Criminology

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In 2005, columnist Sylvester Brown began a series of articles on the Pruitt-Igoe Public Housing Development, where he once resided as a child. The North Side St. Louis site on which Pruitt-Igoe once stood is now vacant.

I was driving down Jefferson Avenue and I happened to notice the trees. Now I've driven by Pruitt-Igoe before, but I've really never paid attention to it. There were full grown trees. And the question hit me, how long does it take to grow a tree?

So I pulled over and I just looked at those trees. And there were so many, many, many, many trees. And I thought, wow, it's been at least 30 years since I've been in there. And I was supposed to get a police escort and I said, ah, I'm not going to do all that. I wanted my first revisit to Pruitt-Igoe to be alone.

It was like a little mini forest. It was tall grass, white-tipped weeds, trees all over the place.

And I followed this dusty little path, and I walked up this path. I sat on this big mound of concrete and dirt. I just sat there and I reflected.

And the sun was going down. And I remembered as a child looking out my 10th-story window and watching the sun go down. And so the memories started to come back.

And as I was sitting there I heard this [RUSTLING SOUND]. And I looked across and there was this black dog just running at me.

[BARKING]

I started running out of there. And then I had this idea that this slobbering dog's gonna jump on my back. But I made it out of there.

And I remember sitting outside there panting and being afraid. And I was afraid again-- feeling this fear that I had felt when I was six years old, the danger of being at Pruitt-Igoe.

These developments are run by the St. Louis Housing Authority. This is a far cry from the crowded, collapsing tenements that many of these people have known. Here in bright, new buildings with spaces grounds, they can live-- live with indoor plumbing, electric lights, fresh plastered walls, and the rest of the conveniences that are expected in the 20th century.

In these projects, children can play in safety on the wide lawns, not in the littered alleys and vacant lots.

It was touted as a solution, a cure for the disease. Pruitt-Igoe would rise above the polluted slums, lifting its residents out of poverty. They would thrive and the city would prosper. Everything would be different.

Well, it was a very beautiful place-- like a big hotel resort, I'd say, with plenty of green grass, trees, shrubbery.

What happened?

Well, one day we woke up and it was all gone.

In the middle '50s, St. Louis thought it had solved its low-cost housing needs. But instead, a monster was created.

But things changed quickly. As problems mounted, to decline was steep. Those who could move out did.

12,000 people were originally jammed into these 33 buildings. Only 2,500 people still linger in the remaining shells.

It became poor, increasingly segregated, heavily vandalized, and began to resemble the slums it replaced.

Pruitt-Igoe looks like a battle ground. Vandalism and neglect have left fear among the remaining occupants.

Crime rates rose, fear grew, conditions worsened, outsiders stayed away. It had become notorious.

Some projects became breeding grounds for crime. The Pruitt-Igoe Project in St. Louis is a casebook example.

In St. Louis, Missouri today, the health of an ailing neighborhood got some long and badly needed treatment.

Though in St. Louis today, they were hard at work again-- this time tearing down what was built before.

Two decades after opening Pruitt-Igoe, the government gave up.

Because they are so desperate, they are willing to try desperate things.

[EXPLOSIONS]

It was a powerful story with a dramatic end. The footage was replayed again and again. One image seemed to sum up the infamy. It circulated worldwide.

It was reprinted next to photos from earlier years and suggested a simple question, what caused the failure? The Pruitt-Igoe myth begins here.

When critics talk of the failures of federally-funded high-rise housing projects, they often cite the example of the huge Pruitt-Igoe Project in St. Louis.

Some blamed the architect. Modernist high-rises like Pruitt-Igoe, they said, created a breeding ground for isolation, vandalism, and crime.

The net result of all this quality design was, in fact, a production of an environment of fear.

Others attacked the welfare state, with big government, the problem, and Pruitt-Igoe, the result.

Film of that demolition has become an anti-public housing cliche.

This federal government of ours no longer has an open checkbook.

Many stated flatly that the residents were too poor, uneducated, or rural-- that they'd caused their own problems and had taken Pruitt-Igoe with them

It's a social as well as economic failure.

Long after the dust settled and the site was cleared, this is the Pruitt-Igoe that remained-- the mythical Pruitt-Igoe with a fatal flaw, doomed to failure from the start.

Little was said about the laws that built and maintained it, the economy that deserted, the segregation that stripped away opportunity, the radically changing city in which it stood. In the years of Pruitt-Igoe, the American city was wrenched apart by devastating forces. They were felt most deeply by the residents of a large but vulnerable housing project on the north side of St. Louis. It's a powerful story with a dramatic end. And its aftershocks are still with us.

In the years after the war, they came by the thousands-- small farmers who couldn't make it on 40 acres, tenants who saw a chance for their children up north. They brought them in the hope that in the center of so much wealth, there would be a place for them.

Mechanized labor had changed agriculture in the South. Tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and field workers could no longer scratch out a living. The new migrants arrived with little money or property. They were shepherded into the only place in which they were welcome-- distressed neighborhoods near inner city jobs known as the slums.

You really had these people called slum lords, who took advantage of the fact that the poor basically had to live in the center of cities, close to where their jobs were. You had acres and acres of housing that was unsafe, and unsanitary. By unsanitary, it meant a complete lack of the basic plumbing facilities. And by unsafe, it meant you could be burned to death. And the slum lords knew that they could just jam as many people as possible into it.

So it was a very profitable system, but it was also completely destructive-- not just for the people who were stuck in the slums, but for the whole urban community. And there is a despair that private enterprise could ever deal with this issue.

