“The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” is surely one of the best and most moving documentaries in recent years. Director Chad Freidrichs takes a long and necessary look at the modernist housing project designed to take residents out of rat-infested tenements and put them in clean, modern high rises designed to provide shelter, succor and dignity to the poverty stricken residents of St. Louis. Designed by architects George Hellmuth and Minoru Yamasaki in1951, the thirty three, eleven story buildings were set on 35 acres on the north side of the city and were completed in 1956. Built with federal funds, this massive urban renewal project was created for an integrated population of families below the poverty line. It was, many cried, doomed to failure because the poor and eventually all African American population would never have the skills or pride to succeed in such an environment. And that is the myth that this film seeks to implode, just as the Pruitt-Igoe projects were imploded in 1972, only sixteen years after their creation.
As many of the former residents recalled, Pruitt-Igoe was a dream-come-true. For one woman, it was her penthouse in the sky with a view overlooking the city and the Mississippi River. Beautifully maintained, at first, families had the luxury of multiple bedrooms, modern kitchens and private bathrooms. There was pride in ownership and crime was low. It was a conflict in the goals of the government, at the Federal, State and City levels, that led to the rapid deterioration from the very beginning. Many in the Federal government saw the need for humane housing for the poor and pushed through legislation known as the Housing Act of 1949, part of President Truman’s Fair Deal, providing the funds to build housing projects. There were also those who objected to the use of government funds to help the poor and, while they could not block the building funds, they were successful in blocking any post-construction funding for maintenance of the buildings. St. Louis, a city whose population and tax base had rapidly declined since 1949, was unable to provide any support for the buildings. The politicians were under the impression that rents would supply the necessary monies, seemingly unaware that the low rents collected from the residents would never cover the costs of janitorial services or building infrastructure.
Further contributing to an increasing atmosphere of hopelessness was the systematic government destruction of the family. Under federal rules for families receiving ADC (aid for dependent children), no adult male was allowed to live on premises, as it was thought that unemployed men would take unfair advantage of the system. Thus the first step in destabilizing the African American family was government sanctioned, leading to the first wave of crime in an environment without adult male leadership. Further stipulations by the welfare department were that anyone receiving government aid was not allowed to have a television or telephone. The isolation that resulted from the loss of the cohesive family unit and outside communication created a prison environment and an atmosphere of hopelessness.
Families moved away whenever the opportunity presented itself and there were fewer rents to support the maintenance of elevators that never worked and garbage that was rarely incinerated. Vacant apartments harbored drug dealers and thugs; the lack of proper lighting and security resulted in rampant crime unhampered by authority as the police refused to answer calls to the projects for fear of their own safety. And as crime increased and maintenance decreased, the city continued to raise rents until they were unconscionably high, leading to the very first public housing rent strike.
As the white residents left the city limits, for St. Louis and St. Louis Country were both de jure and defacto segregated well into the 60s (and beyond), they blamed the failure of the projects on what they called its immoral residents. But, as Dr. Joyce Ladner, a prominent sociologist who studied the structure of Pruitt-Igoe as part of her PhD. thesis from Washington University in St. Louis in 1968, pointed out, “Poverty doesn’t create immorality. Poverty creates want.”
Deteriorating to a point of no return, the residents were moved out, the buildings imploded and the land cleared in 1972. The land continues to lie vacant, a symbol not that the residents failed the project but that the government failed the residents.
Archival footage and interviews with former residents provide the background for this interesting and horrifying piece of history. Marred only by a weak narrator, the film moves at a fast pace and succeeds on dramatic, historic and sociologic levels.
See it on the big screen and hope that PBS and/or HBO picks up this brilliantly informing and produced documentary gets the audience it deserves.
Opening April 27 at the Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills.
Neely also writes a blog about writers in television and film at http://www.nomeanerplace.com
