A few classes ago, I read an article written by Michael Kimmelman titled “Towers of Dreams: One Ended in Nightmare.” The article compares two “aesthetic cousins,” Pruitt-Igoe (built in 1954) of St. Louis, Missouri and the Penn South (built in 1962) development in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood. It was surprising to read that while both projects were almost identical, the Pruitt-Igoe development had seemingly gone so wrong. It became infamous for poverty, crime and segregation due to inadequate funds, deteriorating conditions and the 1949 Housing act, respectively. Tenants slowly abandoned the complex and it continued to deteriorate, falling prey to drug dealers and murderers until its demolition in the 1970s.

When reading through the article, I tried to picture the Pruitt-Igoe complex as best as I could. I searched online for some pictures of it and read a few additional excerpts. However, none of this compared to watching the film of the Pruitt-Igoe Myth in class last week. The stark and candid portrayal of the Pruitt-Igoe complex was shocking. It was somewhat disheartening to see something that was once so new and beautiful fall prey to such despair.

In both Kimmelman’s article and the film watched in class, I noticed a sense of attachment. Although Pruitt-Igoe so quickly and drastically deteriorated, original residents such as Sylvester Brown, Jacquelyn Williams, and Valerie Sills all had fond memories of their home. When referring to the living conditions at Pruitt-Igoe, one of the interviewees on screen even said that the bad did not outweigh the good. What I saw in the documentary, however, made such a statement hard to believe.

I could have never imagined the change that occurred between the 1950s and the 1970s; Pruitt-Igoe has quite literally decayed within that time. Broken windows, garbage galore, faulty elevators, dark hallways. All of this seemed commonplace at Pruitt-Igoe during its latter years. I was shocked to hear that the St. Louis police eventually neglected showing up when called upon. They were not welcome (as the “fire bombs” thrown from windows indicated) nor did they want to be present in such an environment. Unfortunately, I was unable to watch the ending of the documentary but this picture below speaks volumes about the way in which Pruitt-Igoe’s story concluded. After being so badly neglected, Pruitt-Igoe was demolished. I would love to see what has since taken its place.

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The film about the Pruitt-Igoe disaster relays the story of another public housing failure. Looking back, it is easy to see what made the public housing complex fail: the movement of people to the suburbs, the lack of repair work, or the reluctance of police to intervene. At the time the housing was built, it seemed to be a great improvement to the previous dilapidated housing, but no foresight was put into place and the Pruitt-Igoe housing deteriorated as well.

The large Pruitt-Igoe buildings were put into place to act as an improvement. The slums, with unsanitary and cramped housing, were being demolished and instead several tall and identical buildings were put in place. Perhaps the slums should have been cleared, but these large buildings would eventually be almost vacant. The public housing authority in charge made a huge error in judgment, assuming that the city would grow and there would be a demand for more housing. Unfortunately this was not the case, as people who could afford to move moved out to the suburbs, leaving the rest to stay in the public housing in the city. This caused a major problem, since only the poorer families stayed in the Pruitt-Igoe buildings and they did not contribute enough rent to cover the cost of repairs. The utilities in the buildings quickly deteriorated and vandalism was rampant. Another effect of the exodus to the suburbs was the influx of drug users into the unoccupied buildings. One of women who was interviewed in the film mentioned seeing the lights on at night in a building that was supposed to be empty. She knew that inside were drug users or sellers and that added to her fear and lack of safety.

One of Jacobs’ points about the safety of streets definitely was apparent in the Pruitt-Igoe situation. The buildings had park areas that were placed between the buildings and were not accessible to the public. Nor did the public housing attract any street traffic from nearby residents. Because of the relative isolation and few people, the areas became extremely dangerous. At first cops arrived to Pruitt-Igoe, yet after several incidents of attacks on the police, they stopped answering calls to come into the area. This allowed crime to increase even further since criminals knew it was unlikely they would be hindered.

I was very surprised by one of the women in the film who said she loved Pruitt-Igoe, mainly because of her first memories there and the contrast of the new housing to her previous dilapidated home. She speaks of being excited to come live there and how her family finally had their own beds to sleep in, unlike their previous home where her mother had to sleep on the floor in the kitchen. While at first the Pruitt-Igoe homes may have been an improvement, the condition they became outweighs the positives. Had a different housing structure been built, it could have perhaps lasted longer and provided housing for the long term.

Overall, I believe the housing failed because it was constructed with no forethought and no one was given any incentive to keep the building in repair. Similar to the failure of the Chicago Housing Authority with their high youth to adult ratios, the placement and maintenance of the buildings invited crime and there were not enough people to police the area themselves. The rent was low yet the repair work costs were higher. It seems that often the public sector is unequipped to handle large-scale public housing.

