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

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Picture this, it's March 16, 1972

SPEAKER_2 (0:04)

Okay.

SPEAKER_1 (0:05)

You're sitting in your living room, just watching national television, and the broadcast suddenly cuts to this massive, 11-story brick and concrete high-rise building in St. Louis, Missouri.

SPEAKER_2 (0:16)

Right, the infamous footage.

SPEAKER_1 (0:18)

Exactly. And suddenly a series of controlled explosives detonate.

The immense structure just like shutters, crumbles, and completely collapses into this towering cloud of dust.

SPEAKER_2 (0:30)

It's such a wild thing to see.

SPEAKER_1 (0:32)

It really is. Now, watching that, you might naturally assume you're witnessing the demolition of, I don't know, an ancient decaying industrial factory or something. But here's the shocker.

That was a residential public housing project.

SPEAKER_2 (0:45)

Yeah.

SPEAKER_1 (0:45)

And it had barely been open for two decades.

SPEAKER_2 (0:48)

It's crazy, right?

SPEAKER_1 (0:49)

Yeah.

SPEAKER_2 (0:50)

I mean, it remains one of the most striking, instantly recognizable images in modern American history.

SPEAKER_1 (0:56)

Oh, for sure.

SPEAKER_2 (0:57)

Because that implosion wasn't just bringing down concrete and steel. For the millions watching and certainly for urban planners around the globe, it was like the visceral symbolic death of a very specific utopian dream.

SPEAKER_1 (1:10)

Well, welcome to the deep dive. Today, we are tearing into the history of a place officially known as the Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments.

SPEAKER_2 (1:20)

Though history simply remembers it as Pruitt, Igoe.

SPEAKER_1 (1:23)

Right. Exactly. We're going to figure out how a $36 million development, one that was hailed on its opening day as a monumental architectural savior, became the very first major public housing project in the US to be leveled by the government.

SPEAKER_2 (1:38)

More importantly, we really need to uncover what the rubble of those 33 towers actually tells us about urban failure.

SPEAKER_1 (1:45)

Because honestly, imagine buying a brand new, highly anticipated car to solve all your commuting problems, right?

SPEAKER_2 (1:51)

Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_1 (1:51)

Only to just watch the engine spontaneously combust before you've even paid off the loan. You'd want to know if the engineer is totally messed up or if you were just set up to fail.

SPEAKER_2 (2:00)

Exactly. We really need to strip away the mythology here because the narrative most people think they know about Pruitt, Igoe entirely misses the actual structural causes of its downfall. Yeah.

SPEAKER_1 (2:11)

I was looking at the financing structure and the political maneuvering that birthed this project and it feels like a complete trap.

SPEAKER_2 (2:17)

It really does.

SPEAKER_1 (2:18)

It's like a city building a massive state of the art public hospital using federal grants, but then telling the hospital administrators that they can only afford to buy medicine or pay the nurses using the pocket change they collect from destitute patients.

SPEAKER_2 (2:31)

That's a really good way to put it.

SPEAKER_1 (2:33)

It's an economic paradox. You immediately want to know if the architects were just incompetent or if the residents were doomed from the start.

SPEAKER_2 (2:40)

Well, I'd argue it's not even an either-or scenario, you know. The design was basically weaponized by the policy. But to understand how that trap was set, we have to rewind to before the first blueprint was ever even drawn.

SPEAKER_1 (2:53)

Right. Back to the 1940s.

SPEAKER_2 (2:55)

Exactly. You have to look at the severe conditions of St. Louis in the late 40s, because without that context, a project of this hulking scale just makes zero sense.

SPEAKER_1 (3:05)

Yeah. Looking at the municipal data from that era, the public health crisis was just staggering. We're talking about severe overcrowding in the city center.

SPEAKER_2 (3:13)

Like Dickensian levels of overcrowding.

SPEAKER_1 (3:16)

Literally. There were over 85,000 families crammed into these rapidly deteriorating 19th century tenements.

A 1947 survey found that 33,000 homes were still relying on communal outdoor toilets.

SPEAKER_2 (3:30)

I mean, just let that sink in for a second. In 1947

SPEAKER_1 (3:35)

It's wild.

SPEAKER_2 (3:36)

And you have to layer the broader economic shifts over that public health crisis too. Post World War II, you have middle class residents, predominantly white families, of course, rapidly fleeing the city center.

SPEAKER_1 (3:46)

Right. Heading out for the expanding suburbs, aided by all the new highway systems.

SPEAKER_2 (3:50)

Exactly. And when they left, the city's tax base just evaporated.

So St. Louis city leaders are looking at their downtown central business district and panicking about plummeting property values.

SPEAKER_1 (4:02)

So their aggressive solution was quote unquote urban renewal, which was heavily incentivized by the Federal Housing Act of 1949

SPEAKER_2 (4:10)

Right. And the strategy of that 1949 Housing Act wasn't necessarily just like altruistic housing for the poor.