A Failed Public-Housing Project Could Be a Key to St. Louis' Future

I am standing at the corner of North Jefferson and Cass in St. Louis, Missouri, in the 98-degree heat, peering into a forest that looks like it was intentionally designed as a park, some kind of urban wild. In fact it’s the overgrown ruins of the Priutt-Igoe public housing project, left untouched for 40 years. The site remains highly symbolic as the region reflects on the economic disparities and housing policies that are underneath the tensions in Ferguson, 11 miles north.

Pruitt-Igoe, a set of 33 massive 11-story apartment buildings set on 57 acres of open space, was a classic urban renewal solution: razing an old neighborhood and starting over. Completed in 1956 and designed by Minoru Yamasaki, author of the World Trade Center in New York City, Pruitt-Igoe was a bad version of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse and his Unite d’Habitation apartment complex in Marseille. The superblock structures had no amenities and soon turned into warehouses of fear and crime and despair; the project was famously blown up in 1972, a symbol of bad planning.