The film “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” was much more interesting than I imagined it would be and it also had a much greater impact on me than I believed it would. I thought it would be pretty boring, just talking about the history of Pruitt-Igoe and why it went wrong, but it was more than that. Although the New York Times article had quotes from the interviews in it, it was different and more powerful when watching the people talk about living there and all the emotion that they felt and displayed.

The greatest and most touching part of the film for me was hearing the former residents talk about how it felt when they first moved into Pruitt-Igoe. There were descriptions about it as a hotel and a “poor man’s penthouse.” Another talked about how she came from a family of 12 and her mother actually had a room of her one with a door, after sleeping the in the kitchen. There were also stories about Christmas and how beautiful and fun it was. The most memorable for me was at the end of the film when the women teared up as she spoke about how she remembers it for the good and refuses to think that it was all bad. Hearing all the accounts of how the people felt first moving in and all the good makes me actually want to do something to work towards developing affordable housing for all so they can experience what it’s like to have a livable nice home. Of course a lot of people are trying to do this and it’s not easy, with Pruitt-Igoe being a prime example of what could go wrong.

Although there were many accounts of some of the good, there were also of course many about the bad. The worse one and the one that stuck with me was when the man spoke about how his brother got shot and his mother tried to put everything back in but couldn’t. This is just so shocking and scary to hear about, but I suppose this isn’t really uncommon, both in the past and today. When the film got to all the bad that happened and the film said that police wouldn’t come because they didn’t care, this just didn’t sound right. It probably was true, but the film also talked about how when the police did come, people threw firebombs outside wanting the police to leave. It’s like they wanted to be helped and everything to get better, but at the same time, they turned away outside help.

It seems like Pruitt-Igoe was destined to fail given the lack for funding for maintenance cost. With no government help to take care of the place and not enough from the resident’s income, its no surprise that the elevators didn’t work, or that it wasn’t taken care of and became really dirty. However, the lack of funding wasn’t the whole problem. I wonder why the residents didn’t do something when things first became bad. I know there was the discussion about the amount of children outnumbering the adults, but if I wonder if maybe there was something that could’ve been done if everyone worked together to really act like they cared about the place and make it better. There some socio and economic reason why it might not have worked, but I still think there could have been maybe some things that could’ve been done, even just little things like cleaning up hallways and not burning and throwing garbage there that could have prevented it from becoming as bad as it was.

Seeing a film like this makes me wonder about the public housing of today. Most of what I’ve read have been about public housing in the past, so I don’t really know what it’s like now. When I walk near or through a housing project, it does scare me a bit, I guess this is just from my own prejudgment. I wonder what the government has done differently, more money probably, but also if there are other things to prevent another Pruitt-Igoe. I wonder if government has done anything about the ratio of children to adults, which might be tricky and a bit difficult to do. The big question I have is if there is a way for the government and residents to do something to improve the conditions and quality of life and stereotypes that seem to preside in public housing.

SInce watching the documentary about Pruitt-Igoe, a single disturbing detail has been embedded in my mind staunchly. I have not been able to reconcile the idea of the supposed well-intentioned public housing project with the fact that families had to agree to have the main breadwinner leave the household in order to secure a living space in this public project. Essentially, it seems to me that the authorities were breaking these families apart and increasing their need for public assistance before agreeing to provide that assistance.

This would be an unimaginable thing to ask of middle class families. This particular request was not about avoiding any distant relatives and hangers-on from leeching off of the assistance being provided to one family. These families, these children had to agree to live without their father and these wives had to agree to live without their husbands in order to continue receiving the support that they so badly needed. When one of the former residents who’d been just a boy during his time at Pruitt-Igoe spoke of having to lie to the white officials and say that he had never seen his father, I was deeply moved and outraged. I cannot imagine the psychological trauma that a young boy would have to go through in order to lie to about seeing his own father. I also could not help but wonder how much this contributed to the somewhat popular notion that in poor families, males usually abandon their own kids.

Many of the former residents spoke of how their fathers would sneak in during the night to see their families. That kind of behavior is not indicative of an irresponsible parent. One former resident spoke about how her mother even painted one of the walls inside her home with black paint in order to homeschool her children. These stories speak of parents that cared about their children and seem to have been fighting an uphill battle to keep them safe and provide them with a better future. If on the other hand, these men were asked to leave because their presence would have made the families slightly better off and therefore not in need of public assistance, the absurdity of that argument speaks for itself. It cannot have been the objective of public housing that the resident families had to remain at the poverty-line level.

Additionally, some of these children had to also witness their siblings and friends being snatched away by the criminal elements that seem to have taken advantage of these ill-protected people. Whether some of the youth participated in the criminal activity under lack of adult supervision or were simply the victims of violence that arises in such situations, the conditions for children here were definitely not ideal.

