Pruitt-Igoe: Skip-Stop Elevators, Rent-Funded Upkeep and the 1972 Implosion

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In the late 1940s St. Louis had more than 85,000 families crowded into deteriorating tenements, and a 1947 survey found 33,000 homes relying on communal outdoor toilets. With its tax base shrinking and the Federal Housing Act of 1949 offering support, the city pursued slum clearance and hired Minoru Yamasaki, who proposed a mix of mid-rise buildings, walk-ups and a few high-rises with open space. Federal officials capped buildings at 11 stories and required 50 units per acre, denser than the slums being cleared, producing 33 identical towers on 57 acres for $36 million. Pruitt opened in 1954 and Igoe in 1955, planned as segregated but integrated after a Supreme Court ruling, and one early tenant called her unit a poor man's penthouse.

Value engineering shrank apartments, eliminated balconies and landscaping, and installed skip-stop elevators serving only floors 1, 4, 7 and 10, with bare galleries meant as streets in the sky. Federal law paid for construction but required tenant rents to cover all operations and maintenance, so as St. Louis lost 30 percent of its population and 11,000 manufacturing jobs, vacancies rose, upkeep was cut and rents climbed from a $20 minimum in 1952 to $58 by 1968. A nine-month rent strike in 1969 forced the housing authority board to resign, but by 1970 23 of the 33 buildings were abandoned, and the first was imploded on television on March 16, 1972. Charles Jencks called it the day modern architecture died and Oscar Newman built his defensible space theory on it, while Katharine Bristol and Eugene Meehan argued policy, not design, doomed it.

• Planners had projected St. Louis would grow to a million people by 1970.
• Rent increases left some families spending up to 75 percent of their income on housing.
• Studies, including work by sociologist Lee Rainwater, found the worst vandalism and violent crime came mostly from outsiders and transients.
• The site had no ground-floor businesses and not even public mailboxes.
• Yamasaki said he regretted the project and later designed the World Trade Center towers.