A new book on Pruitt-Igoe shifts the focus from architecture to people

Artist and Wash. U. professor Bob Hansman is famous for his “divided city” bus tours. One of the most important stops is the site of the former Pruitt-Igoe housing project. In the ’50s and ’60s, the 57-acre tract held 33 high-rise buildings, but they were demolished just 20 years after their construction. Now, it’s a fenced-in urban forest at the edge of the St. Louis Place neighborhood; many people who grew up here don’t know what it is or what once stood there.

People who do tend to view it as the “the death of Modernism” or the failure of public housing. In this slim but powerful book, packed with rarely seen photos, Hansman posits that the only way to tell the story of Pruitt-Igoe is to allow for many stories, even when they contradict one other. “There were some people who approached me and said, ‘Don’t write anything good about Pruitt-Igoe,’” he writes. “And then there were some that said, ‘Don’t write anything bad.’ And all of these people lived there. This was not going to be a single person’s memoir.” The key word, of course, is “person.” “It’s not about buildings,” he writes. “It’s not about statistics.”

The book feels a bit like a slideshow at a neighborhood reunion, with thoughtful, poetic captions revealing the story behind each photograph, making sure that the faces, names, and stories of the human beings who lived in those imposing concrete towers are preserved, even though the buildings are long gone.

Pruitt-Igoe is an outlier in comparison to other Arcadia titles, which tend toward sepia-tinted nostalgia or the deadpan school of documentarianism. Hansman says he wants readers to feel something when they read the book, and you definitely do: The book is a choral narrative that raises its fist against the forces that would erase whole neighborhoods and the stories of the people who live in them. It dares the reader not to be moved—and to do some deep thinking about St. Louis and your own place within this still-divided city.