Original subtitles

Today in America,

the gap between rich and poor continues to grow.

Once again, we're in the midst of a debate--

can public assistance and housing programs

help close the gap?

I'm Natasha del toro, and tonight,

we'll go back to an earlier experiment.

In the 1950s, the Pruitt-Igoe towers

promised relief to St. Louis's poor people

living in overcrowded tenements.

Less than 2 decades later,

the public housing complex was demolished.

Why did the Pruitt-Igoe project fail?

This is "America reframed."

Narrator: In 2005, columnist Sylvester Brown

began a series of articles on the Pruitt-Igoe

public housing development, where he once resided

as a child.

The north side St. Louis site,

on which Pruitt-Igoe once stood, is now vacant.

I was driving down Jefferson Avenue

and I happened to notice the trees.

And I've driven by Pruitt-Igoe before,

but I really never paid attention to it.

There were full-grown trees and the question hit me,

"how long does it take to grow a tree?"

So, I pulled over and I just looked at those trees

and there were so many, many, many trees,

and I thought, "wow, you know, it's been

at least 30 years since I been in there."

And I was supposed to get a police escort and I said,

"eh, I'm not gonna do all that."

I wanted my first revisit to Pruitt-Igoe to be alone.

It was like a little, mini forest.

There was tall grass, white-tip weeds,

trees all over the place.

(Police sirens in distance)

And I followed this dusty, little path

and I walked up this path, and I sat on this big mound

of concrete and dirt, I just sat there,

and I reflected, and the sun was goin' down.

I remembered it as a child, looking out

my 10th-story window and watching the sun go down.

So the memories started to come back.

And as I was sitting there, I heard this (Blowing sound)

And I looked across and there was this black dog just running.

(Barking)

I started runnin' out of there and I had this idea

that this slobbery dog's gonna jump on my back.

But I made it out of there, and I remember

sitting outside there, panting, and being afraid

and I was afraid again,

feeling this fear I felt when I was six years old,

the danger of being at Pruitt-Igoe.

Film narrator: These developments are run

by the St. Louis housing authority.

This is a far cry from the crowded, collapsing

tenements that many of these people have known.

Here, in bright, new buildings with spacious grounds,

they can live.

Live with indoor plumbing, electric lights,

fresh, plastered walls and the rest of the conveniences

that are expected in the 20th century.

In these projects, children can play in safety

on the wide lawns,

not in the littered alleys and vacant lots.

Narrator: It was touted of as a solution,

a cure for the disease.

Pruitt-Igoe would rise above the polluted slums,

lifting its residents out of poverty.

(Dog barking)

They would thrive and the city would prosper.

Everything would be different.

Well, it was a very beautiful place, like a big hotel resort,

I'd say, with plenty of green grass, trees,

shrubbery, and all the works.

What happened?

Well, one day we woke up and it was all gone.

Reporter: In the middle '50s, St. Louis thought

it had solved its low-cost housing needs,

but instead, a monster was created.

But things changed quickly.

As problems mounted, the decline was steep.

Those who could move out did.

Reporter: 12,000 people were originally jammed

into these 33 buildings, only 2,500 people

still linger in the remaining shells.

It became poor, increasingly segregated,

heavily vandalized, and began to resemble

the slums it replaced.

Reporter: Pruitt-Igoe looks like a battle ground.

Vandalism and neglect have left fear

among the remaining occupants.

Crime rates rose, fear grew,

and conditions worsened.

Outsiders stayed away, it had become notorious.

Reporter: Some projects became breeding grounds for crime.

The Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis is a casebook example.

In St. Louis, Missouri today, the health of an ailing

neighborhood got some long and badly needed treatment.

So in St. Louis today, they were hard at work again.

This time, tearing down what was built before.

Two decades after opening Pruitt-Igoe,

the government gave up.

Reporter: And because they are so desperate,

they are willing to try desperate things.

It was a powerful story with a dramatic end.

The footage was replayed again and again.

One image seemed to sum up the infamy.

It circulated worldwide.

It was reprinted next to photos from earlier years

and suggested the simple question,

"what caused the failure?"

The Pruitt-Igoe myth begins here.

Reporter: When critics talk of the failures

of federally-funded, high-rise housing projects,

they often cite the example of the huge Pruitt-Igoe project

in St. Louis.

Some blame the architect.

Modernist high-rises like Pruitt-Igoe, they said,

created a breeding ground for isolation,

vandalism, and crime.

Reporter: The net result of all this quality design

was, in fact, the production of an environment of fear.

Others attacked the welfare state,

with big government the problem

and Pruitt-Igoe the result.

Reporter: Film of that demolition has become

an anti-public housing clich⸡

this federal government of ours no longer has an open checkbook.

Many stated flatly that the residents

were too poor, uneducated, or rural,

that they'd caused their own problems

and had taken Pruitt-Igoe with them.

Reporter... social as well as economic failure.

Long after the dust settled and the site was cleared,

this is the Pruitt-Igoe that remained.

The mythical Pruitt-Igoe with a fatal flaw,

doomed to failure from the start.

Little was said about the laws that built

and maintained it, the economy that deserted it,

the segregation that stripped away opportunity,

the radically changing city in which it stood.

In the years of Pruitt-Igoe, the American city

was wrenched apart by devastating forces.

They were felt most deeply by the residents

of a large but vulnerable housing project

on the north side of St. Louis.

It's a powerful story with a dramatic end.

And its aftershocks are still with us.

Film narrator: In the years after the war,

they came by the thousands...

Small farmers who couldn't make it on 40 acres.

Tenants who saw a chance for their children up north.

They brought them in the hope that in the center

of so much wealth, there would be a place for them.

Mechanized labor had changed agriculture in the South.

Tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and field workers

could no longer scratch out a living.

The new migrants arrived with little money or property.

They were shepherded into the only place

in which they were welcome,

distressed neighborhoods, near inner-city jobs,

known as the slums.

You really had these people called slumlords,

who took advantage of the fact that the poor basically

had to live in the center of cities,

close to where their jobs were.

You had acres and acres of housing that was unsafe

and unsanitary.

By unsanitary, it meant a complete lack

of the basic plumbing facilities.

And by unsafe, it meant you could be burned to death.

And the slumlords knew that they could just jam

as many people as possible into it.