The door was open for a public option. Housing reformers pressed lawmakers to replace the slums with clean, modern housing-- to re-energize the depression-era housing program that had been stalled by the war. They found an unlikely ally in civic leaders and politicians who began to see the ring of slums as an eyesore that blighted to the aging downtown area.

Eager developers desired valuable inner city land, while anxious business interests worried fearful consumers were being driven away by the slums. The downtown interests just wanted the slums to go away. They didn't particularly care what happened to the people. But because they were wealthy and powerful, they were a very important part of the coalition that passed the 1949 housing act. The federal government would put up the money to buy slum property, using eminent domain if necessary to condemn not just individual houses, but whole blocks and whole sets of blocks, to knock them down and to rebuild on a modern and humane scale.

The essence of public housing was that the public sector could do a better job. People who had been living where they literally never saw the sun-- now they would have more magnificent views than the richest people in St. Louis. It enabled the most disadvantaged people in our cities to be liberated from the slums.

To residents weary of the poverty and aspiration of the depression, the sacrifices of the war, for a city so haunted by its celebrated past, yearning for a Renaissance, a new modern St. Louis rebuilt from the ground up would be the salvation of the city.

St. Louis' post-war project of downtown renewal was one of the most ambitious in the nation. Some plans never materialized.

Others were breathtaking in conception and execution.

Just to the north and west of downtown, construction began on a newly cleared 57-acre site in 1952. The Wendell Pruitt and William Igoe homes became a proud symbol of St. Louis' rebirth-- a modern break with the crumbling past that surrounded it.

My family came from a very small house. And I would say it was like a shack, actually. There were three rooms and there were 12 in my family. The sleeping conditions were quite crowded. My mom slept in the kitchen, if you can believe that. She had a roll- away bed in the kitchen next to the potbelly stove.

Some friends came by and said they got new project up here, we're going to put in an application when it comes. Right on the corner there of Jefferson and O'Fallon was the first building they opened up in Pruitt. It was like an oasis in the desert-- all this newness. I'd be the first person to occupy my unit. That was a thrill for me.

And then they put me on the 11th floor. Where I was, you didn't live any higher than the second floor. And they were putting me on 11th floor with elevators. But once I moved in on the 11th floor with elevators-- I called it a poor man's penthouse-- I didn't want to live on another floor. I never thought I would live in that kind of a surrounding.

When we first moved in, it was probably one of the most exciting things of my life. It was like another world. Everybody had a bed. My mom had her own bed. And I was so happy to see her just in a room to herself with a door.

We moved there really close to Christmas. It was like a Christmas present. There was snow on the ground. There was lights all over the place-- cars back and forth, people walking back and forth.

And everybody had Christmas lights. Everybody had Christmas lights. It seemed like they all came on about the same time. Just as soon as the sun would go down, the Christmas lights would start to come on. Then it was, wow, look at this.

I can still see it. They was really nice.

I tell you, when I drive down on Jefferson, I always have to park and just look. It brings back wonderful memories. I'm very truthful when I say, my memories of Pruitt-Igoe are probably some of the best memories I have.

I remember a warm sense of family, and a warm sense of community. Pruitt-Igoe was a place that I remembered as this wonderful building of different smells-- of pies, and cookies, and cakes, and all these eclectic dishes that were being cooked by the residents on the 11th floors. It was a place where we played hard, ran up and down these little breezeways, and up and down the steps, and running around. And so it was a place where kids could really, really get a chance to play hard.

Pruitt and Igoe was a safe place for me. I mean, I don't care what people said about it that lived outside there. If you didn't live in there, you thought it was a big place.

But growing up in there was-- you knew the people and you were never alone. I have to say, you were never alone because there's somebody across the hall, there's somebody down under you, there's somebody up over you. There's people here, there's lights here, there's life here. And so I'm not alone and now I'm not afraid.

I like people; I like neighborhoods; I like driving; and I like to hear music. I like to see people on their front porches; I like to see kids playing in parks; I like to see schools; I like to see libraries; I like to see-- and at one time, Pruitt-Igoe had that. It had this life, this engaging, electric life.

There were friendships and bonds formed there that have just lasted a lifetime. I know a lot of bad things came out of Pruitt-Igoe. I know they did.

But I don't think they outweigh the good. I really, really don't. Because at first, Pruitt-Igoe was just a wonderful place. It was wonderful. I think Pruitt-Igoe would be here today had it been maintained like it was when they first opened it up.

When we first moved into Pruitt and Igoe, it was clean-- always clean. The maintenance men were always sweeping. The elevator was always clean. And I remember there was a quilted kind of a cloth that went on the elevator when you move in so you wouldn't scratch it up.

But the maintenance started to just go down, and down, and down, and down, and down until it seemed like nobody cared about Pruitt and Igoe. The maintenance men stopped cleaning the elevators, the kids got to where they would go in the elevator as their personal restroom.

I mean, many times these urine-smelled elevators, they'd stop. And you pushed the button all day long and nobody would come. So you'd be in this dark elevator. I'm remember me and my brother oftentimes stuck on this stupid urine-smelled elevator and couldn't get out. So what we learned to do was to push the doors open, find a little cable, and pull ourselves up to our floor, and pull ourselves out of there.

In fact, we became the guys who people would call when you'd need to get somebody out of the elevator. We'd come and we'd push the doors open. You're down on that floor. You'd go down there and we'd help get them out of there.

You've been under considerable fire because of what is alleged to be, let's say, poor housekeeping practices on the part of the Housing Authority. How do you respond to that? What do you think is really the thing that's wrong here?

Well, in dealing with public housing, the problem that we find the most pressing is one I've talked about for quite awhile publicly-- the fact that we simply do not have enough money to operate as well as we should, perhaps.

