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11/7/2019 ‘Pruitt-Igoe Myth’ asks: Did what went up have to come down?

- The Boston Globe

MOVIE REVIEW

‘Pruitt-Igoe Myth’ asks: Did what went


up have to come down?
By Mark Feeney Globe Staff, April 6, 2012, 12:00 a.m.

The buildings at Pruitt-Igoe being imploded in a scene from “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.” (STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF
MISSOURI/FIRST RUN FEATURES)

Pruitt-Igoe was the name of a massive public-housing project in St. Louis that’s become a
byword for urban planning failure. How massive? The development’s 33 buildings took
up 57 acres on the city’s north side and at one point had as many as 12,000 residents.
The chief architect on the project was Minoru Yamasaki, who was later responsible for
the World Trade Center, in lower Manhattan.
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11/7/2019 ‘Pruitt-Igoe Myth’ asks: Did what went up have to come down? - The Boston Globe

How much of a failure? At the time that the project’s demolition began, only 2,500
people still lived there. Living conditions had gotten that bad. The array of news footage,
vintage film clips, still photos, and newspaper clippings that writer-director Chad
Freidrichs has gathered makes plain just how bad, as do the interviews he’s conducted
with a half-dozen former residents and a trio of academics.

Footage of the first buildings being imploded, in 1972, appeared on network newscasts
and became a staple of stories about urban decay. The images remain shocking 40 years
later. In a cruel twist, the Gateway Arch was near Pruitt-Igoe and can be seen in many
views of the project. Even more shocking may be the fact that the project had opened to
residents just 20 years before it was torn down.

So that’s the “Pruitt-Igoe” part of the documentary’s title. Where does “myth” come in?
Presumably, it refers to the inevitability of the project’s failure. Yet the very things
Freidrichs brings in as context (and indictment) — racism, suburbanization, inadequate
funding for the project, the loss of urban manufacturing jobs — make plain what a
burden the project suffered under. Add in the Modernist design commandment that
high-density tower blocks in low-density settings were the best way to house people, and
you had a prescription for disaster.

Pruitt-Igoe was the first, and most famous, example of the failure of that sort of public
housing. But it was by no means alone. The since-demolished Cabrini-Green project in
Chicago became, if anything, more notorious. And that’s not taking into account a factor

specific to St. Louis. The city saw its population decline by 50 percent — that’s right, 50
percent — between 1950 and 1980, a more severe decline than almost any other US city.
Shrinking cities have numerous needs. Housing, let alone the wrong sort of housing, is
not one of them. Under a different set of circumstances — in a different society — the
development might have flourished. But “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” is a documentary, not
f
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11/7/2019 ‘Pruitt-Igoe Myth’ asks: Did what went up have to come down? - The Boston Globe
fantasy.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.

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