So, it was a very profitable system,

but it was also completely destructive,

not just for the people who were stuck in the slums,

but for the whole urban community,

and there is a despair that private enterprise

could ever deal with this issue.

The door was open for a public option.

Housing reformers pressed lawmakers to replace

the slums with clean, modern housing,

to re-energize the depression-era housing program

that had been stalled by the war.

They found an unlikely ally in civic leaders and politicians,

who began to see the ring of slums as an eyesore

that blighted the aging downtown area.

Eager developers desired valuable inner city land,

while anxious business interests

worried fearful consumers

were being driven away by the slums.

The downtown interests just wanted the slums to go away.

They didn't particularly care what happened to the people,

but because they were wealthy and powerful,

they were a very important part of the coalition

that passed the 1949 housing act.

(Building collapsing)

The federal government would put up the money

to buy slum property, using eminent domain, if necessary,

to condemn not just individual houses,

but whole blocks and whole sets of blocks,

to knock them down and to rebuild

on a modern and humane scale.

The essence of public housing was that the public sector

could do a better job.

People who had been living where they literally

never saw the sun, now, they would have

more magnificent views than the richest people in St. Louis.

It enabled the most disadvantaged people

in our cities to be liberated from the slums.

To residents weary of the poverty

and desperation of the depression,

the sacrifices of the war,

for a city so haunted by its celebrated past,

yearning for a renaissance,

a new, modern St. Louis, rebuilt from the ground up,

would be the salvation of the city.

St. Louis' post-war project of downtown renewal

was one of the most ambitious in the nation.

Some plans never materialized.

Others were breathtaking, in conception and execution.

Just to the north and west of downtown,

construction began on a newly-cleared 57-acre site

in 1952.

The Wendell Pruitt and William Igoe homes

became a proud symbol of St. Louis' rebirth.

A modern break with the crumbling past

that surrounded it.

Woman: My family came from a very small house

and I would say it was like a shack, actually.

There were three rooms and there were twelve in my family.

The sleeping conditions were quite crowded.

My mom slept in the kitchen, if you can believe that.

She had a roll-away bed in the kitchen,

next to the pot belly stove.

Woman: Some friends came by and said,

"you got a new project up here,

we're going to put an application, you wanna come?"

Right on the corner, there, of Jefferson and old Fowler,

it was the first building they opened up in Pruitt.

It was like an oasis in the desert.

All this newness, I'd be the first person

to occupy my unit, that was a thrill for me.

And then they put me on the 11th floor,

where I was, you didn't live any higher than the 2nd floor,

and they were puttin' me on the 11th floor with elevators.

But once I moved in on the 11th floor with the elevators,

I called it the "poor man's penthouse."

I didn't wanna live on another floor.

I never thought I would live in that kind of a surrounding.

Jacquelyn: When we first moved in, it was probably

one of the most exciting things of my life.

It was like another world.

Everybody had a bed.

My mom had her own bed,

and I was so happy to see her

just in a room to herself, with a door.

Woman: We moved there really close to Christmas.

It was like a Christmas present.

There was snow on the ground, there was lights

all over the place, cars back and forth,

people walkin' back and forth

and everybody had Christmas lights.

Everybody had Christmas lights, it seemed like they all

came home about the same time,

just as soon as the sun would go down,

the Christmas lights would start to come on.

Then it was, "wow, look at this."

I can still see it, it was really nice.

I tell you, when I drive down on Jefferson,

I always have to park and just look.

It brings back wonderful memories.

I'm very truthful when I say, "my memories of Pruitt-Igoe

are probably some of the best memories I have."

I remember a warm sense of family

and a warm sense of community.

Pruitt-Igoe was a place that I remembered

as this wonderful building of different smells

of pies and cookies and cakes and all these eclectic dishes

that were being cooked by the residents

on the 11th floor.

It was a place where we played hard.

Ran up and down these little breezeways and up and down

the steps and running around,

so it was a place where kids could really,

really get a chance to play hard.

Pruitt and Igoe was a safe place for me.

I mean, I don't care what people said about it

that lived outside there, if you didn't live in there

you thought it was a bad place, but growin' up in there

was--you knew the people

and you were never alone.

I have to say, you were never alone,

because there's somebody across the hall,

there's somebody down under you, there's somebody up over you.

There's people here, there's lights here,

there's life here, and so I'm not alone

and I'm not afraid.

I like people, I like neighborhoods,

I like driving, and I like to hear music,

I like to see people on their front porches,

I like to see kids playing in parks,

I like to see schools, I like to see libraries,

I like to see--you know, and at one time, Pruitt-Igoe had that.

It had this, this life, this engaging, electric life.

There were friendships and bonds formed there

that have just lasted a lifetime.

I know, I know a lot of bad things came out of Pruitt-Igoe,

I know they did, but I don't think

they outweigh the good.

I really, really don't

because at first, Pruitt-Igoe was just

a wonderful place, it was--it was wonderful.

I think Pruitt-Igoe would be here today had it been

maintained like it was when they first opened it up.

When we first moved into Pruitt and Igoe,

it was clean, always clean.

The maintenance men were always sweepin',

the elevator was always clean,

and I remember there was a quilted kind of a cloth

that went on the elevator when you moved in,

so you wouldn't scratch it up,

but the maintenance started to just go down

and down and down and down until it seemed

like nobody cared anymore about Pruitt and Igoe.

The maintenance men stopped cleanin' the elevators.

The kids got to where they would go in the elevator

as their personal restroom.

I mean there's many times, these urine-smelled elevators,

they'd stop and you'd push the button all day long

and nobody would come,

so you'd be in this dark elevator--

I remember me and my brother often times--

stuck on this stupid,

urine-smelled elevator and couldn't get out,

so what we learned to do was to push the doors open,

find a little cable and pull ourselves up

to our floor and pull ourselves out of there.

In fact, we became the guys who people would call

when you needed to get somebody out of the elevator.

We'd come and we'd push the doors open.

"You're down on that floor."

We'd go down there and we'd help get them out of there.

Man: You've been under considerable fire

because of what is alleged to be,

I'd say poor housekeeping practices

on the part of the housing authority.

How do you respond to that, what do you think

is really the thing that's wrong here?

Well, in dealing with public housing,

the problem that we find the most pressing,

is one I've talked about for quite a while, publicly.