What about this incinerator here behind us? Do you have difficulty with things like that? Well, this is a building which will be cleaned. Every building cannot be cleaned at exactly the same moment-- people working all day cleaning inside and outside.

The incinerator is rather small. But it was build that way and there's not much we can do about it. We do the best we can, and in most cases, it works quite well.

We pulled up in the moving van. The stench from the garbage pilling up in front of the incinerator wafted out of the elevator. And I knew at that point that there was something drastically different about this living arrangement-- the site of all these huge buildings and all of these people, and just the overall non-upkeep of place. It was a shock for me as a kid. And I'd never really recover from that first day.

Almost from day one, these buildings were under-maintained. There was never an adequate provision for the maintenance that was so important to these very complex structures. Government paid for building them, but the maintenance had to come out of money from the rents of the tenants. And the tenants couldn't afford the very highly skilled maintenance people to keep these buildings operated. So in this very basic way, I think the public sector failed the people who were living in these buildings.

From the first, public housing had enemies. Banks, Realtors, and chambers of commerce lined up against it, fearing its affect on their bottom line. Public housing was labeled as American, as a communist erosion of the free market.

But clearing slums and constructing large buildings was popular with downtown business interests and building trades. Clearance allowed for profitable redevelopment. Construction meant lucrative building contracts and jobs.

And so the law was written and the slums were cleared, the towers built and valuable land redeveloped-- all with federal funding. But the enemies of public housing had their say as well-- no federal funds for operation and maintenance. The projects became dependent on their tenants income. in the beginning, low- and middle-income applicants flooded into Pruitt-Igoe's new apartments.

Rental incomes strong, grounds were maintained, elevators worked, security staff patrolled the area. It thrived in the crowded city. But the city was changing.

One of the big questions for planners, and policymakers, and politicians during and after World War II was what would the future of St. Louis look like in terms of its population. Between 1930 and 1940, St. Louis actually declined slightly. And that put the fear of God in the city planners and the politicians. So growth becomes almost a kind of psychology. They really wanted to believe that that was an anomaly, that that was a depression era problem, and the growth trajectory was actually going to be upward after World War II, so that there would be about a million people by 1970.

And if you were going to fit a million people into the city, then you had to have some kind of large-scale housing. The problem is, though, that there are two trends going on at once. One of the trends is upward growth. And the other trend is large numbers of people who have enough means leaving the city. And planners mistook which one was the dominant trend.

St. Louis' population peaked in the 1950s. The growth that had defied the war years had ended. Yet well out of earshot of downtown gridlock and demolition, a new kind of city was being developed on a massive scale.

But it was not the urban high-rise envisioned by city planners. Instead, the new American Dream was built on cheap lots on the margins of cities, and one story ranches that came to dominate the landscape of the suburbs. 2/3 of the people in our country now live in a metropolitan area. Mostly, the growth is out here in the suburbs.

There are many good things about living in this new world. It has given millions of families pleasant, well-planned homes, a place to have a garden with light, and air, and space.

In the post-war years, a new lifestyle was emerging as a centuries-old engine of American urban growth ground to a halt and then reversed. Criticized for conformity, condemned for endless sprawl, idealized, desired, labeled American Dream, or nightmare. The sudden rise of the suburb, for good or ill, reshaped the American city.

What people didn't see in 1949 was that the cities were emptying out. They were losing their middle class, they were losing their industrial base. With the loss of population and jobs, you have the loss tax base, and you enter into this vicious circle where, within the cities, there was a deterioration of basic services.

Whereas in the suburbs, every single year there was a growth in the value of your house, more services, more jobs that were close to where you were living, better schools. The federal government basically committed itself to making the suburbs affordable for the American middle class, and for the white working class.

Essentially, we had a national pro-suburban policy during the years when Pruitt-Igoe was being built. The urban flight draining American cities was made possible by the same federal law that built Pruitt-Igoe-- the 1949 housing act. With expanded FHA loans, buying a new suburban home became less expensive than renting in the city for most families.

As poor migrants from the South continued to flood in, the middle-class exodus was nearly complete. For St. Louis, postwar urban decline was especially quick and hard. While other cities annexed unused land and expanded outward, St. Louis was locked in. The city's borders had been legally fixed in the 19th century. It's toughest years were ahead.

By 1980, the City of St. Louis would lose half its mid-century population. The planners had expected an overcrowded city of a million people. They'd built massive projects like Pruitt-Igoe, expecting them to fill. But the plans were collapsing. St. Louis was in free fall.

In the affluent St. Louis County, the suburbs directly to the west of the city, a powerful new central business district emerged just outside city limits. Dozens of tiny suburban townships formed, determined to maintain their independence.

Though it's only a crossroads on the highway north of St. Louis, you can hardly miss Blackjack as you pass through it. Citizens proudly proclaim its location right here where two huge blackjack oaks used to stand.

65 C, in subdivision developed under the density development procedures set out an ordinance number 12, the zoning ordinance.

Tiny Blackjack incorporated itself as a city last August and promptly passed a zoning law prohibiting the construction of new apartment buildings. Among them, a proposed low- to middle-income housing project. The people of blackjack are afraid, and what they are afraid of is visible only a few miles away at the giant Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis. Vandalism and crime are commonplace. The citizens of Blackjack fear that a project in their neighborhood might become a suburban Pruitt-Igoe, destroying their property values and their safety.

The people who are out here are middle income, behave like middle income. They worry about their schools, they worry about their lawns, their properties.

They don't want to bring in, shall we say, trash-- trash people.

What kind of people?

Well, people. They're not necessarily just poor, but they're just-- well, you won't be able to walk in the neighborhood. Then, I said, it'd be people like that.

