Back in the 1950s, St. Louis commissioned a public housing project unlike any in history.
Designed by Minoru Yamasaki — the architect who would later design the World Trade Center — the Pruitt-Igoe housing project was hailed as "vertical neighborhood for poor people" and named the building of the year by "Architectural Forum."
Things looked great when the building opened in 1956, but within years everything went horribly wrong. For various reasons, Pruitt-Igoe turned into a ghetto, neglected, deteriorating, and dangerous, and by the mid-1970s, the building was demolished.
A 2011 documentary by Chad Friedrichs called "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" chronicles the rise and fall of the housing project. We've broken out some highlights in the following slideshow. Also check out upcoming screenings in New York, Grand Rapids, Oklahoma City, and Pittsburgh.
Prior to the construction of Pruitt-Igoe, the working class residents of St. Louis were crammed into slums with communal bathrooms (or none at all), unreliable electricity, and streets filled with trash.
Source: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
Reformers wanted to remove people from the inhumane conditions of the slums, and local politicians thought they were an eyesore. So beginning in the late 1940s, federal and state governments began funding massive public housing projects in inner cities.
Source: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
Pruitt-Igoe was built with that big federal spending push. It cost around $36 million to construct and was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who later designed the World Trade Center towers.
Source: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
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