The fact that, uh, we simply do not have enough money

to operate as well as we should, perhaps.

What about this incinerator, here, behind us,

do you have difficulty with things like that?

Well, this is a building which will be cleaned.

Every building cannot be cleaned at exactly the same moment.

People working all day, cleaning inside and outside.

The incinerator is rather small,

but it was built that way

and there's not much we can do about it.

We do the best we can and in most cases,

it works quite well.

Man: We pulled up with the moving van.

The stench from the garbage piling up,

in front of the incinerator, wafted out of the elevator

and I knew at that point that there was somethin'

drastically different about this living arrangement.

The sight of all these huge buildings

and all of these people and just the overall

non-upkeep of the place,

it was a shock for me, as a kid,

and I never really recovered from that first day.

Robert: Almost from day one, these buildings

were under-maintained.

There was never an adequate provision

for the maintenance, that was so important

to these very complex structures.

Government paid for building them,

but the maintenance had to come out

of money from the rents of the tenants.

And the tenants couldn't afford the very highly-skilled

maintenance people to keep these buildings operating.

So, in this very basic way, I think the public sector

failed the people who were living in these buildings.

From the first, public housing had enemies.

Banks, realtors, and chambers of commerce

lined up against it, fearing its effect

on their bottom line.

Public housing was labeled as un-American,

as a communist erosion of the free market.

But clearing slums

and constructing large buildings

was popular with downtown business interests

and building trades.

Clearance allowed for profitable redevelopment.

Construction meant lucrative building contracts and jobs.

And so the law was written and the slums were cleared,

the towers built and valuable land redeveloped,

all with federal funding.

But the enemies of public housing had their say as well.

No federal funds for operation and maintenance.

The projects became dependent on their tenants income.

In the beginning, low- and middle-income applicants

flooded into Pruitt-Igoe's new apartments.

Rental incomes were strong, grounds were maintained,

elevators worked,

security staff patrolled the area.

It thrived in the crowded city.

But the city was changing.

Man: One of the big questions for planners

and policy makers and politicians, during and after

world war ii, was, "what would the future

of St. Louis look like in terms of its population?"

Between 1930 and 1940, St. Louis

actually declined slightly and that put the fear of God

in the city planners and the politicians.

So, growth becomes almost a kind of psychology.

They really wanted to believe that that was an anomaly,

that that was a depression-era problem,

and the growth trajectory was actually going to be upward

after world war ii, so that there would be

about a million people by 1970.

And if you were going to fit a million people into the city,

then you had to have some kind of large-scale housing.

The problem is though,

that there are two trends going on at once.

One of the trends is upward growth

and the other trend is large numbers of people,

who have enough means, leaving the city.

And planners mistook which one

was the dominant trend.

St. Louis' population peaked in the 1950s.

The growth that had defined the war years had ended.

Yet, well out of earshot of downtown gridlock

and demolition, a new kind of city was being developed

on a massive scale.

But it was not the urban high-rise envisioned

by city planners.

Instead, the new American dream was built on cheap lots

on the margins of cities,

and one-story ranches that came to dominate the landscape

of the suburbs.

Film narrator: Two thirds of the people in our country

now live in a metropolitan area,

mostly, the growth is out here, in the suburbs.

There are many good things about living in this new world.

It has given millions of families

pleasant, well-planned homes, a place to have a garden,

with light and air and space.

In the post-war years, a new lifestyle was emerging,

as a centuries-old engine of American urban growth

ground to a halt and then reversed.

Criticized for conformity, condemned for endless sprawl,

idealized, desired, labeled American dream or nightmare,

the sudden rise of the suburb, for good or ill,

reshaped the American city.

Robert: What people didn't see in 1949

was that the cities were emptying out.

They were losing their middle class,

they were losing their industrial base.

With the loss of population and jobs, you have the loss

of tax base and you enter into this vicious circle,

where within the cities, there was a deterioration

of basic services,

whereas in the suburbs, every single year,

there was a growth in the value of your house,

more services, more jobs that were close

to where you were living, better schools.

The federal government basically committed itself

to making the suburbs affordable for the American middle class

and for the white working class.

Essentially, we had a national pro-suburban policy

during the years when Pruitt-Igoe was being built.

The urban flight, draining American cities,

was made possible by the same federal law

that built Pruitt-Igoe, the 1949 housing act.

With expanded fha loans, buying a new suburban home

became less expensive than renting in the city

for most families.

As poor migrants from the South continued to flood in,

the middle class exodus was nearly complete.

For St. Louis, post-war urban decline

was especially quick and hard.

While other cities annexed unused land

and expanded outward, St. Louis was locked in.

The city's borders had been legally fixed

in the 19th century.

Its toughest years were ahead.

By 1980, the city of St. Louis would lose half

its mid-century population.

The planners had expected an overcrowded city

of a million people.

They built massive projects, like Pruitt-Igoe,

expecting them to fill,

but the plans were collapsing,

St. Louis was in free fall.

An affluent St. Louis county, the suburbs directly

to the west of the city, a powerful,

new central business district emerged,

just outside city limits.

Dozens of tiny suburban townships formed,

determined to maintain their independence.

Reporter: Though it's only a crossroads on the highway

north of St. Louis, you can hardly miss black Jack

as you pass through it.

Citizens proudly proclaim its location,

right here, where two huge Blackjack oaks used to stand.

Sixty-five feet in subdivisions developed under the density

development procedures, fled out in ordinance number twelve,

the zoning ordinance.

Reporter: Tiny black Jack incorporated itself as a city

last August and promptly passed a zoning law

prohibiting the construction of new apartment buildings.

Among them, a proposed low- to middle-income housing project.

The people of black Jack are afraid,

and what they are afraid of is visible

only a few Miles away at the giant Pruitt-Igoe

housing complex in St. Louis.

Vandalism and crime are commonplace.

The citizens of black Jack fear that a project

in their neighborhood might become a suburban Pruitt-Igoe,

destroying their property values and their safety.

The people who are out here are middle-income,

behave like middle-income.

They worry about their schools,

they worry about their lawns,

their property, and so forth.

They don't want to bring in, shall we say "trash?"

Trash people?

What kind of people?

Well, people--

not necessarily just poor, but they're just, uh--

well, you won't be able to walk in the neighborhood then.

