Pruitt-Igoe
On March 16, 1972 the first of 33 eleven-story buildings in the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex was demolished. Not even 25 years old at its demise, the federally funded project had been a failure almost from its opening in 1956. The buildings were never more than 60 percent occupied, and while the neighborhood they replaced had been a racially mixed poor community, the Pruitt-Igoe projects quickly became a black ghetto. The crowd cheered the demolition, and St. Louis must have been relieved in 1976 when the last building was cleared away, but critics around the country still point to Pruitt-Igoe as a major cultural turning point.
Modernism died and gave way to the post-modern age. Planned communities are bound to fail. The government humiliates and mistreats the poor. Pruitt-Igoe stands for these and many other ideas as a symbol of failure in our culture. While it is convenient to recognize cultural milestones, it is easy to ignore the real story of how a neighborhood was torn down and replaced with a multi million-dollar development. It is easy to forget the millions more dollars spent in vain attempts to keep the project afloat. Finally it is too easy to ignore the hope of revitalization and growth that such a massive project represents.
The story of Pruitt-Igoe is tied to the short history of tall buildings. In the 1890s, steel beam construction allowed the first skyscrapers to rise to ten and more stories off the ground without compromise in strength or aesthetics. Elevators allowed easy access to tall buildings which were originally built for industry and business interests. Residential towers were not far behind and many were built in large cities like New York where land was precious. New social spaces were created in these buildings; stairways, elevators, corridors and lobbies took the place of sidewalks and streets as the public space outside an individual’s private residence. In Pruitt-Igoe those common areas became one of the biggest problems because anyone could enter them and no one was responsible for the trash and criminal activity that occurred there. (Mumford 184)
In 1947 the City Plan Commission was formed with the goal of bringing people back to the city of St. Louis which had lost population during the 1930’s. A neighborhood called DeSoto-Carr was designated as “obsolete” and it was decided to replace it with two and three story row house apartments and a large public park, but St. Louis got a new mayor in 1949 who preferred larger scale projects like those he had seen in New York city. (Von Hoffman 2)
Slum clearance had its beginnings under the Public Works Administration during the depression. In 1936 Franklin D. Roosevelt attended the opening of a housing project in Atlanta and said, “Within sight of us today stands a tribute to useful work under government supervision-the first slum clearance and low rent housing project.” The Housing Act of 1937 provided federal aid to municipal authorities for the redevelopment of slum areas into low income housing, and by 1941 there were over 200,000 people living in federally aided projects. One advantage that the federal monies gave city planners was the ability to put together large reconstruction projects using eminent domain to acquire the large blocks of property. (Domhoff 176)
During the years of depression in America and world war in Europe, utopian ideas for the city of the future were growing in the minds of politicians and urban planners. The United States had particular reason for concern because her cities were full of poor neighborhoods and dilapidated housing. By the end of World War II, much of the administrative machinery was in place to remake the American city. David Handlin describes the slum clearance of the 1940’s and 50’s as a “Federal bulldozer” which razed whole neighborhoods of supposedly substandard buildings in order to renew aging cities. The extensive interstate highway system was also built at this time, and it often sliced neighborhoods into pieces while connecting the urban centers to the sparsely populated suburban outskirts. (Handlin 232)
But what form would the cities take? Modernist city planners and architects early in the 20th century attempted to rethink building and urban design in a way that did not reproduce what they thought of as outdated modes of living. Both Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier were visionary architects and each had his own image of the ideal city of the future. Their ideas were remarkably similar considering how different the two men were. Both wanted to change the city from a place of dark, close streets to an open and bright natural environment. Wright’s Broad Acre city envisioned houses set on an acre each, and would have eliminated the modern city in favor of a continuous landscape of houses spread out from each other in order that each family could flourish. Le Corbusier, on the other hand, wanted to concentrate as many residents as possible into high rise apartment buildings thereby allowing the ground to be freed up for highways, green space and light. The skyscrapers would be beautiful modern buildings essentially set in parks. He called it the “City in a Park.” (Handlin 230)
Le Corbusier’s famous description of a house as a “machine for living” is the outgrowth of his practical use of standardized components in building designs that could be cheaply purchased and easily assembled on site. The use of mass produced “parts” for building was not merely for convenience, but for Corbusier, demonstrated a new aesthetic of harmonious, repetitive forms. (Fishman 179)
Le Corbusier’s masterwork Unite d’Habitation (Unity House) would not be built until 1947, but by its completion in 1953 in Marseilles, France, his ideas had inspired projects and buildings around Europe and in America. This ten-story high rise apartment building featured 23 different apartment layouts for different size families and had galleries or “interior streets,” as Corbusier referred to them, on several levels. These interior spaces would replace the social space of the urban street and allow the residents a place to interact and commune. The population for this project was intended to be about 1800 people. (Curtis 438)
Many factors created Pruitt-Igoe, but why didn’t it work? Did Pruitt-Igoe assist in pushing 234,000 people out of the city of St. Louis between 1950 and 1970? Aren’t there people living in high-rise apartment buildings all over the world today? There were some specific problems with the design and building of Pruitt-Igoe. Because of the federal money for the project, local contractors charged too much for the work and the city’s response was to raise densities, and cut amenities for the project. (Von Hoffman 3) Playgrounds for children were never built. The elevators were designed only to stop on the third, seventh and tenth floors. Recreational galleries and stairwells became danger zones and havens for criminals.
