THE CASE HISTORY
OF A FAILURE
Ten years ago, this St. Louis project was expected to set a new standard of housing design. 
Now $7 million will be spent in an attempt to save it.

In its April, 1951 issue the FORUM featured a St. Louis public housing project which, it claimed, had "already begun to change the public housing pattern in other cities." Called Pruitt-Igoe, its 33 11-story buildings designed by Hellmuth Yamasaki & Leinweber would "save not only people, but money," the FORUM predicted. Two months ago, only ten years after Pruitt-Igoe's completion, the Public Housing Administration announced that it will spend an unprecedented $7 million in an attempt to save it.

What impressed the FORUM were the project's efficient slab buildings incorporating skip stop elevators opening, only on every third floor, which permitted generous galleries, 11 ft. deep by 85 ft. long, at each of the stop floors.  Also singled out were the "refreshing" site plan and landscaping design, which called for a minimum of 200 ft. between buildings and a "river" of open space winding among them.

The galleries, the feature which most impressed the FORUM, were conceived by the architects to be "vertical neighborhoods" serving a variety of uses:

• "As a close, safe playground for small children while mothers are doing housework or laundry. 
• "As an open air hallway.
• "As a porch in spring, autumn and summer.
• "As a laundry.
• "As storage for such items as bicycles, washing machines, and tools."

Today, ten years after its completion, Pruitt-Igoe bears little resemblance to the architects' early sketches (left).  In a city that suffers from a shortage of low income housing, it is nearly a third vacant--PHA's major reason for putting up the $7 million.  Its buildings loom formidably over broad expanses of scrubby grass, broken glass and litter, and they contain hundreds of shattered windows.

The undersized elevators are brutally battered, and they reek of urine from children who judge the time it takes to reach their apartments.  By stopping only on every third floor, elevators offer convenient settings for Crime.  Every so often assailants will jam the elevators while they rob, mug of rape victims, then stop at one of the floors and send the elevator on with the victims inside.

The stairwells, the only means of access to almost the apartments, are scrawled with obscenities; their meager lighting fixtures and fire hoses are ripped out; and they too provide handy sites for predators.  The breezeways at the entrances are hangouts for teenagers who often taunt the women and children and disturb those in close-by apartments with their noise.

The galleries are anything but cheerful social enclaves.  The tenants call them "gauntlets" through which they must pass to reach their doors.  Children play there, but they are unsupervised and their games are rough and noisy outdoor pastimes transferred inside.  Heavy metal grilles now shield the windows, but they were installed too late to prevent three children from falling out.  The steam pipes remain exposed, both in the galleries- and the apartments, frequently inflicting severe burns.

The adjoining laundry rooms are unsafe and little used.  They never served enough tenants to keep them continuously bustling with activity, and thus invited molesters.  Now their doors are kept locked, and keys are distributed to the few tenants who use them.  The storage rooms also are locked and empty.  They have been robbed of their contents so often that tenants refuse to use them.

Simply too big

The St. Louis Housing Authority operates seven other public housing developments, and it claims that none of them comes close to Pruitt-Igoe in the proportion of crimes and acts of vandalism committed.  Why?  Charles L. Farris, the Authority's executive director, says Pruitt-Igoe is simply too big.  With nearly 2,800 units and almost 11,000 inhabitants (12,000 if it were full), it is four times the size of the second largest project. Its sheer size and scale, Farris says. thwart all attempts at effective management.

Architect Minoru Yamasaki, who designed Pruitt-Igoe, agrees that its size is objectionable.  His original design called for a combination of garden apartments and high-rise buildings accommodating,-- a density of 30 per acre.  "PHA forced us to almost double the density [to 55]," Yamasaki said.  "The best we could do then was to eliminate the low-rise and add more slabs."

As for the misuse of Pruitt-Igoe's communal spaces, Yamasaki said, "I never thought people were that destructive.  As an architect, I doubt if I would think about it now.  I suppose we should have quit the job.  It's a job I wish I hadn't done."

Architect Gyo Obata, who joined the firm while Pruitt-Igoe was in design, recalled that Yamasaki "tried and fought at every turn" with PHA to get more amenities.  "Now," he said, "PHA has gone clear around.  They are rehabilitating Pruitt-Igoe because they realize that the human values we fought for are important."

The Rev. John A. Shocklee, pastor of St. Bridget's Catholic Church adjacent to Pruitt-Igoe, criticized the project's lack of public and commercial facilities.  "To build a place and offer no services to 2,800 units is ridiculous," he said.  "There are no gymnasiums, no barbecue pits, no soda fountains, no decent places for people to gather.  The kids have nothing to do; they might as well pull pipes out of the walls and break windows." A community center, built on the site about five years ago, has not worked well because the Housing Authority places too many restrictions on its use, Father Shocklee contended.  Also, the community center is the place where tenants pay their rent---a function which underscores their suspicion that it belongs to the Authority, not to them. 

Dr. Lee Rainwater, professor of sociology and anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, is heading an exhaustive five-year social study of Pruitt-Igoe through a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.  Though he is reluctant to publicly discuss the study until it is completed, a paper that he delivered to an American Psychological Association conference last fall, based partly on his research at Pruitt-Igoe, reveals some of his conclusions about what he calls "the non-human threats" posed by the physical design of public housing.