I said it'd be people like that.

Valerie: Christmas was like no other place

because there was so many other kids around to play with

and show off your stuff.

I remember when my mother gave me a record player

and she couldn't afford to buy me a brand-new one,

so she went to the pawn shop and she got me

a record player from the pawn shop.

And, baby--she left, we pulled the record player to the door

and Martha Reeves and the vandellas

made "dancing in the street."

We pulled the record player to the door.

Went outside, turned the record player up as high

as it would go and then people just came from everywhere.

It was a party, always in the evening.

It didn't have to be any special day.

Somebody, somewhere had their music blastin',

and that was on Christmas day,

and, uh, I won't ever forget that.

My relationship with Pruitt-Igoe was that

of a research assistant.

I went to Washington university, to graduate school in 1964.

I was working on a national institute of mental health

funded study on social problems in public housing.

My role was to study women and girls in Pruitt-Igoe.

I was 20 years old, I had just gotten out of college.

Some of the girls were 18 years old

and I was two years older, but yet, my life

was vastly different.

As time passed, I did wonder, would my life have been similar

to that of the girls had my parents

migrated from Mississippi to St. Louis?

Would my opportunities have been different?

I guess to put it bluntly, I never saw the people

in Pruitt-Igoe as that different from the lives of poor people

I had grown up with in Mississippi,

except for one thing.

The strong, tightly-knit communities and families

in which I grew up had begun to shatter

around the people who were displaced

in a northern city with few supports,

and the policy of the housing authority was to move

the poorest of the poor, the most dependent families,

to Pruitt-Igoe.

Jacquelyn: Before we moved into Pruitt-Igoe,

the welfare department came to our home,

they talked with my mother about moving into

the housing project, but the stipulation

was that my father could not be with us.

They would put us into the housing project

only if he left the state.

My mother and father discussed it

and they decided that it was best

for the twelve children for the father to leave the home,

and that's how we got into the projects.

The welfare department had a rule

that no able-bodied man could be in the house if a woman

received aid for dependent children.

If a man lost his job, if he's looking for work,

he still had to leave the home and there was even a night staff

of men who worked for the welfare department,

whose job was to go to the homes

of the welfare recipients and they searched to find

if there was a man in the home.

Sometimes men came back at night to be with their families.

Some were found in the closet, hiding.

Sylvester: I remember, vividly, my mother telling us,

"if white people come to the house

and ask you guys questions,

tell them that your father is not here.

Tell them that your father has never been here,

you have not seen your father."

I trusted her, I knew there was a reason that we had

to do this charade and I participated

in the charade, I sat there and looked those people

in the eye and told them-- with pure earnestness

that no, I have not seen my father and no, my daddy

does not live here,

and, um--but I knew that I was lyin' and that made

me wonder, "who are these people and how do they have the power

to make my mother lie?"

"We're giving you money.

We want to be able to control...

You.

We're giving you money,

so we have the right to make stipulations as to how

you use it and what you use it for."

There were so many restrictions.

We couldn't have a telephone.

We couldn't have a television.

And we were really left at the mercy of the system.

Brian: In the project, it seemed to be strategically planned

to create an environment that people felt isolated,

that people felt, uh, restricted,

that people felt, you know, inhuman almost.

You're bad, we have to restrain you,

we have to curtail what you're doing.

It was void of humanity.

It was void of caring.

It seemed more like a prison environment that

you have to escape from.

They were treated in some ways like they were prisoners.

If we are going to support you

and to give you a few measly dollars to live on,

then we're going to extract blood from you.

You're going to live according to the rules we set,

and the rules just happen to be very punitive.

There was this whole undertone of morality, that they had

poor morality, they were immoral by virtue

of lifestyles they lived.

Poverty never created immorality.

Poverty created want.

(Turning on TV)

When we first moved in the projects,

we couldn't have a television.

And then my mother got a letter

that we could have TV.

Woman: Barbie's dream house is a wish come true

for both of you, and look...

I was always interested in the family programs.

Programs with fathers.

"My little Margie,"

where the father was so involved with his daughter.

- Margie? - Come on in, dad.

Margie, you know I've always tried to be both

mother and father to you.

You've been wonderful, dad.

Do you remember that little game we always play

when you have a problem that you can't tell your father?

But I haven't got any problems.

Now come, tell me what's wrong.

When I looked at those sitcoms,

I just felt like this is the way white people live

because black people, from my experience,

did not live that way.

And I never questioned, I never wondered why,

I just figured this is how it is.

Woman: We have our home here and if the colored move in

and run real estate values down

it's bound to create tension,

and you will have, well, I think their aim

is mixed marriages and becoming

equal with the whites.

I just could not live beside them.

I don't feel that they should be oppressed,

but I moved here--one of the main reasons was because

it was a white community,

and that's the only place I intend to live.

Joseph: Public housing in St. Louis was always used

as a segregation tool.

The city did everything in its power

in order to prevent what was called "negro deconcentration."

That is African Americans moving out

of particular neighborhoods.

Every project is imagined as a white or black project, solely,

and they're actually placed on the map in St. Louis

in ways that deepen the pockets

of segregation in one place or the other.

It's a way to really radically separate

whites from blacks in ways that no other

kind of legislation or other tool had ever been able to do.

Pruitt was settled in 1954, right after

the brown vs. Board decision, and so, very quickly

the projects had to be desegregated.

And what happens is that whites actually just leave in droves

and it in effect becomes an all-black project,

almost immediately.

So, by the time you get to the Pruitt-Igoe moment,

you have a city that is hyper-segregated, in fact,

in a region that's hyper-segregated.

The color line wound through a fractured city,

submitting the widespread prejudice that inhabited

backyards, board rooms, and the halls of government.

It was reflected in neighborhood property values,

in the terms of mortgages, in the way realtors

steered prospective buyers,

and countless other tactics that preserved

the racial barrier.

Whites who chose to ignore the color line

faced a severe financial penalty.

Blacks usually had no choice in the matter.

Through it all, the key programs

of the 1949 housing act,

slum clearance and public housing,

were being used to reshape cities throughout the country,

redistributing land and populations

to suit those in power.

Poor districts on desirable urban land

were cleared for redevelopment, but were rarely replaced

with affordable housing.

These neighborhoods were disproportionately black.

