Pruitt–Igoe
Coordinates: 38°38′32.24″N 90°12′33.95″W / 38.6422889°N 90.2094306°W
Pruitt–Igoe was a large urban housing project first occupied in 1954 in the U.S. city of St. Louis, Missouri. Living conditions in Pruitt–Igoe began to decline soon after its completion in 1956. By the late 1960s, the complex had become internationally infamous for its poverty, crime, and racial segregation. Its 33 buildings were demolished with explosives in the mid-1970s, and the project has become an icon of failure of urban renewal and of public-policy planning.
The complex was designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed the World Trade Center towers and the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport main terminal.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the city of St. Louis was overcrowded, with housing conditions in some areas resembling "something out of a Charles Dickens novel." Its housing stock had deteriorated between the 1920s and the 1940s, and more than 85,000 families lived in 19th century tenements. An official survey from 1947 found that 33,000 homes had communal toilets. Middle-class, predominantly white, residents were leaving the city, and their former residences became occupied by low-income families. Black (north) and white (south) slums of the old city were segregated and expanding, threatening to engulf the city center. To save central properties from an imminent loss of value, city authorities settled on redevelopment of the "inner ring" around the central business district. As there was so much decay there, neighborhood gentrification never received serious consideration.
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