Pruitt-Igoe and Why It Was Torn Down

Pruitt-Igoe was a federally funded public housing project on the north side of St. Louis, Missouri, with 33 eleven story buildings that opened in 1954 and were demolished in a series of implosions starting in 1972. It was torn down less than two decades after it opened, and for decades the story told about it was that the buildings themselves had failed.

I haven’t been to the site, and this isn’t a post about an explore. It’s a history post built from government pages, newspapers and public radio, and every fact links to its source. It’s entertainment and general information, not legal or safety advice.

What was Pruitt-Igoe?

It was a huge project. The preservation nonprofit TCLF says it covered 57 acres about two miles north of the Gateway Arch, in St. Louis’s DeSoto-Carr neighborhood, with 33 eleven story buildings clad in concrete and brick and nearly 3,000 residential units. It was one piece of the nearly 6,000 public housing units financed in the city under the Housing Act of 1949. St. Louis Public Radio puts the count at 2,870 units.

The architect was Minoru Yamasaki of the St. Louis firm Leinweber, Yamasaki and Hellmuth, who also designed the World Trade Center in New York. Architectural Record says the goal was to relieve overcrowding in the city’s tenements. TCLF says the design drew on Le Corbusier’s Modernist approach and was meant to give residents views of a wooded setting, and that a landscaping plan by Harland Bartholomew was dropped because of budget cuts.

TCLF says the superblocks replaced older tenement housing and contrasted sharply with the surrounding grid of single family homes. How many people lived there depends on the source. NPR says about 12,000 residents, and St. Louis Public Radio says a peak of about 15,000. HUD says the first tenant moved in in 1954.

Why was Pruitt-Igoe torn down?

There is no single answer, and the best sources say so. The common version blames bad architecture, bad policy and bad people. Architectural Record says that popular narrative also points to rising crime, neglected facilities and tenants leaving. The version in the reporting I opened is more specific, and most of it is about money and about where people were allowed to live.

HUD’s page lists the causes drawn from the 2011 documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. Federal money paid for construction, but upkeep relied entirely on tenant rent, so high vacancies threatened the project’s finances and its physical condition. St. Louis lost about half its population in the 1950s and 1960s, but funding policies did not adjust. Planners expected working class tenants to keep the project full. The neighborhood lacked adequate transportation, jobs and food access, and state rules limited aid to families that had a man in the home.

HUD also says research showed Pruitt-Igoe had a higher vacancy rate than more successful housing projects in the city from the time it opened.

Did segregation play a part?

Yes, and the sources are direct about it. HUD says the project was first planned as segregated complexes. After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling it was planned as integrated, but by the mid 1960s its tenants were almost entirely Black. TCLF says the Igoe apartments were initially for white residents and the Pruitt homes for Black residents, and that after desegregation in 1955 many white residents left and occupancy fell to nearly 50 percent.

NPR’s review of the documentary adds the wider picture. St. Louis did not get the postwar boom it was expected to, so its population fell, and federal policy supported low income projects but also encouraged suburban growth. Racial segregation hardened through municipal and county lines, and jobs moved away from downtowns. Welfare rules denied benefits to families with adult males in the home.

HUD quotes the film’s conclusion, “The bigger story is in fact the decline of the city overall.”

What went wrong inside the buildings?

By the 1960s it showed. St. Louis Public Radio lists gang activity, drug use, crime, crumbling buildings, trash buildup and unreliable elevators. In February 1968 a KMOX-TV report covered flooding from burst pipes, with residents saying housing officials ignored their pleas for help, and a sewer line rupture sent raw sewage into the street. The author of that piece called it “a colossal, tragic, multi-million dollar failure.”

Former residents remember more than the headlines did. Architectural Record says the film interviews five former residents, who describe an 11th floor apartment as a “poorman’s penthouse” and recall restrictions on phones, televisions and men living with their families.

How was Pruitt-Igoe demolished?

With explosives, over several years. KSDK lists implosions on March 16, April 21 and June 9, 1972, followed by more over the next three years, with the site cleared in 1976. HUD gives a different first date, saying the city demolished three of the 33 towers on July 15, 1972 and finished by 1976. The sources don’t agree on the day, so I’ll say 1972.

U.S. Representative William L. Clay said on December 14, 1970, “Pruitt Igoe is a mistake and we ought to recognize it as such,” according to KSDK. A demolition expert told the station’s reporter, “We don’t use much dynamite. It’s all gravity.”

NPR notes that some newspapers called the destruction “the death of Modernism.” Architectural Record treats that as part of the myth the film doesn’t fully dispel. It points out that the film mentions Modernist planning as a cause only briefly.

What is on the site now?

Trees, mostly. HUD says two St. Louis city schools occupy half the property and an overgrown urban forest covers the other half. St. Louis Public Radio said the cleared land was left unsecured and became a dumping site for decades. TCLF describes the remaining undeveloped 33 acres as bisected by remnants of concrete paths, with asphalt paving, curbs, streetlights and sidewalks that follow former resident routes.

St. Louis Magazine reported in December 2017 that bulldozers had cleared much of the forest for a project it called NorthSide Regeneration, with a hospital planned by developer Paul McKee. Michael Allen, a senior lecturer at Washington University, argued the clearing erased heritage, saying the city should have saved or documented elements such as trees and a barbecue pit built by residents. St. Louis Magazine also noted that part of the site had been partitioned off for a nearby middle school and that the electric transformer building survived the implosions. Check current St. Louis news for what is built there now, since that reporting is nearly a decade old.

How does this connect to the abandoned places I film?

The same pattern shows up at a smaller scale. A building doesn’t fail because of one cause. The money for upkeep stops, the people leave, and it deteriorates. That is the cycle I describe in what is urban decay, and you can see it in my video of the abandoned bank in East St. Louis, Illinois.

I also filmed Exploring Illinois Abandoned John Mackler Projects, and a Baptist church in East St. Louis with a collapsed roof is on my channel. Neither one is Pruitt-Igoe.

NPR draws one comparison I can pass along, which is that Chicago’s Cabrini-Green began construction before Pruitt-Igoe, and its last building came down in 2011. If you want to know how I look into a place before I decide to document it, that’s in how to research an abandoned building and in my $9.99 PDF, How to Find Abandoned Places.

The bigger story, in the words HUD quotes from the film, is the decline of the city overall.