Christmas was like no other place because it was so many other kids around to play with and show off your stuff. I remember when my mother gave me a record player. And she couldn't afford to buy me a brand new one. So she went to the pawn shop. And she got me a record player from the pawn shop.

And baby, she left, we pulled the record player to the door, and Martha Reeves and The Vandellas made "Dancing In The Street." We pulled the record player up to the door, went outside, turned the record player up as high as it will go, and then people just came from everywhere.

It was a party always in the evening. It didn't have to be any special day. Somebody somewhere had their music blasting. And that was a Christmas day. And I will never forget that.

My relationship with Pruitt-Igoe was that of a research assistant. I went to Washington University, to graduate school, in 1964. I was working on a National Institute of Mental Health funded study on social problems in public housing.

My role was to study women and girls in Pruitt-Igoe. I was 20 years old. I had just gotten out of college.

Some of the girls were 18 years old. And I was two years older, but yet my life was vastly different. As time passed I did wonder, would my life have been similar to that of the girls had my parents migrated from Mississippi to St. Louis? Would my opportunities have been different?

I guess to put it bluntly, I never saw the people in Pruitt-Igoe as that different from the lives of poor people I have grown up with in Mississippi. Except for one thing, the strong, tightly-knit communities and families in which I grew up had begun to shatter around the people who were displaced in northern city with few supports. The policy in the Housing Authority was to move the poorest of the poor, the most dependent families, to Pruitt-Igoe.

Before we moved into Pruitt-Igoe, the welfare department came to our home. They talked with my mother about moving into the housing project. But the stipulation was that my father could not be with us. They would put us into the housing project only if he left the state.

My mother and father discussed it and they decided that it was best for the 12 children for the father to leave the home. And that's how we got into the projects.

The welfare department had a rule that no able-bodied man could be in the house if a woman received aid for dependent children. If a man lost his job, if he's looking for work, he still had to leave the home. And there was even a night staff of men who worked for the welfare department whose job was to go to the homes of the welfare recipients. And they searched to find if there was a man in the home.

Sometimes men came back at night to be with their families. Some were found in the closet, hiding.

I remember, vividly, my mother telling us, if white people come to the house and ask you guys questions, tell them that your father is not here. Tell them that your father has never been here, you have not seen your father. I trusted here. I knew that there was a reason that we had to do this charade.

And I participated in the charade. I sat there, and looked those people in the eye, and told them with pure earnestness that no, I have not seen my father. And no, my daddy does not live here.

But I knew that I was lying. And that made me wonder, who are these people? And how'd they have the power to make my mother lie.

We're giving you money. We want to be able to control you. We're giving you money, so we have the right to make stipulations as to how you use it and what you use it for.

There were so many restrictions. We couldn't have a telephone. We couldn't have a television. And we really left at the mercy of the system.

In the project, it seemed to be strategically planned to create an environment that people felt isolated, that people felt restricted, that people felt inhuman almost. You're bad. We have to restrain you. We have to curtail what you're doing.

It was void of humanity. It was void of caring. It seemed more like a prison environment that you'd have to escape from.

They were treated in some ways like they were prisoners. If we are going to support you, and to give you a few measly dollars to live on, then we're going to extract blood from you. You're going to live according to the rules we set. And the rules just happened to be very punitive. There was this whole undertone of morality-- that they had poor morality, that they were immoral by the virtue of the lifestyles they lived.

Poverty never created immorality. Poverty created want.

When we first moved in the projects, we couldn't have a television.

Here it is.

And then my mother got a letter that we could have TV.

Barbie's Dream House is a wish come true for both of you. And look--

I was always interested in the family programs, programs with fathers-- My Little Margie, where the father was so involved with his daughter.

[KNOCKING]

Margie!

Come on in, Dad.

Margie, you know I've always tried to be both mother and father to you.

You've been wonderful, Dad.

Do you remember that little game we always play when you have a problem that you can't tell your father.

But I haven't got any problems.

Now come, tell me what's wrong.

When I looked at those sitcoms, I just felt like this is the way white people lived. Because black people, from my experience, did not live that way. And I never questioned, I never wondered why. I just figured, this is how it is.

We have our home here. And if the colored move in and run real estate values down, it's bound to create tension. And you'll have, well, I think their aim is mixed marriages and becoming equal with the whites.

Well, I just could not live beside them. I don't feel that they should be oppressed, but I moved here-- one of the main reasons was because it was a white community. And that's the only place I intend to live.

Public housing in St. Louis was always used as a segregation tool. The city did everything in its power in order to prevent what was called, Negro de-concentration-- that is, African Americans moving out of particular neighborhoods. Every project is imagined as a white or black project solely. And they're actually placed on the map in St. Louis in ways that deepen the pockets of segregation in one place or the other. It's a way to really radically separate whites from blacks in ways that no other kind of legislation or other tool had ever been able to do.

Pruitt was settled in 1954 right after the Brown v. Board decision. And so, very quickly, the projects had to be desegregated. And what happens is that whites actually just leave in droves. And it, in effect, becomes an all-black project almost immediately.

So by the time you get to the Pruitt-Igoe moment, you have a city that is hyper-segregated, in fact, in a region that's hyper- segregated.

The color line wound through a fractured city, submitting the widespread prejudice that inhabited backyards, boardrooms, and the halls of government. It was reflected in neighborhood property values, in the terms of mortgages, and the way Realtors steered prospective buyers, and countless other tactics that preserved the racial barrier. Whites who chose to ignore the color line face a severe financial penalty. Blacks usually had no choice in the matter.

