Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.Repeat a distorted version of the truth often enough, and it becomes accepted fact, regardless of the realities on the ground. This verity has rarely been more vividly evoked than in Chad Freidrichs's moving and revelatory documentary about the legacy of St. Louis's infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex. As Freidrichs shows, the lessons supposedly learned from this ignominious episode weren't entirely wrong but they certainly weren't all correct, either. As usual, it was the poor and powerless who received the blame, while the powers that be escaping censure and pointing fingers back at those whom they were to have been helping. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth starts in a haunting setting all too familiar to residents of some Rust Belt cities: a wide stretch of mature trees and wild undergrowth right in the heart of a once-thriving downtown. On that spot back in 1952, the city of St. Louis cleared out a swath of decrepit housing to make room for an ambitious project. Over the next few years, some 33 modernist high-rise buildings (designed by the World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki) sprung up on a wide, 57-acre plain just a few blocks away from the downtown's central district. The response of one of the residents interviewed by Freidrichs appears to be somewhat typical of the poor families who started moving in: "It was like an oasis in the desert."
What makes Freidrichs's interviews so compelling is how they reside at such a stark, 90-degree angle to the received history of the project and its downfall. Conceived as a revolutionary approach to modernizing the city's downtown, relieving overcrowding, and avoiding the inevitable slum lords and unsanitary conditions prevalent in poorer neighborhoods, Pruitt-Igoe seemed like a dream come true to many of its new residents. Person after person sighs into Freidrichs's camera, recalling the way that the buildings were lit up like giant Christmas trees during the holidays, the close and neighborly feel of the place, and the penthouse-like glamour of the higher-floor apartments.
The tragedy of this film lies in how quickly that dream of decent and affordable housing for the city's poor unraveled. As Freidrichs shows with a woeful sense of the poetic (illustrated by a rich mix of archival footage), it was doomed from the start. In a particularly short-sighted move, the local government had approved the building of Pruitt-Igoe, but didn't think to appropriate funds for its upkeep (much like, as Ken Burns showed in his 2009 documentary series, The National Parks, Washington set up the national park system but took years to bother finding the money to maintain them). One particularly harebrained housing authority policy prohibited able-bodied men from inhabiting apartments of residents on welfare; essentially dynamiting the project's family structure. In short order, elevators stopped working, broken windows weren't fixed, and a bleak air settled about the place, followed by the inevitable lawlessness and what one resident termed "a prison environment."
At the same time, larger forces were at work that hastened the project's collapse. Even though Pruitt-Igoe had been built in part to handle the density of the city's population, by the time it was completed, people were leaving downtown in droves for the suburbs - a nationwide shift that was particularly prevalent in St. Louis. This outward flow of population was generated not just by what the film terms "a national pro-suburban policy" (new highways and federal loan programs that made buying a suburban house cheaper than renting in the city) but also the harsh realities of racial politics in a divided city. The Great Migration of working-class blacks from the South to cities like St. Louis in the postwar years had been drawn by the promise of readily available manufacturing jobs. Just in time for Pruitt-Igoe to be finished, those factories were either closing down or moving out of downtown.
The "myth" that Freidrichs talks about is what the 1972 demolition of the utterly decrepit Pruitt-Igoe complex (largely uninhabited for several years prior) is supposed to represent. In that version of the story, related in often racially-tinged tones by locals, the national media, and urban renewal professionals, the residents were at fault for not keeping their buildings in shape. The more nuanced view put forward by the urban historians and residents in Freidrichs's film is that the complex and its residents were actually collateral damage in a wider postwar onslaught on the cores of many American cities. Surveying the wreck of poor planning and class and racial divisions that hampered this "emptying city," the film argues that what happened to St. Louis was in fact "a slow-motion Katrina." And just as many critics couldn't understand why people wanted to return to the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans after the hurricane, so too those who wrote off the residents of Pruitt-Igoe won't understand their often warm memories of the place. Sometimes home is where the malfunctioning elevator is.
