Pruitt–Igoe
The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments, known together as Pruitt–Igoe (), were joint urban housing projects first occupied in 1954 in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. The complex consisted of 33 eleven-story high rises, designed in the modernist architectural style by Minoru Yamasaki. It was constructed with federal funds on the site of a former slum as part of the city's urban renewal program. The project was originally intended to be racially segregated; a Supreme Court ruling forced the project to be integrated on opening, but from the beginning it almost exclusively accommodated African Americans. When it opened, it was one of the largest public housing developments in the country. Although initially viewed as an improvement over the tenement housing in the slums, living conditions in Pruitt–Igoe began to deteriorate soon after completion, and by the mid 1960s it was plagued by poor maintenance, high crime, and low occupancy. Vandalism and juvenile delinquency were endemic problems. Numerous attempts to reverse the decline failed, and in 1972 several of the buildings were demolished by explosives in a widely televised event. By 1976, all 33 buildings had been taken down. Pruitt–Igoe has come to represent some of the failures of urban renewal, public-policy planning, and public housing. In the years immediately following its demolition, the project's failure was widely attributed to architectural flaws that created a hostile and unsafe environment; Charles Jencks described its demolition as "the day Modern architecture died". More recent appraisals have placed a greater emphasis on social and political factors, notably the decline in St. Louis's population and fiscal problems with the local housing authority. As of 2016, the Pruitt–Igoe site remained vacant and overgrown.
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North 22nd Street, St. Louis
Geographical coordinates (GPS) Address Nearby Places Show on map
Geographical coordinates (GPS)
| Latitude | Longitude |
|---|---|
| N 38.642288888889 ° | E -90.209430555556 ° |
Address
Samuel Shepard Educational Park
North 22nd Street
63106 St. Louis
Missouri, United States
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