Through it all, the key programs of the 1949 housing act, slum clearance and public housing, were being used to reshape cities throughout the country-- redistributing land and populations to suit those in power. Poor districts on desirable urban land were cleared for redevelopment, but were rarely replaced with affordable housing. These neighborhoods were disproportionately black.

Residents were scattered to segregated pockets throughout the city. New ghettos formed as the old were demolished. Urban renewal found a new name-- Negro removal. In the segregated city, blacks paid more for worse housing with fewer amenities, older hospitals, higher food prices, less police protection.

The city was changing. The northern black ghetto had arrived.

The urban economy in 1949 appeared very strong. Not only were the population of big cities peaking, but also their industrial production. So that it appeared that all you had to do was solve the housing problem and there would be plenty of jobs within every big city. What nobody could see was that this was the peak period, and that the urban industrial economy was about to really fall off a cliff.

How many places have you tried to get a job here?

Well, I've tried a lot of factories, and warehouses, and stoves, and filling stations, and things.

What do they tell you?

Well, some jobs I call in, and I guess they catch my voice and find out I'm a colored man and say, we're filled up. We don't need nobody else.

The American city has been, in the past, a wonderful mechanism for assimilation of immigrant and migrant groups because it was essentially on an upward trend. What happened after 1945 was that that wonderful mechanism of opportunity began to fail. This economy still flourished, but it flourished outside the city. And as a result, you had a mismatch between where the jobs were, and where the people who needed the jobs were living, or forced to live.

In the days of say, the Italian and Jewish ghettos, these ghettos were close to those critical entry level industrial jobs. The black ghetto, for the first time, was very far from where jobs were moving. They moved to the city, as the black migrants did. Instead of finding themselves in the midst of this wonderful, expanding urban economy, they found themselves in the midst of an economy was dying.

Have you had any chance to work which you've turned down since you came to St. Louis.

No, sir. I wouldn't turn down any jobs.

What would you take? Would you take any job?

At the time, I would.

You have people to support? Family?

A wife and two children.

Do you think somehow you're going to get some work soon?

I don't know.

Now in the projects, everybody's wall was the same color-- white paint and that was it. But my mother, because she didn't have money for school supplies and a lot of paper, she went to Central Hardware. She got a can of black paint and painted one of the walls, and got chalk and eraser. And that was our homework wall. So we would work our problems out, we'd practice our penmanship, we did everything on that wall.

And we had gotten a notice from the administration office that they were going to inspect. I was so afraid they were going to put us out of the project. And when the lady saw that black wall, she said, Mrs. Blair, what is this?

So my mother just told her, she said, I don't have money for paper. And I want my children to do well in school, and they have to practice. The lady was just floored. She couldn't believe that that was the reason.

And she said, you know what? You are trying to raise your children. You leave this wall black. And if you want to paint another wall, that's fine with us.

I ventured out after a while to the merry-go-round, to the swings, and got into a bunch of kids. And this one kid, for whatever reason-- I don't know, I think in that environment you could sense fear-- but he sensed I feared him. Man, he beat me up pretty good. And I cried. And I went to get my mom.

A months or so after we moved in, my mother sent me and my older brother to the store. We're going to go buy some stuff. We came downstairs. These gang of kids stopped us, slapped us around, took some of our money.

And I remember looking up as we were walking away from those boys, my mother looking out the 10th floor window. And we came back and there was my mother downstairs by the steps, folding her arms, stomping her feet. She said-- we walked up to her-- she said, I saw what happened. She said to my older brother, we're to go find that boy and you're going to fight him. You're going to fight him now.

My mom, she knew what I was facing, I guess, looking back on it. She took me down, crying, looking for this kid. And she wanted me to defend myself and fight him.

Especially after my father left, my mother insisted that her boys fight. For some reason, she knew that we had to, I guess, mark our territory. We went down the hall. There was this group of kids.

My mother pushed my brother, he went in there, pulled the kid out, got into this big raucous fight. I mean, it was a hard fight. The kid's older brother came out of the door with a pair of brass knuckles, handed it to his younger brother. My mother said, you go get him.

And she took me down by the hand into the crowd of kids, and that just wasn't my makeup. And I saw the kid off to my right. And I just pretended like I never saw him. So that was my way of avoiding that confrontation.

My brother fought the fight of his life. And after that fight, we got a little bit of respect. The people in the building knew that the Brown boys could scrap. But still it kind of stuck with me that this was the only time my mother told us to fight.

I saw examples of enormous strength and integrity, examples of mothers who wanted the very best for their children, and were constantly groping for ways with which to do that. They preached self sufficiency to their children all the time. And you've got to be able to make it on your own, especially in a poor environment where there are a lot of people who can prey upon you.

And sometimes the boys were challenged to act like a man. I heard that expression quite a lot of times. So mentally, these guys are always jockeying for position on who's going to be the top dog. Nobody wanted to be on the bottom.

The error of violence and anger, that's something that you learned a project as a kid. There was a way that you had to carry yourself. It was understood that if you didn't stand up, if you showed any weakness, if you didn't let people know, they would take advantage of you.

All too often, it created an environment were fighting one another and someone's ending up laying on the ground. So what I would do is go across, away from the projects, and there were fields over there, there was vacant lots with weeds. And I had this fascination with insects-- what a spider would do to this insect, praying mantises, how they ate other insects.

You felt empowered to be able to out think these insects, or be quick enough to catch a grasshopper. So it gave me a sense of control, it gave me a sense of power. That would be my escape. I would be maybe 100 feet from the projects, but it was like I was a world away in a world all my own.

Right across the street, on my hand, it seemed like it was an environment created by people that didn't like these people. They didn't like me. The didn't like the other people that lived there.

