City Saves Doomed Neighborhood by Demolishing It, Its Residents, and the Concept of Neighborhoods
Federal money razed the 'slums,' put up towers and expressways, and produced housing so unlivable they blew it up on the six o'clock news.
The neighborhoods marked for rescue did not, by and large, feel as though they needed rescuing. They were crowded and poor, true, but they had butchers and barbershops and front stoops and congregations — the unglamorous machinery of a place where people actually live. The planners looked at the same blocks and saw 'blight,' a word that did a great deal of quiet work, since the blight turned up, with remarkable consistency, wherever Black families happened to be.1
The Housing Act of 1949 supplied the means: federal dollars for cities to buy up 'substandard' areas, level them, and turn the cleared ground over to redevelopment.2 What rose in their place was the era's idea of progress — superblocks, garages, and expressways routed, as if by happy accident, straight through the neighborhoods least able to object. The bulldozer was the instrument; the future was the alibi.
St. Louis built the showpiece. Pruitt-Igoe opened in 1954: thirty-three eleven-story towers by a celebrated architect, written up in the magazines as the shape of things to come.3 Within a decade the elevators failed, the corridors emptied, and every family that could leave did. On March 16, 1972, the city began dynamiting it, and the networks ran the footage of the towers folding into dust — a public-housing project demolished, on camera, barely eighteen years after it was hailed as the cure.3
Pruitt-Igoe was only the photogenic part. In the city's Mill Creek Valley, roughly 20,000 residents were cleared and 93 percent of the structures flattened; the emptied ground sat largely vacant for years, and locals took to calling it 'Hiroshima Flats.'4 Multiply that by a few hundred cities and you have the program's true output: not new neighborhoods but the absence of old ones.
None of this was a secret at the time. In a 1963 conversation filmed for television with the psychologist Kenneth Clark, James Baldwin pointed to the place he had been born and put it plainly: that, he said, is a slum now, and 'urban renewal' means Negro removal. The line stuck because it was accurate. The fix had worked exactly as designed; the design was the problem.5
Urban renewal… means Negro removal.— James Baldwin, interview with Kenneth Clark, 1963
References & Citations
- Boston Review — Brent Cebul, "Tearing Down Black America," bostonreview.net.
- Smart Cities Dive — "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth of Public Housing," smartcitiesdive.com.
- ArchDaily — "AD Classics: Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project / Minoru Yamasaki," archdaily.com.
- Milwaukee Independent — "Pruitt-Igoe: The failed public housing project and symbol of a dysfunctional urban abyss," milwaukeeindependent.com.
- American Archive of Public Broadcasting (WGBH) — "A Conversation With James Baldwin," June 24, 1963, americanarchive.org.