Minoru Yamasaki, the famed architect who designed the World Trade Center with its iconic Twin Towers, found out how hard it can be to design society.
But what a time to study architecture! This was the high modernism era: Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier were rethinking everything. Breakthroughs in glass, steel, and concrete created new possibilities.
Le Corbusier, or Corbu as he was known, was a major influence for Yamasaki. Corbu was perhaps the most extreme of the high modernists. He had unyielding faith in the power of rationalism and efficiency to improve every facet of society. He believed homes should be âmachines for living.â The master planner could create literal utopias by exerting his expert will from the top down.
The Housing Actâs provision of government-backed mortgage insurance meant suburban housing was cheap and getting cheaper. So were cars. President Eisenhowerâs interstate highway project, which (arguably) began with the paving of I-70, connected St. Louis with the blossoming suburbs of St. Charles just across the river. Despite the decision in Brown v. Board, white families were taking that same FHA money that funded Pruitt-Igoe and buying homes in the suburbs, and many jobs went with them.
This fundamentally changed the city. De facto segregation soared; the city shrank and suburbs swelled. If St. Louisâ leaders realized their assumption of continued economic growth and population growth was wrong, they kept it to themselves.
It quickly got worse from there.
Planners expected the working poor to live in the complex. Instead, many unemployed families took the apartments, which meantâbecause families receiving welfare paid the lowest rentsâthe rent revenue wasnât enough to sustain the building.
Also, under Missouriâs welfare laws at the time, you could receive welfare only as a single parent. This left many mothers and fathers with the grim options of staying together without the state benefits, or separating in order to receive benefits. Many fathers left their families to search for work wherever they could find it. They often didnât return. Soon Pruitt-Igoe was mostly populated with large, single-parent families. The lack of fathers in the building (and social workers ran regular checks to ensure dad really wasnât living there) had dangerous ripple effects for Pruitt-Igoe children. Crime quickly became common, and children joined gangs, vandalizing and damaging the buildings. Maintenance workers had trouble keeping up and occupancy dropped rapidly.
The day President Lyndon Johnson gave his famous âGreat Societyâ speech in 1964, residency in the complex hovered around 25%.
And what of Yamasakiâs innovative skip-stop elevators? His wide hallways? Did they foster a sense of community as he intended? Amity Shlaes paints a bleak picture:
[The] elevators⌠were muggersâ traps. Poor maintenance meant the elevators often jammed, leaving gangsâ victims in with them for long extra minutes. The gangs lurked in the halls and made tenants ârun the gantletâ to get to their doors.
Young men threw bricks and rocks at windows and street lamps; the activity was a regular sport. There were no good playgrounds. Because there were no toilets on the ground floor, children had accidents there, and the elevators gradually became public toilets. The community area was a sorry joke; its only function ultimately was as a place for collecting Housing Authority rents. No one seemed able to stop the decay.
ST. LOUIS QUICKLY realized that Pruitt-Igoe was a problem. But it was unclear who, if anyone, could fix it. The federal government, the St. Louis Housing Authority, the state, and the City of St. Louis itself all shared responsibility for the complex. When a problem belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one.
Within five years of its launch, Yamasaki was regularly apologizing for his role in the project. Though the final design of the complex differed from his original vision, he came to question the core assumption behind the project: that peopleâs lives could be effectively engineered through urban design. He expressed regret for his âdeplorable mistakesâ with Pruitt-Igoe. By the late 1950s, he was giving eloquent speeches about the âtragedy of housing thousands in exactly look alike cells,â which âcertainly does not foster our ideals of human dignity and individualism.â
To the Detroit Free Press, he put it more simply: âSocial ills canât be cured by nice buildings.â
By the early 1970s, the 33 concrete tombstones lining St. Louisâ skyline were a cautionary tale for utopian housing schemes. It was a den of crime and misery, rather than anything anyone could call home. When the decision came to demolish the complex, occupancy was only 10 percent.