The one thing you always ask yourself is why? Why is it like this? Why do I live here? What did I do wrong?

I think it created a mindset for the inhabitants that they weren't cared about. And I think that manifested itself in a way that caused more harm to the tenants than any other entity. The vandalism that existed in Pruitt-Igoe came from that environment-- things allowed to just deteriorate and people not really caring.

And so management decided, well, instead of trying to enhance their existence, we'll just make things so they can't be destroyed. Everything had to be protected-- light fixtures, no light exposed. There were shields around them with mesh metal protecting the bulb. The fact that it was indestructible made you want to try to destroy things.

There was a screen around the light bulbs that kept you from breaking them. But you know, kids will be kids-- find a way to break it. And we'd just put water in there, throw it up, and the light would get hot and it would bright, and lights are out.

They took all the lights off the elevator, and they recessed them up into the ceiling, and then they tried to cover that up with Plexiglas. But sometimes people would try to set that Plexiglas on fire. Sometimes, instead of taking the trash and putting it inside the incinerator, they just set it on fire right out there in the middle of the floor. You getting off the elevator, or you on elevator, the elevators fills up with smoke. There's no place to go, and especially if they've put the lights out.

Looking back at it, we did a lot of crazy things down there. After I moved away from Pruitt and Igoe, I went on to become a police officer within the city. And I had the opportunity to work in these buildings straight up and down.

I do remember people calling the police, and trying to come into the buildings. And they would drop just anything they could find, trash-- they throw trash out the window. I remember that. I remember them throwing fire bombs out onto the police cars. I remember they did that.

So there is enough blame to go around. I don't think people rationalize that somebody's house could burn down or people could be killed. I think they just saw that fire truck, or that police car, or that ambulance as the enemy. It was just bitter people, angry people, and that was a way of making a statement-- were not happy here and we want you to know it.

And the way you're going to know it is these bricks and bottles will rain down on you no matter who it's saving, no matter how relevant or important it is, we want you to understand that you're not welcome here. And so after a while, they just stopped showing up.

By the mid-'60s, Pruitt-Igoe was falling apart. Runaway maintenance costs, rising vandalism and crime, growing numbers of vacancies in an increasingly poor and emptying city. Public housing was set up as a system that depended on an overcrowding crisis. Once populations begin to move out of the city, that begins to increase the vacancy rates in the rental markets. And so people begin to look elsewhere besides public housing for place to live.

So Pruitt-Igoe had very little money to actually pay for maintenance and upkeep because it couldn't raise the money from the rents of the tenants because so many of them had left.

Grants were given to rehab buildings. Studies were commission. But nothing seemed to help.

The Housing Authority was faltering. The giant project's finances were bringing it down. Rents were raised. By the end of the decade, rents increased three times in one year. The residents were stretched. Some paid 3/4 of their income to live in Pruitt-Igoe.

There were a lot of men in Pruitt-Igoe, but they didn't belong there. Basically Pruitt-Igoe was a place that had a lot of young women, a lot of single mothers. You had men coming back from the Vietnam War; you had broken men; you had unemployed men; you had men who weren't supposed to be in the home because of the whole welfare system, friends of friends, guys who hung out, men who stayed downstairs and drank.

And there were men who came in, waited in the hallways for women to come home from work, for the salesmen to come on Fridays. And they'd lurk around in the hallways. It was easy to get in there, do the dirty deed, and get out.

The reputation that we had, we did not deserve. People came in from the outside that didn't live in there. And you come in, and you throw a couple of bucks here and there to some kid that's sitting on the steps, he ain't got nothing to do. So his hero just gave him $2.

Well, no. I ain't tell the police where you are. But I'm gonna tell you when they coming because you gonna run by and pat me on my head, or give me a couple more dollars, or maybe you'll buy me some tennis shoes. Maybe you'll by us a bag of groceries.

The crime was real, but the people of Pruitt-Igoe were stigmatized by the crime. To the average St. Louisan, the word Pruitt-Igoe became this representation of the fears of black poverty, black drug abuse, black crime. Repeated rumors, and repeated stories, and media accounts made that much more representative to what it was. It was like danger was around the corner, danger was always there. So that element have crept its way into the definition of Pruitt-Igoe.

If a person sense fear in you, then you had a problem.

Anywhere you went, you had to have this certain air about you of, don't mess with me because I'll hurt you.

It's the mindset of individuals that live in constant fear. It changes people. It created a group of individuals that felt as if they had really nothing to lose.

And I tell you this, persons that don't have a decent place to stay are becoming motivated enough to want to fight for them a place to stay, and are willing to take these kinds of chances. While we live, we're taking chances.

Many times, you don't even know that you're sitting on a keg of dynamite.

I say, as tenants, we've got to draw a line and say, no more!

No more!

We are not no dolls, cats, or rats that you can just take us and just put us just anywhere. We want some decent place where we can live.

In all the buildings, we're getting calls all the time that the heating is broke down. And they give us reason, but they give us very little heat.

Toilet's not being fixed on time, windows that are never replaced, you understand? And the projects just went down. And if your house was broken into, and you call the police, and they wouldn't come because you were in Pruitt-Igoe.

And you mean to tell me they are doing their job? Uh-uh. They are evading what is reality. And the fact is that Pruitt-Igoe is still standing there, and those policemen are afraid to go in there and they don't give a damn.

Why are we paying rent when we can't get none of these things done? It's the Housing Authority's fault. You might go to the Housing Authority. He says, it's not our fault, it's the Mayor's fault. And the Mayor might say, it's Washington's fault.