I came to the conclusion that these families, at risk to begin with, were placed under enormous stress from the specific circumstances at Pruitt-Igoe. This was not a community where families could live in neighborly harmony and help one another grow. It was certainly not a place that could give the younger generation dreams of a brighter future, something that is essential for the growth of every society. The demands placed upon them by poverty, combined with the feeling that they were all alone and unprotected by the law had to have forced the residents to lose hope. The story of Pruitt-Igoe is unquestionably a tragedy but the real revelation here is that perhaps this tragedy wasn’t as inevitable as some groups seem to have suggested.

When we began this film, I did not have expectations since I had no clue as to what the Pruitt-Igoe Myth was. I assumed it would be a documentary about housing, which it was, but I did not expect it to have such a big impact on me. The interviews of people who had lived and grew up in Pruitt-Igoe made the documentary effective in displaying how public housing can go wrong. When I learned about slums in history class, and how terrible they were, I sympathized for the people who had to live through such conditions. After watching this film, I felt horrible that such living conditions even existed.

The woman who did not regret living in Pruitt-Igoe left a strong impression on me. I thought she was an extremely strong and positive woman to be able to think so optimistically about the time she lived in Pruitt-Igoe. When she described what the buildings were like when they were first established, it seemed like a wonderful place to live, especially when they were showing the interior of the rooms. Then they began showing how the buildings were deteriorating: vandalism, broken windows, garbage strewn about the floor, etc. After seeing the diminishing quality of Pruitt-Igoe, I found it hard to understand how the woman could treasure her time at Pruitt-Igoe; that the positives outweighed the negatives. She was the only optimistic perspective in the documentary.

Another person who I thought created a strong impact was the man who became the buildings elevator repairman. Although this man’s story about being stuck in a smelly elevator with his brother was not meant to be funny, he provided a small moment of relief from all the depressing narratives. I thought it was clever how he made his narrative into something positive. It is strange to think that two young boys were climbing through the elevator and opening the elevator doors to get out. Also, hearing that no one would come help people stuck in the elevator is outrageous. Luckily the boys were kind enough to be there and help. If there were stories about kids helping out people stuck in elevators, there would be criticisms about how the government is slacking off and taxes going to waste.

The narrative that left the strongest impression on me was the story of the man who lost his brother due to violence in the building. This man’s story was so emotional that I felt myself on the brink of tears. No child should have to grow up and/or live in a dangerous area. Although there are better public housing than Pruitt-Igoe today, there are still dangerous neighborhoods with gangs and other criminal activities. I think there is a common aspect of these two problems. I believe that trouble travels to troubled areas and continues to grow as a result. Thus, this story of how criminals took over the community brings a connection to today’s society, indicating that there are problem areas that are still present.

If Pruitt-Igoe was well kept, would there be a different outcome? Personally, I think there would have been. However, I felt that Pruitt-Igoe rapidly deteriorated because the tenants there began to not care about the quality of the housing, because the government stopped caring. If the community got together and tried to keep Pruitt-Igoe in its original condition, I think there could have been a different outcome of Pruitt-Igoe.

Roger Starr’s “Making New York Smaller” discusses various methods of saving New York from the financial crisis of the 1970s. Beforehand, Starr explains how the city is fiscally divided into the Economic City and the Political City. I really liked this description of the city, for I’d never thought to separate it as such. As I understand it, these two entities must balance each other out. In essence, the revenue earned in the Economic City becomes the basis for the taxes collected from the Political City, so there’d be an issue if either of them fell behind. When it came to the financial crisis, the Economic City was lagging, so the Political City had to overcompensate to maintain the balance. This led me to question whether or not NYC could survive solely on the Political City. If the economy ever got so bad that there was basically no revenue, could we get by on federal funding? If this balanced system were to fail, do we have any sort of backup plan?

It is mentioned in the article that New York used to be a center for manufacturing and that it was suffering financially because it was no longer that. While the shift occurred for other reasons, something that caught my attention was that New Yorkers didn’t want to think of their city as a factory town. I personally never thought New York had that image to begin with and that it was always a tourist attraction, but it seems that tourism was not always what it is today. Apparently, tourism was low at the time that the article was written. I’m not sure if that’s a result of the financial crisis or if New York just didn’t have as much to offer as it does now. Still, I agree with the consensus that New York should be more than a factory town. Starr implied that the decline in manufacturing brought financial troubles, but I’m glad that nobody pushed for the return of factories. If that had happened, the NYC that I grew up in might have been monumentally different.