Frank Buckley described such buildings as ugly Marxist boxes, and accused their designers of being “harshly inhumane.” In his essay “Architecture’s Nasty Authoritarianism,” Buckley compares Le Corbusier’s designs to the ideal city Germania envisioned by Hitler’s planner Albert Speer. The theory of modern living became more important than the established needs of people, and architects took away individuality and independence from the residents. (31,32) The urban historian Lewis Mumford directly addresses Le Corbusier’s plan:
The City in the Park does nothing to foster the constant give and take, the interchange of goods and ideas, the expression of life as a constant dialogue…by the nature of the high-rise slab, its inhabitants are cut off from the surveillance and protection of neighbors and passers-by particularly when in elevators. (Mumford 184)
Oscar Newman focuses on surveillance and safety in his assessment of Pruitt-Igoe. While teaching at Washington University in St. Louis, Newman noticed across the street from Pruitt-Igoe a two-story row house development called Carr Square Village. The residents were of the same demographic as those of Pruitt-Igoe but these apartments had remained stable and occupied throughout the building, decline, and demolition of the residential towers across the street. His interest in the differences between these two residential designs would eventually be developed into a government-supported doctrine of urban planning called Defensible Space. The thesis is simple: residents only take care of what they define as their own. So in a walk-up apartment where 2 families share a staircase and landing, an agreement about acceptable use and behavior in that semi-private space can easily be reached. However, contrast that with a corridor and stairway shared by 150 families and without security and cleaning staff, the semi-public spaces can quickly become unmanageable and dangerous. In fact, as this table demonstrates, crime increases with the amount of interior space available. (Newman 10)
Oscar Newman
Newman demonstrates his principles further by showing how a resident in a single family home considers not only his or her front yard to be somewhat private space, but also the sidewalk and even the parking space and street in front of the house. In other words, the individual feels ownership and therefore responsibility well into the public sphere. There is a stark contrast in an individual’s sense of safety when identifying a stranger on the street and seeing a stranger in the hall right outside the door. The entrances of high-rise apartment buildings often do not even relate to the street directly, forcing residents to take a circuitous route from parking lot across open space, to arrive at further unknowns once inside the building. In a civilized middle-class environment none of these factors would have been a problem, but in the case of Pruitt-Igoe and many other low-income housing projects, every small detail added to the despair and uncertainty of the residents. (Newman 15)
One resident of Pruitt-Igoe said of the place: “This is a city within a city and the people make their own laws.” Even the police did not like to enter these dangerous buildings. Lee Rainwater supervised a comprehensive social survey of the inhabitants and their problems, and he described the site as a “federally built and supported slum.” In his view the 57-acre site condensed the problems of poverty and race and exacerbated them. (18)
While it was essential to improve the lives of the poor in society, after the war, Americans were preoccupied with the newfound luxuries of life. The American dream of the single-family home with green lawn, dog, wife, and two kids was within easy reach. So while the middle classes moved away from urban centers, the poor were increasingly left behind and they became a burden on the cities that housed them. City administrators could not do nothing, and so clearing the vast sections of poorly maintained and substandard housing seemed the best solution. Michael Allen sums up the urban renewal craze: “The modernist desire for organization and efficiency grew into a drive to rebuild the city completely, and mass housing was the proving ground for disastrous new ideas.”
