Pruitt-Igoe

Origins

The decision to build Pruitt-Igoe was a component of a multifaceted effort to reconstruct and modernize central St. Louis. By clearing slums, redesigning the downtown, and creating planned industrial zones, St. Louis's civic and political leaders hoped to revive [Page 567]the city's economy and reverse the flow of middle-class families to the suburbs. Tow hip up support for the campaign, the city's major newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in 1950 published a 13-week series of articles about St. Louis's problems whose title starkly posed the question, “Progress or Decay?”

In the minds of its planners, progress for St. Louis entailed clearing slums in inner-city neighborhoods and rebuilding them with new public and private housing. In the late 1940s, the city targeted DeSoto-Carr, an area of approximately 180 acres, which contained many old and dilapidated houses, for almost complete demolition and redevelopment with new housing developments, one of which would be the Pruitt-Igoe project.

The civic vision for the future of St. Louis was distinctly modernist in style. The architect Eero Saarinen won a 1948 competition for a riverfront monument to Thomas Jefferson's vision of westward expansion with his abstract modernist design of the Gateway Arch. Enamored of the tall elevator residential buildings being built in New York and other large cities, mayor Joseph Darst pushed for modernist high-rise designs for the city's housing. Darst directed the housing authority to hire the firm of Hellmuth, Yamasaki, and Leinweber, which had experience in large-scale projects. The firm's first project for the St. Louis Housing Authority, John J. Cochran Gardens, a set of modern elevator buildings with outdoor balconies, won a gold medal from the St. Louis Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Years later, some would confuse this project with the firm's later Pruitt-Igoe project, which they mistakenly described as an award winner.

Although they were never mentioned in public, racial issues played a large role in the planning of postwar St. Louis. Much of the civic anxiety about the spread of slums concerned the influx of African American migrants from the rural South. Many African Americans lived in DeSoto-Carr and other redevelopment neighborhoods and thus stood to lose their homes. The city planner proposed to the mayor that building large numbers of dwellings in the DeSoto-Carr neighborhood would prevent the African American population from spreading to White neighborhoods—a policy of racial containment pursued in Chicago and other cities. Despite pressure from civil rights organizations and citizens, city officials continued to enforce segregated admission policies in public housing until 1954 when the Supreme Court barred the practice.

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