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16
The
PLAIN TRUTH
!he Pruitt-lgoe
Bousing Project
...ADisaster
Januaq•
1972
S
T.
Lours -
Pruitt-Igoe, once hailed
as the foremost public housing
project in the United States, is being
dosed clown. All but sixteen of its
43 mammoth structures, whích rise
like great, granite cliffs out of 57 acres
of central city land, are vacant. Only
600 famil ies rcmain. The abandoned
buildings, with windows smashed and
interiors devastated, appear to be wait–
ing for the wrecker's ball.
The projcct was built in the early
1950's in an attempt to clean up down–
town slums and to provide decent high–
rise public housing for the urban poor.
The original plan included two projects
- Pruitt for the Negroes and Igoc,
across thc strcet, for the whítes. But thc
plan was rcjccted by the Supreme Court
as unconstitutional. After a short time
of limitcd white occupancy, the project
becamc all black.
At the time of its completion in
195-1, Pruitt-Igoc appeared like an oasis
in a desert of decaying, dangerous slums
- somc of the worst in America. Soon
the project was filled with a small-city–
size population of 12,000 impoverished
Fifty-seven acre Pruitt-lgoe, orig–
inally built to eliminate the
slums of St. louis, has itself be–
come a giant slum. The 43 high–
rise buildings of the project, com–
pleted in 1954, are now almos!
empty and in a state of decay.