Residents were scattered to segregated pockets

throughout the city.

New ghettos formed as the old were demolished.

Urban renewal found a new name:

Negro removal.

In the segregated city,

blacks paid more for worse housing

with fewer amenities:

Older hospitals, higher food prices,

less police protection.

The city was changing.

The northern black ghetto had arrived.

Robert: The urban economy in 1949 appeared very strong,

not only with the population of big cities peaking,

but also their industrial production

so that it appeared that all you had to do

was solve the housing problem

and there would be plenty of jobs within every big city.

What nobody could see

was that this was the peak period,

and that the urban industrial economy, uh,

was about to really fall off a cliff.

How many places have you tried to get a job here?

Well, I tried a lot of factories and warehouse

and stores and filler stations and things.

What do they tell you?

Well, uh, some job I call in

and I guess they got some rules,

found out I'm a colored man and said, "we filled up,

we don't need nobody else."

Robert: The American city has been, in the past,

a wonderful mechanism for assimilation

of immigrant and migrant groups

because it was essentially on an upward trend.

What happened after 1945 was that that wonderful mechanism

of opportunity began to fail.

This economy still flourished,

but it flourished outside the city,

and as a result, you had a mismatch

between where the jobs were

and where the people who needed the jobs were living

or forced to live.

In the days of, say, the Italian and Jewish ghettos,

these ghettos were close

to those critical entry-level industrial jobs.

The black ghetto, for the first time,

was very far from where jobs were moving.

They moved to the city, as the black migrants did.

Instead of finding themselves in the midst

of this wonderful, expanding urban economy,

they found themselves in the midst of an economy

that was dying.

Have you had any chance to work which you've turned down

since you came to St. Louis?

No, sir, I haven't turned down any jobs,

what would you take? Would you take any job?

At the time, I would.

You have people to support, family?

Wife and two children.

Do you think somehow you're gonna get some work soon?

(Voice breaking) I don't know.

Jacquelyn: Now in the projects, everybody's wall

was the same color:

White paint and that was it.

But my mother, because she didn't have money

for school supply and a lot of paper,

she went to central hardware,

she got a can of black paint

and painted one of the walls

and got chalk and eraser.

And that was our homework wall.

So we would work our problems out,

we'd practice our penmanship.

We did everything on that wall.

And we had gotten a notice

from the administration office

that they were going to inspect.

I was so afraid they were gonna put us out of the project.

And when the lady saw that black wall,

she said, "Mrs. Blair, what is this?"

So my mother just told her, she said,

"I don't have money for paper

and I want my children to do well in school,

and they have to practice."

The lady was just floored.

She couldn't believe that that was the reason,

and she said, "you know what?

You are trying to raise your children.

You leave this wall black,

and if you wanna paint another wall,

that's fine with us."

I ventured out after a while

to the merry-go-round, to the swings,

and got into a bunch of kids and, uh...

This one kid, for whatever reason--

I don't know, I think, uh, in that environment, uh,

you could sense fear.

But he sensed I feared him,

and he--he beat me up pretty good.

And I cried.

And I went to get my mom.

A month or so after we moved in,

my mother sent me and my older brother

to the store.

We were gonna go buy some stuff.

We came downstairs, these gang of kids stopped us,

slapped us around, took some of our money.

And I remember looking up

as we were walkin' away from those boys,

my mother was looking out the tenth floor window.

And we came back and there was my mother

downstairs by the steps,

foldin' her arms, stompin' her feet.

She said--we walked up to her, she said, "I saw what happened."

She said, to my older brother,

"we're gonna go find that boy, and you're gonna fight him.

You're gonna fight him now."

My mom, she knew what I was facing, I guess,

lookin' back on it.

Uh, she took me down, cryin',

lookin' for this kid.

And she wanted me to defend myself and fight him.

Especially after my father left,

my mother insisted that her boys fight.

She--for some reason, she knew that we had to,

I guess, mark our territory.

Went down the hall, there was this group of kids.

My mother pushed my brother, he went in there,

pulled the kid out, got into this big raucous fight.

I mean, it was a hard fight.

The kid's older brother came out the door

with a pair of brass knuckles.

Handed it to his younger brother.

My mother said, "you go get him."

And we--she took me down by the hand

into the crowd of kids,

and that just wasn't my makeup.

And I saw the kid off to my right, you know?

And I just pretended like I--I never saw him.

And so, that was my way of avoidin' that confrontation.

My brother fought the fight of his life,

and, uh, after that fight,

we got a little bit of respect.

The people in that-- in the building

knew that the brown boys could scrap.

But it was--still it kind of stuck with me

that this was the only time my mother told us to fight.

I saw examples of enormous strength and integrity,

examples of mothers who wanted the very best for their children

and were constantly groping for ways with which to do that.

They preached self-sufficiency to their children all the time.

Now you've gotta be able to make it on your own,

especially in a poor environment where there were a lot of people

who could prey upon you.

And sometimes the boys were challenged to act like a man.

I heard that expression quite a lot of times.

So mentally, these guys were always jockeying, you know,

for position on who's gonna be the top dog.

Nobody wanted to be on the bottom.

The air of violence and anger--

that's somethin' that you learned to project as a kid.

There was a way that you had to carry yourself.

It was understood that if you didn't stand up,

if you showed any weakness, if you didn't let people know,

that they would take advantage of you.

And all too often, it created an environment

where people were frightened of one another

and someone's ending up laying on the ground.

So what I would do is

go across away from the projects,

and there were fields over there,

there was vacant lots with--with weeds.

And I had this fascination with insects.

What a spider would do to this insect,

praying mantises,

how they ate other insects.

You felt empowered to be able to outthink these insects

or be quick enough to catch a grasshopper,

so it gave me a sense of control.

It gave me a sense of power.

That would be my escape.

I would be maybe a hundred feet from the projects,

but it was like I was a world away

in a world all my own.

Right across the street, on the other hand,

it seemed like it was an environment

created by people that didn't like these people.

They didn't like me.

They didn't like the other people that lived there.

The one thing you always ask yourself is why?

Why is it like this?

Why do I live here?

What did I do wrong?

I think it created a mindset for the inhabitants

that they weren't cared about,

and I think that that manifested itself

in a way that caused more harm to the tenants

than any other entity.