These threats, he said, "can be pretty well done away with where the resources are available to resign decent housing for lower class people." For example, "In buildings where there are half a dozen or more families whose doors open onto a common hallway, there is a greater sense of the availability of help should trouble come than there is in buildings where only two or three apartments open onto a small hallway in a stairwell."

But, Dr. Rainwater observed, "it would be asking too much to insist that design per se can solve or even seriously mitigate" the human problems of the occupants.  At Pruitt-Igoe, these problems are overwhelming.

Absentee fathers

The median annual income of the project's 2,100 families is only $2,300, and more than half are receiving welfare payments.  Of the 10,736 individuals living there, 98 per cent of whom are Negro, there are only 990 adult males.  Missouri law prohibits mothers from receiving public assistance for their children if the father lives at home, and since the aid check is often a family's only stable source of income, many fathers live elsewhere.  Father Shocklee considers - the absence of so many male heads of households a major cause of its disciplinary and crime problems: "This is the natural result when you drive out an of the strong men.  When you remove so much strength from a community, it takes more than the police department to restore the basic structure."

Pruitt-Igoe also is a state of mind.  Its notoriety, even among those who live there, has long since outstripped the facts.  Its crime rate, though high, is well below that of the surrounding slum neighborhood, and declining.  Yet, until recently, the St. Louis Globe Democrat referred to every offense committed anywhere in the general neighborhood as a "Pruit-Igoe" crime--its way of saying "Negro."

Planner-Architect Albert Mayer, who is advising the Housing Authority and Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum in planning the renovation, calls Pruitt-Igoe "a product of the atmosphere of the time.  Housing was considered mainly as shelter. Agencies were opposed to anything enlivening, any commercial facilities.  There was the crass hostility of real estate interests and the puritanical belief that people could, if they wanted to, earn their own way."

"The success or failure of any housing project," Mayer said, depends on a combination social help and alert, understanding management." Pruit-Igoe, he feels, was deficient in some degree in all three.  "Its great size and density," he said, "are accentuated by its relentless over scale.  It doesn't stop and it doesn't start.  It is a question of endlessness versus definition.  Design can provide the definition.  But much of this could have been alleviated had the management approached it administratively and socially as a group of smaller entities

Pruitt-Igoe also is an example of the "not altogether rational craze for open space, Mayer said.  "The important thing with open space is what you do with it. At Pruitt-Igoe its relationship to the surrounding slum areas was not sufficiently considered.  The adjoining strip of park, bleak and treeless, rather than acting as a link between the project and its neighborhood, serves as a barrier.  The open spaces among the buildings are, per se, neutral.  They provide too many uncontrolled situations which invite trouble."

The $7 million renovation can do nothing about the building masses, but Mayer has proposed a number of changes designed to relieve the project's sterility and correct its almost total lack of social and recreational facilities.  They include many small playgrounds of differing character and designed for different age groups, sitting places, barbecue pits, and wooded picnic areas.

New lighting will be installed, not only for security but, in Mayer's words, "to highlight the arteries of this 'small town's' anatomy."

Circulation will be made to converge on a new central pedestrian "main street," and entrances to the project will be designed to give it greater self-identity.  Two cul-de-sac streets will be joined to form a continuous loop.  A small private shopping center will be built on a portion of the site to be sold as surplus property.  Small buildings of special character which Mayer calls "Everybody's Clubs" will provide informal drop-in and gathering places for all age groups, manned and supervised by tenants.

Within the buildings, the galleries will be narrowed and additional apartment units placed where the laundry and storage rooms are.  Laundry facilities will be moved to the ground floor.  One of the two breezeways in each building will be partially enclosed for a sheltered play area.  Exposed pipes will be covered, raw cement blocks painted, and elevators reconditioned.  Public toilets will be installed in the ground floors, and each building group will have a first floor sub-community center.  The skip-stop system, too expensive to correct, will remain in all but two buildings to be converted for the exclusive use of the elderly.  All elevators will be reconditioned.

Tenant participation

The Housing Authority, aware that physical rehabilitation may only provide "something else to break," has a series of programs underway to involve the tenants in the process, invite their suggestions, and give them a voice --and hope-- in the future.  The Authority has also begun a program to coordinate the activities of the scores of Federal, state and local welfare and social agencies, private charitable organizations and sympathetic individuals who are stumbling over each other, and the tenants, in efforts to do something about the human problems of Pruitt-Igoe.

Three years ago, Pruitt-Igoe was selected by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for its first "concerted services" project, an intense program of health, education, vocational rehabilitation and welfare services.  In a report issued last year, HEW admitted that the results have been disappointing, though the same method is working well other places.  "Because of the complexity of the problems," said the report, "one can only hope for slow but steady progress in the future."

The same philosophy is being applied to the physical rehabili-tation.  It will proceed cautiously in four stages over the next five years.  After each stage is completed, it will receive a six-month scrutiny so that mistakes can be avoided and new solutions tried in succeeding stages.  This time there are no glowing predictions --just hope, and a determination to alter the grim realities of Pruitt-Igoe's first ten years.

--JAMES BAILEY