accurate.

2. “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” Some idioms are just annoying, but this one is always going to be relevant because there will always be people trying help but doing only harm. In so many ways, the Pruitt-Igoe projects were doomed to fail. Name a few from the article:

Something I don’t get is…

Now I know that…

3. What is something that you don’t understand from the article? After you write that down, try to get clarification by asking others. What did you find out?

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