The vandalism that existed in Pruitt-Igoe

came from that environment;

things allowed to just deteriorate

and people not really caring.

And so management decided,

well, instead of trying to enhance their existence,

we'll just make things so they can't be destroyed.

Everything had to be protected:

Light fixtures, no light exposed.

There were shields around them with mesh metal

protecting the bulb.

You know, the fact that it was indestructible

made you want to try to destroy things.

There was a screen around the light bulbs

that kept you from breakin' 'em,

but you know, kids will be kids.

Find a way to break it.

And we just put water in it, threw it up,

and the light would get hot and would get hot

and it would break, and lights are out.

They took all the lights off the elevator and put 'em--

they recessed 'em up into the ceiling,

and then they tried to cover that up with plexiglas.

But sometimes people would try to set that plexiglas on fire.

Sometimes instead of taking the trash

and putting it inside the incinerator,

they just set it on fire right out there

in the middle of the floor.

You gettin' off the elevator

or you were on the elevator,

the elevator fills up with smoke.

There's no place to go, and especially

if they've put the lights out.

Lookin' back at it,

we did a lot of crazy things down there.

After I moved away from Pruitt and Igoe,

I went on to become a police officer

with St. Louis city,

and I had the opportunity to work

where you are in these buildings straight up and down.

I do remember people callin' the police

and tryin' to come into the buildings,

and they would drop just anything they could find--

trash, throw trash out the window.

I remember that.

I remember them throwin' fire bombs out

onto the police cars.

I remember they did that.

So there is enough blame to go around.

(Siren wailing)

Brain: I don't think people rationalize

that somebody's house could burn down

or people could be killed.

I think they just saw that fire truck

or that police car or that ambulance

as the enemy.

It was just bitter people, angry people,

and that was a way of makin' a statement.

"We're not happy here,

and we want you to know it,

and way you're gonna know it is

these bricks and bottles will rain down on you

no matter who it's savin',

no matter how relevant or important it is.

We want you to understand you're not welcome here."

And so after a while, they just stopped showin' up.

By the mid-sixties, Pruitt-Igoe was falling apart.

Runaway maintenance costs,

rising vandalism and crime,

growing numbers of vacancies

in an increasingly poor and emptying city.

Joseph: Public housing was set up as a system

that depended on an overcrowding crisis.

Once populations begin to move out of the city,

that begins to increase the vacancy rates

in the rental markets,

and so people begin to look elsewhere

besides public housing for places to live.

So Pruitt-Igoe had very little money

to actually pay for maintenance and upkeep

because it couldn't raise the money

from the rents of the tenants

because so many of them had left.

Grants were given to rehab buildings,

studies were commissioned,

but nothing seemed to help.

The housing authority was faltering.

The giant project's finances were bringing it down.

Rents were raised.

By the end of the decade,

rents increased three times in one year.

The residents were stretched.

Some paid three quarters of their income

to live in Pruitt-Igoe.

7 hey, what's happenin', baby? 7

7 looks like the world is changin' overnight 7

7 yes, it is now 7

7 people groovin' on different things 7

Sylvester: There were a lot of men in Pruitt-Igoe,

but they didn't belong there.

Basically Pruitt-Igoe was a place that had

a lot of young women, a lot of single mothers.

You had men coming back from the Vietnam war,

you had broken men, you had unemployed men,

you had men who weren't supposed to be in the home

because of the whole welfare system.

Friends of friends, guys who hung out,

men who stayed downstairs and drank.

7 the world is changin' 77

and there were men who came in,

waited in the hallways for women to come home from work,

for the salesmen to come on Fridays,

and they'd lurk around in the hallways.

I mean, it was easy to get in there,

do the dirty deed, and get out.

Valerie: The reputation that we had we did not deserve.

People came in from the outside that didn't live in there,

and you come in and you threw a couple of bucks here and there

to some kid that's sittin' on the steps.

He ain't got nothin' to do.

So his hero just gave him two dollars.

"Well, no, I won't tell the police where you are.

But I'm gonna tell you when they come

because you gonna run by and pat me on my head

or give me a couple of more dollars

or maybe you'll buy me some tennis shoes,

maybe you'll buy us a bag of groceries."

Sylvester: The crime was real,

but the people of Pruitt-Igoe were stigmatized by the crime.

To the average St. louisan,

the word "Pruitt-Igoe" became this representation

of the fears of black poverty,

black drug abuse, black crime.

Repeated rumors and repeated stories

and media accounts

made that much more representative than what it was.

It was like danger was around the corner,

danger was always there,

so that element of fear had crept its way

into the definition of Pruitt-Igoe.

Brian: If a person sensed fear in you,

then you had a problem.

Anywhere you went,

you had to have this certain air about you

of "don't mess with me 'cause I'll hurt you."

(Crowd shouting angrily)

It's the mindset of individuals that live in constant fear.

It changes people.

(Explosion)

It created a group of individuals

that felt as if they had really nothing to lose.

And I tell you this--

persons that don't have a decent place to stay

are becoming motivated enough to want to fight

for them a place to stay,

and are willing to take these kinds of chances.

Where we live, we're taking chances.

Many times, you don't even know

that you're sittin' on the keg of dynamite.

I said as tenants we got to draw a line

and say, "no more!"

No more!

No more!

We are not no dogs, cats, or rats

that you can just take us and just put us just anywhere.

We want some decent place where we can live.

In all the buildings we're getting calls all the time

that, uh, the heating is broke down.

And they give us reasons

but they give us very little heat.

Toilets not being fixed on time,

windows that are never replaced, you understand?

And the projects just went down,

and if your house was broken into

and you called the police, and they wouldn't come

because you were in Pruitt and Igoe.

And you mean to tell me they are doing their job?

Uh uh. They're evading what is reality,

and the fact is that Pruitt-Igoe is still standin' there,

and those policeman are afraid to go in there

and they don't give a (Bleep).

Why are we payin' rent

and we can't get none of these things done?

It's the housing authority's fault.

You might go to the housing authority, says,

"not our fault, it's up-- it's the mayor's fault."

And the mayor might say it's Washington's fault.

You may not get it resolved, and the fact that you seem

to be goin' around in circles

would pile and pile and pile on the resentment.

When you had a place like a Pruitt and Igoe,

any housing project where there's a multitude of people,

then you had political pull.