One of Starr’s main arguments was the concept of planned shrinkage. He believed that the city’s population would decline as the number of jobs declined and that the city government should plan accordingly. However, I don’t really see how he could anticipate such a drastic change in the population. Even with unemployment at an all-time high, there’s no guarantee that people would leave. If they did, it probably wouldn’t be until a few years later anyway. If it were me, I’d probably just muddle through it until the city found a way to get out of that rut. I wouldn’t want to uproot my entire life just because the economy was temporarily unstable. Who said the same thing wouldn’t happen in another place too? I don’t think Starr was being very realistic when it came to his contingency plan. He proposed federal assistance in this process, but I don’t think that’s plausible in such magnitudes.

There really wasn’t a specific way to plan for a smaller population either. If a significant number of people did move away, which places would still be considered alive? There wouldn’t be enough funding to support the entire city, so only certain places would receive maintenance while others became desolate. That alone sounds bad, but how would you get people to move into these designated areas? If an entire building is vacated with the exception of one resident, it wouldn’t be fair to make him/her move and there’d probably a lot of resistance too. Perhaps that area would have been a good place to maintain too, so it would be a waste to shut it down. How would any of this be decided?

Towards the end of the article, Starr almost refutes his entire plan by saying that the Department of City Planning could formulate multiple plans based on possible future populations. If they were to do that, there is really no point in banking on the hope that the population would decrease. It could fluctuate easily based on so many factors, so I think all of this planning would have been useless. Starr shouldn’t have been focusing on coming up with possible outcomes; he needed to find a way out of the financial crisis. That means devising a plan to implement right away, not hypothesize how to handle a situation that could basically go in any direction. All the time people spent criticizing his idea of planned shrinkage (and all the time Starr took to defend it) could have gone to a better and more productive cause, which would have been ending the crisis instead of figuring out how to deal with its supposed aftereffects.

The film “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” really helped me understand the trials and tribulations of the public housing development. The most memorable of these, in my opinion, was the video clip of the Caucasian woman. She’d said that she had originally moved to the neighborhood because it was a ‘white neighborhood,’ but that she no longer wanted to live there because of all the black people in Pruitt-Igoe. This did not sit well with me at all, and the racism in the North still shocks me even though I’ve heard of it time and time again. I wonder what she’d have said if Pruitt-Igoe was successful. Had it not been ridden with crime—which had nothing to do with the race of the residents anyway—would she have gotten past her issues?

The documentary offered a lot of insight to the development that had only ever been described to me as a complete failure. The interviews with former residents certainly showed me different perspectives. For example, one man recounted how his brother was killed there while a woman reminisced about the happy childhood she had there. I suppose this one woman’s pleasant memories don’t cancel out all of the negative experiences others had, but it was nice to hear that Pruitt-Igoe wasn’t a horror for everyone. At least there is someone who can look back on it fondly and remember something other than constant criminal activity. Had it not been for this documentary, I would have continued to believe that Pruitt-Igoe did nothing but ruin countless lives. Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough to sway my opinion entirely.

Seeing the buildings being blasted with dynamite gave me a sense of relief, and I actually felt happy that it happened. Once things took a turn for the worse and tenants began to leave, there was no going back. Vacancies led to break-ins by drug addicts, which led to even more crime. In addition, the low rent generated even less funding for maintenance. Everything was spiraling down, and Pruitt-Igoe could no longer be saved. If the government had left it there, it’d just serve as a breeding ground for crimes, drugs, violence, etc. As wasteful as it was to destroy something that had cost so much money and served as a form of stable housing for many, it had to be done. I would imagine that the development today, were it still standing, would have an awful connotation in the local area and just attract more trouble. It’d be known for its dark history, which would inevitably repeat itself.

On the other hand, I don’t think that the land should be vacant anymore. Surely by now, the housing authority of St. Louis has perfected a method of building public housing. I don’t see why they aren’t building more public housing unless it’s actually not needed whatsoever. If that’s true, why not make a nice public recreational area, like a park or a mall? Developers in NYC would kill for an open piece of land like that, so I’m surprised it hasn’t been grabbed up to be used to its full potential. Pruitt-Igoe was already such a waste, and I can’t believe that the lot has remained untouched. If used correctly, whatever gets built could reap great profits along with benefits for the community. It doesn’t make any sense to do absolutely nothing with it.

“The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” makes me wonder if the development was just destined to fail from the very beginning. In an effort to create decent housing, safety and maintenance were ignored. That might have been acceptable at first, but definitely not over a long period of time. Was that never considered? The large amount of children residing in the development couldn’t really be reduced, but they were a main source of the havoc wreaked throughout. As a family destination, was this not considered either? Whose fault was it that Pruitt-Igoe failed so miserably? It could be argued that it was not planned for accordingly in terms of funding and security, but could the residents have counteracted that in any way? Especially as a community of families, could they have banded together with a goal of general safety and no crime? Had that happened, maybe the myth we’re hearing about today would be drastically different.