You may not get it resolved, and the fact that you seem to be going around in circles, it would pile, and pile, and pile-- and the resentment. When you had a place like a Pruitt-Igoe-- any housing project where there's a multitude of people-- then you had political pull. Like the Martin Luther King march-- couldn't have done nothing just with Martin Luther King marching by himself. It caught on fire.

In February, 1969, St. Louis Public Housing residents began a rent strike-- the first of its kind in the history of public housing. Tenant organizations collected the rent, which was withheld from the Housing Authority until demands were met.

Mr. Porter, the Housing Authority argues that since the project is run with rent money, you're only doing yourself a disservice by withholding the rent money-- that conditions would be even worse.

Well, by withholding our money, we feel that we can-- that's only stick that we feel as poor people that we have to fight with.

Well, the Housing Authority says it simply does not have the money. Where's it going to get the money to do what you want done?

Well, we feel that's their problem.

So handbills were passed out, meetings were held, senior citizens, handicapping, young people walking the street saying, don't pay any rent.

Well, we're going to keep rent striking until they do something. Because we know that somebody can do something. They're saying that they are bankrupt, we are too. They're saying they can't do any more, we can't either. The tenants don't have any money. They cannot pay this kind of rent and eat too. So I'm telling the people to eat and damn the rent.

You got people registering to vote and voting. You have people speaking up for the rights who never spoke up before. And you got the people seem to be able to do something about it, I'll put it that way.

It caught on fire. And while we weren't praised for it, it occurred.

After nine months of negotiations, the depleted housing authority finally gave into the strikers demands. Rents were limited to one quarter of any tenant's income. And residents would have a much greater voice in the operation of St. Louis Public Housing.

The victory was short-lived, as years of neglect placed beleaguered buildings on the verge of physical collapse. Just two months after the end of the rent strike, the damn finally broke. When the temperatures dropped below freezing earlier this week, water lines in several of the Pruitt-Igoe apartment buildings broke and a subsequent flow of water turned into ice. At 2311 Dixon, a sewer line is broken. And now raw sewage bubbles out of the ground like a malevolent spring.

In the building itself, residents and maintenance crews are working to clean up the mess.

Some of my friends, they had to come help me sweep the water out the house.

What about heat? Have you got heat today?

No, we haven't had no heat in a week.

You're using the gas stove for heat then?

Uh-huh.

30 additional carpenters were added to the maintenance crews to board up an estimated 10,000 broken windows, which contributed to the general breakdown of services. Clothing and other household items continue to flow into the community center.

We need you to tell us what takes priority. I would like to recommend the following-- that you need first of all to have this area declared as a disaster area and an emergency area; that the second thing that you work on, evacuation of the citizens; and the third thing is to work for a permanent solution to this problem, which keeps coming up time, and time, and time again.

Outside one of the buildings, in the mud, the slush, and the debris, we found this button, which looks a bit the worse for wear. It says, make Pruitt-Igoe number one. That undoubtedly reflects the feeling of many of the residents who live here, who suffered through broken pipelines in the subzero temperatures. Make Pruitt-Igoe number one. Pruitt-Igoe at this point, and the other public housing units in St. Louis, are still a long way from number one.

When they started to close that complex down it became a really big hazard. People started to go in and they would strip the buildings. There was a lot of copper inside the buildings. The drug addicts, and users, and dealers started to move into the empty buildings. And now they got a big giant empty building to themselves because nobody lives in there.

If you're on top of this building, if you stand on the 10th floor or any high up apartment, you could look down, you could tell when the police were coming in. So there was no way-- none-- that they could sneak in there and get you.

There were drug havens set up in these empty buildings because they weren't monitored, nobody checked them, so you had drug dealers who would go in and set up a whole empire in an empty building.

It was just too big, too unmonitored. Criminals could get in, they could get out. Criminal activity could fester. Once it was broke down here, it could pick up again there. It was just the experiment had gone terribly awry. And it was just uncontrollable.

My brother was upset. And we were standing underneath the building. And he was eating these peanut butter crackers. And I asked him for some, he said, no.

So me, my mom, and my step-dad, we stayed on the fourth floor. And we went upstairs, and he went on somewhere. And we weren't there five minutes, and we heard a bunch of shots.

I would wake up in the morning, and we'd go to school. And I remember one day walking by this yellow police tape, and there were blood stains on the concrete. And we were on our way to school. So you heard about these gangs, and these drugs, and this mysterious thing called "hare-on."

And so these different words are coming into my life that I did not understand, but I knew that there was an element of danger that was associated with all this stuff.

I see people flinch all the time from backfires, from automobiles, whatever. But in the projects you learned after a while that you don't flinch, you just look around and surveyor your environment.

And within about two minutes, there was a wrap at the door. [KNOCKING SOUNDS] And it's this guy Herb, he's a friend of my brother's. My brother's name was Beanie. His nickname was that. They just shot Beanie.

The nights I can remember walking through Pruitt-Igoe where it was snow on the ground, and it was white, and the moon was shining. And then all these lights is on. OK, so that means these places are occupied. There's life here.

But when these buildings are abandoned, you don't know what's going on in there. You don't know who is in there, or what they have on their mind if there is somebody in there. Nobody will hear me scream.

So when you look at that and you think about it, it's time to go. I mean, everybody with a brain in their head knows when party's over. And the party was over.

They had shot him at close range with a shotgun. And all his inners were out. And his liver was detached. And my mom was there trying to put it all back in, trying to hold it together, you know.

But she couldn't. She couldn't get it all back in, so he looked up at her. He said, Mom, I'm gonna die, ain't I? And she said, Yeah. And he said, I'm not afraid to die. And that was kind of the last thing he said to her.