Like the Martin Luther King march

could have done nothing with just Martin Luther King

marchin' by himself.

It caught on fire.

In February 1969,

St. Louis public housing residents began a rent strike,

the first of its kind in the history of public housing.

Tenant organizations collected the rent,

which was withheld from the housing authority

until demands were met.

Reporter: Mr. Porter, the housing authority argues

that since the project is run with rent money,

you're only doing yourself a disservice

by withholding the rent money,

that conditions would be even worse.

Well, by withholding our money, we feel that we can--

that's our only stick that we feel as poor people

that we have to fight with.

Well, the housing authority says

it simply does not have the money.

Where's it gonna get the money to do what you want now?

We feel that's their problem.

So, handbills were passed out,

meetings were held.

Senior citizens, handicapped people,

young people walking the streets saying,

"don't pay the rent."

Woman: We're gonna keep rent strikin'

until they do something, because we know

that somebody can do something.

They're saying that they're bankrupt? We are, too.

They're saying they can't do anymore? We can't either.

The tenants don't have any money.

They cannot pay this kind of rent and eat, too,

so I'm tellin' the people to eat and damn the rent.

You got people registering to vote and voting.

You got people speakin' up for their rights

who never spoke up before.

And you got people who seem to be able

to do something about it,

I'll put it that way.

It caught on fire,

and while we weren't praised for it,

it occurred.

After nine months of negotiations,

the depleted housing authority finally gave in

to the strikers' demands.

Rents were limited to one quarter of any tenant's income

and residents would have a much greater voice

in the operation of St. Louis public housing.

The victory was short-lived

as years of neglect placed beleaguered buildings

on the verge of physical collapse.

Just two months after the end of the rent strike,

the dam finally broke.

Reporter: When the temperatures dropped below freezing

earlier this week, water lines

in several of the Pruitt-Igoe apartment buildings broke

and the subsequent flow of water turned into ice.

At 2311 Dixon, a sewer line is broken,

and now raw sewage bubbles out of the ground

like a malevolent spring.

In the building itself, residents and maintenance crews

are working to clean up the mess.

Woman: Some of my friends had to come help me

sweep the water out the house.

What about heat, have you got heat today?

No, we haven't had no heat in a week.

And, uh, you're using the gas stove for heat then?

Uh-huh. Mm-hm.

30 additional carpenters

were added to the maintenance crews

to board up an estimated 10,000 broken windows,

which contributed to the general breakdown of services.

Clothing and other household items

continued to flow into the community center.

We need you to tell us what takes priority.

I would like to recommend the following:

That you need first of all to have this area declared

as a disaster area and an emergency area,

that the second thing that you work on,

evacuation of the citizens,

and the third thing is to work for a permanent solution

to this problem which keeps comin' up

time and time and time again.

Reporter: Outside one of the buildings

in the mud, the slush, and the debris,

we found this button which looks a bit

the worse for wear.

It says, "make Pruitt-Igoe #1."

That undoubtedly reflects the feeling

of many of the residents who live here

who suffered through broken pipelines

in the subzero temperatures.

"Make Pruitt-Igoe number one."

Pruitt-Igoe at this point--

and the other public housing units in St. Louis--

are still a long way from number one.

Valerie: When they started to close that complex down,

it became a really big hazard.

People started to go in

and they would try to strip the buildings.

There was a lot of copper inside the buildings.

The drug addicts and users and dealers

started to move into the empty buildings,

and now they got a big, giant, empty building to themselves

because nobody lives in there.

If you're on top of this building,

if you stand on the tenth floor or any high-up apartment,

you could look down, you could tell

when the police were comin' in,

so there was no way, none,

that they could sneak in there and get you.

Sylvester: There were drug havens set up

in these empty buildings because they weren't monitored,

nobody checked them,

so you had drug dealers who'd go in

and set up a whole empire in an empty building.

It was just too big, too unmonitored.

Criminals could get in, they could get out.

Criminal activity could fester.

Once it was broke down here, it could pick up again there.

It was just--the experiment had gone terribly awry,

and, uh, it was just uncontrollable.

My brother was upset, and, uh...

We were standin' underneath the building,

and he was eatin' these, uh, these, uh...

Peanut butter crackers.

And I ask him for some, he said no.

So me and my mom and my stepdad,

we stayed on the fourth floor and we went upstairs

and he went off somewhere.

And we weren't there five minutes

and we heard a bunch of shots.

Sylvester: I'd wake up in the morning and we'd go to school

and I remember one day walking by this yellow police tape

and there were blood stains on the concrete,

and we're on our way to school.

So you heard about these gangs and these drugs

and this mysterious thing called "heron,"

and so these different words were coming into my life

that I did not understand, but I knew that there was

an element of danger that was associated with all this stuff.

(Gunshots)

Brian: I see people flinch all the time

from backfires from automobiles, whatever.

But in the projects, you learn after a while

that you don't flinch, you just look around

and survey your environment.

And within about two minutes,

there was a rap at the door,

boom-boom-boom,

and it's this guy herb, he's a friend of my brother.

My brother's name was beanie, his nickname was that.

"They just shot beanie."

Valerie: The nights I can remember walkin'

through Pruitt and Igoe were--

it was snow on the ground and it was white

and the moon was shinin',

and then all these lights was on.

Okay, so that means these places are occupied, there's life here.

But when these buildings are abandoned,

you don't know what's goin' on in there.

You don't know who is in there or what they have on their mind

if there is somebody in there.

Nobody will hear me scream.

So when you-- when you look at that

and you think about it,

it's time to go.

I mean, everybody with a brain in their head knows

when the party's over,

and the party was over.

They had shot him at close range with a shotgun,

and all his innards were out,

and his liver was detached.

And my mom was there tryin' to put it all back in,

tryin' to hold it together, you know?

And, uh, uh...

But she couldn't, she couldn't get it all back in, so...

He looked up at her, he said,

"mom, I'm gonna die, ain't I?"

And she said, "yeah."

And he said, "I'm not afraid to die,"

and, uh, you know,

that was kind of the last thing he said to her.

After my brother was murdered,

the idea that we could cohabitate and get along,

that was all out the window.

My mom was bitter,

my family was bitter,

and I can remember distinctly it took me eight years

to stop dreamin' about it every night.

