Tour Guide Michael Allen
There is a certain temptation to romanticize decay. That poignant, dust-in-the-wind feeling you get when walking amidst Greek ruins—or tromping through an abandoned furniture factory in Sauget, Ill., if you’re into that sort of thing—can make you aware of the continuum of history. Our part is but a brief cameo in the midst of the Cecil B. DeMille-directed epic of time, and all that. Broken concrete with the rebar poking out, roads that stop at nowhere, vacant lots, rusted-out cars clustered like the unearthed families of Pompeii—they can make you moony with that delicious sense of time’s unsentimental advance.
But it’s an unseemly business to swoon at the marvels of entropy while forgetting its victims.
That was the conundrum of the hour during Michael Allen’s semi-official tour of the former Pruitt-Igoe site in North City, part of this week’s third annual Chautauqua Art Lab (helmed by civic booster, artist, and musician Emily Hemeyer).
Truly, the Pruitt-Igoe plot is a kind of anti-landmark, a focus of civic shame that, like the East St. Louis Race Riots, we locals make a point of not discussing.
But it is still there. The generous 57-acre site, owned by St. Louis City, has not been converted to a shopping strip, an industrial plant, a prison, a megachurch, or anything else. (A small chunk of the parcel has become the Gateway Middle and Elementary Schools, though.)
Instead, nature has run riot over the flat, empty property. Bushes and tall trees have taken root and spread like a virus at a pre-school. It’s a true forest that, in the words of one person on the Chautauqua tour, “looks like Jefferson County.” That it’s tightly bound on every side by the blight of North City is only less strange than the fact that it’s the site of a complex of buildings whose televised destruction in 1972 (gradually continued through 1976) symbolized the death of the idea of public housing.
Here, where thousands of our impoverished brothers and sisters were herded in the name of a grand vision of hope in the '50s and '60s that, for a number of reasons, turned rapidly to despair and then quite literally imploded, nature has invaded with a fury to grow over an urban embarrassment.
Walking though these woods is a genuine hike. You could host an organized summer camp for hundreds in the site’s glens and trails. You could, as several people remarked to Allen this week, lay down paved trails and make it a beautiful city park and part of the Confluence Greenway network, even.
But again, it is dangerous to romanticize destruction and decay, even if the emptiness is mitigated by wildflowers, tall trees, meandering trails, and bunny rabbits, as the Pruitt-Igoe site currently is.
It was necessary to remember, as we Chautauqua participants, about 40 strong, trooped past stands of beautiful trees and swaths of high Missouri weeds, that the Pruitt-Igoe site is “a great wound or scar on the city… that we pretend doesn’t exist.” That’s how Allen, a gifted lecturer who excels at speaking in paragraphs, phrased it.
The site once cradled 33 11-story apartment buildings that joined nearly 3,000 apartments (but at their height, were just 60% full). It was supposed to be The Solution to the public-housing problem, a prototype for the nation, but instead it went down in the spectacular fashion of the Titanic.
The many reasons for Pruitt-Igoe’s failure are explored in The Pruitt Igoe Myth: An Urban History, a new documentary film by Chad Freidrichs screening at the Tivoli Theatre, 7 p.m. Wed., May 11, and noon Sat., May 14. Every St. Louisan old enough to remember the complex has an opinion, but, in brief, some of the culprits include insufficient support and services as problems developed; the crime and neglect that has dogged many public-housing projects; nonexistent security; the economic decline of the region as a whole; and the project simply being too grand, with absurdly high expectations from the get-go. (One self-aggrandizing critic infamously railed the disaster was due to the arrogance of “modern architecture” itself, which made for great copy, but is widely dismissed.)
Allen added that the boondoggle of Pruitt-Igoe destabilized the surrounding neighborhoods, too. After it was demolished, people moved away from the general area in droves, leaving a wider crater of abandonment and blight that the city reckons with to this day.
In retrospect, the hubris of Pruitt-Igoe was so remarkable that Allen wonders why there is no commemorative plaque on the site. He’s not joking.
If you think about it, it makes a kind of sense. The shameful debacle of the Dred Scott case is the historic core of and the main draw at the Old Courthouse, which anchors our downtown space like no other structure save the Arch. (Then again, the Civil War has become the preferred soap opera of the American male.) The Department of Energy erected an “interpretive center” atop the mound of boulders shielding us from nuclear radiation left from the Mallinckrodt uranium-processing operation in Weldon Spring. Give us a few decades, or a century, maybe, and we St. Louisans are big enough to admit failure, and possibly even open a tidy little commemorative gift shop at the site of the embarrassment.
In the meantime, the lush, overgrown greenery that blankets the huge lot does not exactly offer succor to the city’s poor, but it does serve as a kind of real-life version of the History Channel TV show Life After People. The abandoned space has been reclaimed by forces stronger than man, and its quiet emptiness, suffused with memories of decay, offers a serendipitously lovely note amidst the jarring, cacophonous, never-ending symphony of "progress" on the North Side.