After my brother was murdered, the idea that we could cohabitate and get along, that was all out the window. My mom was bitter. My family was bitter.

And I can remember distinctly, it took me eight years to stop dreaming about it every night. And all I could think about as a kid-- I guess I was about nine years old, eight or nine-- was how to murder somebody. I thought about that every day for years.

They wanted to let you know, this is it. You are leaving here. I don't care where you go, but you coming out of here. This is out of control and we are no longer going to put up with it.

We're not going to tolerate this anymore. We want your asses out of here. Nobody else will come up in here and live like this.

In 1972, three buildings of Pruitt-Igoe were imploded with dynamite-- the first of which was nationally televised. Two years later, the St. Louis Housing Authority received federal approval to close and completely demolish the Wendell Pruitt and William Igoe Homes. By 1976, the site was cleared. Its residents scattered across an emptying city.

57 acres of the North Side neighborhood, again, stood vacant as it had less than three decades earlier in overcrowded city with twice the population.

I remember seeing on the evening news Pruitt-Igoe being blown up. The immediate question that came to my mind was, whatever happened to all the people who lived there? And I think that the powers that be, the authorities in the city, strongly stigmatized the people who lived in Pruitt-Igoe. They gave the impression that it had imploded within before the explosion of the brick and mortar. It never made sense to label them as the perpetrators and to use them as scapegoats, as though they were the cause of a structured inequality.

It only makes sense if it's placed within this broader national context of what was happening to the urban poor. And it wasn't pretty.

The implosion footage was so shocking just because there was still in people's minds the idea that this had been the solution. It was a very painful moment of truth to see that failure. And that's why, in many ways, Pruitt-Igoe is not just the national, and even the world symbol, for the failure of American public housing. It's also been a symbol for the perceived failure well-intentioned government policies in general.

And that's why I think it's so important to look beyond those famous pictures of the towers being destroyed, and really try to understand what failed and why. In some ways, Pruitt-Igoe failed because housing alone couldn't deal with the most basic issues that were troubling the American city. There was just no way to build your way out of that tragedy.

I think we have a responsibility to understand those failures, and to learn from them, and to do better.

Public housing actually has a very fine grain to the story. It's not a total failure or a total success. We don't want people to think of Pruitt-Igoe as a failure if they're going to then translate that failure into all public housing, or all government programs, or all social welfare, or all modernism. That's what Pruitt-Igoe has been freighted with.

If we want to say that this one project in this one place for this one set of reasons, declined to the point where people thought it was necessary to tear it down. But that's one thing. But that's simply not how we've told the story. The bigger story is, in fact, the decline of the city overall. What happened to St. Louis was tragic.

And it's kind of a slow motion Katrina in a way. St. Louis lost half its population, and had a devastated tax base, and drained economy over the course of 50 years from World War II even to the present, it's no wonder Pruitt-Igoe declined in those circumstances. I mean, it would be hard to imagine a public housing project surviving under those conditions.

I was one of the people that they had to come up to the building to watch it. It's almost like losing a child. You hate to see it occur. You hated to see it occur.

Here I'm saying again, it all depends on how you felt when you went into Pruitt-Igoe and what it did for you. With me, I was excited about getting my first apartment. I was excited about getting my poor man's penthouse.

It had its ups and downs. It had its crimes. It had its prostitutes. It had its dope pushers.

It had everything that everybody else had, but that didn't stop me from caring for it.

And when they blowed the building down, yeah, I hated that very much. And that may not be what people want to hear, but that's the fact. Some people loved Pruitt-Igoe. Some people hated Pruitt-Igoe. There are people today you meet, they'll tell you, don't tell nobody I came from Pruitt and Igoe.

They're ashamed. I don't know what affected their lives-- how it affected their lives. I don't know. I don't know that.

I always wonder what my life would have been like if I had never been in that environment. Would I have been a nicer person? Has it affected my relationships with others?

I'm envious of people that have grown up in less trying environments. And I always see them as nicer than I am. I appreciate quiet. I appreciate people being civil. I appreciate nonviolence and people get along. I don't take that for granted.

There's nothing worse than the projects. So I couldn't imagine-- maybe Baghdad or something, but I imagine what those children must feel like over there-- fearful of your life all the time. I empathize with that. So it's taught me empathy.

To go to church, I have to come down Cass Avenue. When I hit Cass Avenue, the library is right there and there's a white building on the left-hand side. That's where Pruitt and Igoe started. I looked at Pruitt and Igoe in my mind's eye. I try not to think of the bad times. I like to think about the good times.

I can see it. It's like when you're a kid and you remember your first Christmas. You remember everything about that Christmas. You remember every toy you got.

I remember Pruitt and Igoe. I remember the Christmas lights. I remember the snow. I remember the rain. I remember the people.

I remember people getting beat up. I remember people having parties. I remember dancing in the street. I remember riding my bike. I remember we raced up and down the hills.

It was our home. It was a good thing. Nobody could tell me that anybody that made that made it for a bad thing. And if they did, God blessed us. And he gave us good things and he gave us really good memories.

And I ain't gonna never forget it. When I feel bad, I don't intend to, but I dream about Pruitt and Igoe. And I always see myself standing in the window, looking out the window.

The North Side of St. Louis is changing. Though most of the Pruitt-Igoe site stands vacant, developers are purchasing land all around it. And plans for a massive renewal are circulating once again.

History as patterns, but it doesn't repeat. The city will change, but in different ways than before. In the years of Pruitt-Igoe, the American city changed in ways that made it unrecognizable from a generation earlier-- privileging some and leaving others in its wake. The city will change, but in ways different from before. The next time the city changes, remember Pruitt-Igoe.

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