And all I could think about as a kid--

I guess I was about nine years old,

eight or nine-- was how to murder somebody.

I thought about that every day for years.

Valerie: They wanted to let you know "this is it."

"You are leavin' here.

I don't care where you go,

but you comin' out of here.

This is out of control

and we are no longer gonna put up with it.

We're not gonna tolerate this anymore

'cause your (Bleep) Is out of here."

Nobody else will come up in here and live like this.

In 1972, three buildings of Pruitt-Igoe

were imploded with dynamite,

the first of which was nationally televised.

Two years later, the St. Louis housing authority

received federal approval to close and completely demolish

the Wendell Pruitt and William Igoe homes.

By 1976, the site was cleared,

its residents scattered across an emptying city.

57 acres of the north side neighborhood

again stood vacant,

as it had less than three decades earlier

in an overcrowded city with twice the population.

Joyce: I remember seeing on the evening news

Pruitt-Igoe being blown up.

The immediate question that came to my mind was,

whatever happened to all the people who lived there?

And I think that the powers that be,

the authorities in the city,

strongly stigmatized the people who lived in Pruitt-Igoe.

They gave the impression that it had imploded within

before the explosion of the brick and mortar.

It never made sense to label them the perpetrators

and to use them as scapegoats

as though they were the cause of a structured inequality.

It only makes sense if its placed

within this broader national context

of what was happening to, um, the urban poor.

And it wasn't pretty.

(Rumbling)

Robert: The implosion footage was so shocking

just because there was still in people's minds

the idea that this had been the solution.

It was a very painful moment of truth

to see that failure.

And that's why, in many ways,

Pruitt-Igoe is not just the national

and even the world's symbol

for the failure of American public housing,

it's also been a symbol for the perceived failure

of well-intentioned government policies in general.

And that's why I think it's so important

to look beyond those famous pictures

of the towers being destroyed

and really try to understand

what failed and why.

In some ways, Pruitt-Igoe failed because housing alone

couldn't deal with the most basic issues

that were troubling the American city.

There was just no way to build your way out

of that tragedy.

I think we have a responsibility to understand those failures

and to learn from them and to do better.

Joseph: Public housing actually has a very fine grain

to the story.

It's not a total failure or a total success.

We don't want people to think of Pruitt-Igoe as a failure

if they're going to then translate that failure

into all public housing or all government programs

or all social welfare or all modernism.

That's what Pruitt-Igoe has been freighted with.

If we want to say that this one project

in this one place for this one set of reasons declined

to the point where people thought it was necessary

to tear it down, that's one thing,

but that's simply not how we've told the story.

The bigger story is in fact the decline of the city overall.

What happened to St. Louis was tragic.

It's kind of a slow motion Katrina in a way.

St. Louis lost half its population

and had a devastated tax base and a drained economy

over the course of 50 years from world war ii

even to the present.

It's no wonder Pruitt-Igoe declined in those circumstances.

I mean, it'd be hard to imagine

a public housing project surviving

under those conditions.

Ruby: I was one of the people that they had to come up with

to be able to watch it.

It's almost like losin' a child.

You hated to see it occur.

You hated to see it occur.

Here I'm saying again it all depends on how you felt

when you went into Pruitt and Igoe,

and what it did for you.

With me, I was excited

about gettin' my first apartment.

I was excited about gettin' my poor man's penthouse.

It had its ups and downs.

It had its crimes, it had its cri--

it had its prostitutes, it had its dope pushers.

It had everything that everybody else had,

but that didn't stop me from carin' for it.

And when they blowed the building down,

yeah, I--I hated that very much.

And that may not be what people wanna hear,

but that's a fact.

Some people loved Pruitt-Igoe.

Some people hated Pruitt-Igoe.

People today, there are people today you meet,

they'll tell you, "don't tell nobody

I came from Pruitt and Igoe."

They're ashamed--I don't know what affected their lives,

how it affected their lives.

I don't know.

I don't know that.

I always wonder, uh, what I--

what my life would have been like

if I had never been in that environment.

Would I have been a nicer person?

Would I have been--

has it affected my relationships with others?

I'm envious of people that, uh,

have grown up in-- in less trying environments,

and I always see them as nicer than I am.

I appreciate quiet.

I appreciate people bein' civil.

I appreciate, uh,

non-violence and people getting along.

I--I don't take that for granted.

There's nothin' worse than the projects.

So I couldn't imagine, no.

Maybe Baghdad or somethin', ah, but...

That--I imagine what those children must feel like

over there.

Fearful of your life all the time.

I empathize with that.

So it's taught me empathy.

To go to church, I have to come down cass Avenue.

When I hit cass Avenue, the library is right there

and there's a white building on the left-hand side.

That's where Pruitt and Igoe started.

I look at Pruitt and Igoe in my mind's eye.

I try not to think of the bad times.

I like to think about the good times.

I can see it.

It's like when you're a kid

and you remember your first Christmas,

you--you remember everything about that Christmas.

You remember every toy you got.

I remember Pruitt and Igoe.

I remember the Christmas lights,

I remember the snow.

I remember the rain, I remember the people,

I remember people gettin' beat up,

I remember people havin' parties,

I remember dancin' in the streets,

I remember ridin' my bike.

I remember we raced up and down the hills.

It was our home.

(Voice breaking) It was a good thing.

Nobody could tell me that anybody that made that

made it for a bad thing,

and if they did, God blessed us.

He gave us good things in there,

he gave us really good memories.

And, um...

I ain't gonna never forget it.

When I feel bad--

I don't intend to--

but I dream about Pruitt and Igoe.

And I always see myself standin' in the window,

lookin' out the window.

The north side of St. Louis is changing.

Though most of the Pruitt-Igoe site stands vacant,

developers are purchasing land all around it,

and plans for a massive renewal are circulating once again.

History has patterns, but it doesn't repeat.

The city will change,

but in different ways than before.

In the years of Pruitt-Igoe,

the American city changed in ways

that made it unrecognizable from a generation earlier,

privileging some and leaving others in its wake.

The city will change,

but in ways different from before.

The next time the city changes,

remember Pruitt-Igoe.

To learn more about "America reframed,"

the stories, and issues we present,

visit our website at worldchannel.Org.

I'm Natasha del toro. Thanks, and see you next time.