‘The Pruitt-Igoe Myth’ Dismantles a Racist Public Housing Legend
Repeat a distorted version of the truth often enough, and it becomes accepted fact, regardless of the realities on the ground. This verity has rarely been more vividly evoked than in Chad Freidrichs’ moving and revelatory documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. First released in 2011, it continues to prove its relevance as race- and class-fraught divisions around cities and the right to housing fail to be resolved.
In The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, Freidrichs breaks down the legacy of this infamous public housing complex, built in St. Louis in 1954. Initially lauded as a promising new frontier for urban housing, they quickly fell into disrepair and became hot beds of criminality. When the buildings were demolished in 1972, the very name “Pruitt-Igoe” became a kind of talismanic curse, a symbol of everything not to do in public housing. Architecture critic Charles Jencks even blamed the complex for killing the promise of an entire style of building: “Modern architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 pm.”
As Freidrichs shows, the lessons supposedly learned from this ignominious episode weren’t entirely wrong but they certainly weren’t all correct, either. As usual, it was the poor and powerless who received the blame, while the powers that be escaping censure and pointing fingers back at those whom they were to have been helping.
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth starts in a haunting setting all too familiar to residents of some Rust Belt cities: a wide stretch of mature trees and wild undergrowth right in the heart of a once-thriving downtown. On that spot back in 1952, the city of St. Louis cleared out a swath of decrepit housing in the old DeSoto-Carr neighborhood to make room for an ambitious project. Over the next few years, after flattening the old DeSoto-Carr tenements, some 33 modernist high-rise buildings (designed by the World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki) sprung up on a wide, 57-acre plain just a few blocks away from the downtown’s central district. The response of one of the residents interviewed by Freidrichs appears to be somewhat typical of the poor families who started moving in: “It was like an oasis in the desert.”
What makes the interviews so compelling is how they reside at such a stark, 90-degree angle to the received history of the project and its downfall. Pruitt-Igoe was conceived as a revolutionary approach to modernizing the city’s downtown, relieving overcrowding, and avoiding the inevitable slum lords and unsanitary conditions prevalent in poorer neighborhoods. At first it seemed like a dream come true to many of its new residents. Person after person sighs into the camera, recalling the way that the buildings were lit up like giant Christmas trees during the holidays, the close and neighborly feel of the place, and the penthouse-like glamour of the higher-floor apartments.
The tragedy of the movie lies in how quickly that dream of decent and affordable housing for the city’s poor unraveled. Bringing a woeful sense of the poetic, illustrated by a rich mix of archival footage, Freidrich shows how the dream was doomed from the start. In a particularly short-sighted move, local government approved the building of Pruitt-Igoe, but didn’t think to appropriate funds for its upkeep (much like, as Ken Burns showed in his 2009 documentary series, The National Parks, Washington set up the national park system but took years to bother finding the money to maintain them).
One particularly harebrained housing authority policy prohibited able-bodied men from inhabiting apartments of residents on welfare; essentially dynamiting the project’s family structure. In short order, elevators stopped working, broken windows weren’t fixed, and a bleak air settled about the place, followed by the inevitable lawlessness and what one resident termed “a prison environment.”
At the same time, larger forces were at work that hastened the project’s collapse. Even though Pruitt-Igoe had been built in part to handle the density of the city’s population, by the time it was completed, people were leaving downtown in droves for the suburbs — a nationwide shift that was particularly prevalent in St. Louis. This outward flow of population was generated not just by what the movie terms “a national pro-suburban policy” (new highways and federal loan programs that made buying a suburban house cheaper than renting in the city) but also the harsh realities of racial politics in a divided city. The Great Migration of working-class blacks from the South to cities like St. Louis in the postwar years had been drawn by the promise of readily available manufacturing jobs. Just in time for Pruitt-Igoe to be finished, those factories were either closing down or moving out of downtown.
The “myth” that Freidrichs talks about is what the 1972 demolition of the utterly decrepit complex (largely uninhabited for several years prior) is supposed to represent. In that version of the story — related in often racially-tinged tones by locals, the national media, and urban renewal professionals—the residents were blamed for not keeping their buildings in shape, not the buildings’ management.
The more nuanced view put forward by the urban historians and residents in Freidrichs’ movie is that the complex and its residents were collateral damage in a wider postwar onslaught on American cities. Surveying the wreck of poor planning and class and racial divisions that hampered this “emptying city,” the movie argues that what happened to St. Louis was in fact “a slow-motion Katrina.” Just as many critics couldn’t understand why people wanted to return to the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans after the hurricane, so too those who wrote off the residents of Pruitt-Igoe won’t understand their often warm memories of the place.
Sometimes home is where the malfunctioning elevator is.
A version of this article was previously published at filmcritic.com
Title: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
Director: Chad Freidrichs
Studio: First Run Features
Rating: NR
Year: 2011
Official site
