Quote:The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, an amazing 2011 documentary. "It began as a housing marvel. Two decades later, it ended in rubble. But what happened to those caught in between?

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and the St. Louis residents who called it home.

This is why Pruitt-Igoe matters – why we made this documentary. So much of our collective understanding of cities and government and inequality are tied up in these 33 high-rise buildings, informed by the demolition image. Too much of the context has been overlooked, or willfully ignored, in discussions of public housing, public welfare, and the state of the American city.

Quote:Pruitt-Igoe: A Black Community Under the “Atomic Cloud”

The true story of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Complex may never be fully declassified. But what we do know is this: it involves the unlucky architect of the World Trade Center, a lost stockpile of a hundred thousand baby teeth, and mountains of recently disclosed U.S. Army records that describe secret radiological experiments conducted on unsuspecting citizens in Minneapolis, Winnipeg, and St. Louis.

In 1952, construction began on a massive array of public housing high-rises in North St. Louis, Missouri. West of the Mississippi River and the city’s downtown, 33 tan apartment buildings were built to stand right next to one another like dominos, a “river of open space” between for playgrounds, parking, and parks.

Clearing 57 acres over three years of construction, Pruitt-Igoe was a herculean spending project in the name of urban renewal. Yet the towers wouldn’t last two decades. In 1972, three Pruitt-Igoe buildings were condemned and demolished, famously, on TV. The rest followed shortly after, televised on the nightly news, harkening the “end of modernism.”

The Pruitt-Igoe Housing Complex became a powerful cliché for Reaganite psychopaths who pointed at St. Louis’s failure to maintain the development as reason to nix welfare initiatives across the nation. As the story goes, “those people” didn’t know how to take care of things. They were dirty, and criminal, so why throw more money at them?

There’s much more to the story. Pruitt-Igoe was not proof of a Cold War logic; it did not display the “inevitable” failures of planned housing. It was an organized sabotage—and a clandestine site for radiological weapons experimentation. These studies were conducted on innocent and unconsenting civilians, who were mostly poor, mostly Black, and mostly women and children.
....

For forty years, the truth about these “cloud” experiments would be entirely unknown to the public. Not until 1994 was their true nature—and the extent of the danger they posed—revealed. Even then, it came to light only after Missouri Rep. Richard Gephardt acquired files disclosing some facts about the program’s true nature.

And yet a vast chunk of American idiots still actually trust their government when they say "safe and effective."