Another conflict of interest existed during the 1940s and 1950s, and the terms of this struggle are not unfamiliar today. In his book about power in American politics, William Domhoff describes municipalities as growth machines or producers of wealth through real estate development. The two interests were real estate developers who wanted to clear small buildings and slums in order to expand central business districts and major institutions such as hospitals and universities, and a liberal-labor coalition that was interested in providing housing for the poor. Their vision was to rehabilitate slums and build housing on vacant land rather than destroying neighborhoods. The Housing Act of 1937 was such a program. By building away from slum areas, the government avoided the costly prospect of using eminent
domain to buy out slum property owners at inflated prices. (Domhoff 173)
During the 1940s, economists and lawmakers worked on what some considered a “social and economic mess” left behind by past generations. The proponents of low-income housing succeeded in establishing that residential neighborhoods razed for renewal would remain predominantly residential, which was defined as over 50 percent. But when the housing bill was finally passed, significant concessions were made to the real estate interests. The most important and the one that still resonates today is the provision that once cleared, the city land could be sold or leased to private developers. This meant using federal tax money to take property by eminent domain, and then selling that same property at lower prices to large private developers who promised returns to cities in the form of increased revenue and tax base. For example, between 1956 and 1966, one out of seven Atlanta residents were moved out of their homes to make way for expressways, urban renewal, and a large building boom downtown. (Domhoff 175)
St. Louis was not alone in its struggle to recover from the ravages of poverty and unemployment. The planners of Pruitt-Igoe believed it would attract residents to the city and encourage more developments like it. The architect Minoru Yamasaki believed his “communal corridors” would be filled with happy children and mothers doing laundry, not trash-strewn, graffiti-marked war zones. But everyone was wrong and the project became the most publicized failure in the history of public housing in the United States. From a peak of 857,000 in 1950, the population of St. Louis has declined until recently. The city now has 348,000 residents. What followed the modern movement in architecture and in our culture broadly was a more intuitive approach to social and aesthetic problems. The reconnection to historical traditions in urban housing has caused most large-scale housing projects into be remade into 2 and 3 story walkups. Rather than tearing down entire neighborhoods, city planners now rehabilitate and fill in empty lots with similar houses.
In St. Louis the void left by the Pruitt-Igoe project remains; the weed covered expanse is partially fenced in and vacant because the concrete foundations are too expensive to remove. This costly project still affects the lives of the residents of St. Louis who have to live with the symbol of a bad idea.
Works Cited:
Allen, Michael R. “Neighborhood Gardens and the Perils of Modernism” 17 August
2005. 1 December 2005. http://www.eco-absence.org/stl/ng/allen.htm
Buckley, Frank. “Modern Architecture’s Nasty Authoritarianism.” The American
Enterprise. 13 January/February 2002, 30-31.
Curtis, William J. Modern Architecture Since 1900. New York: Phaidon, 1982, 2001.
Domhoff, William G. Who Rules America Now? New York: Prentice Hall Inc., 1983.
Handlin, David. American Architecture. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985.
Hemdahl, Reuel. Urban Renewal New York: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1959
Keel, Robert O. “Pruitt-Igoe and the End of Modernity.” 9 May 2005. 20 November
2005. http://www.umsl.edu/~rkeel/pruitt-igoe.htm
Mumford, Lewis. The Urban Prospect. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956.
Newman, Oscar. Creating Defensible Space. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Policy Development and Research, April 1996.
Rainwater, Lee. Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Family Life in a Federal Slum. Chicago:
Aldine Publishers, 1970.
von Hoffman, Alexander. “Why They Built the Pruitt-Igoe Project.” Joint Center For Housing Studies, Harvard University. http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/PruittIgoe.html
Modernism died and gave way to the post-modern age. Planned communities are bound to fail. The government humiliates and mistreats the poor. Pruitt-Igoe stands for these and many other ideas as a symbol of failure in our culture. While it is convenient to recognize cultural milestones, it is easy to ignore the real story of how a neighborhood was torn down and replaced with a multi million-dollar development. It is easy to forget the millions more dollars spent in vain attempts to keep the project afloat. Finally it is too easy to ignore the hope of revitalization and growth that such a massive project represents.
The story of Pruitt-Igoe is tied to the short history of tall buildings. In the 1890s, steel beam construction allowed the first skyscrapers to rise to ten and more stories off the ground without compromise in strength or aesthetics. Elevators allowed easy access to tall buildings which were originally built for industry and business interests. Residential towers were not far behind and many were built in large cities like New York where land was precious. New social spaces were created in these buildings; stairways, elevators, corridors and lobbies took the place of sidewalks and streets as the public space outside an individual’s private residence. In Pruitt-Igoe those common areas became one of the biggest problems because anyone could enter them and no one was responsible for the trash and criminal activity that occurred there. (Mumford 184)
In 1947 the City Plan Commission was formed with the goal of bringing people back to the city of St. Louis which had lost population during the 1930’s. A neighborhood called DeSoto-Carr was designated as “obsolete” and it was decided to replace it with two and three story row house apartments and a large public park, but St. Louis got a new mayor in 1949 who preferred larger scale projects like those he had seen in New York city. (Von Hoffman 2)
Slum clearance had its beginnings under the Public Works Administration during the depression. In 1936 Franklin D. Roosevelt attended the opening of a housing project in Atlanta and said, “Within sight of us today stands a tribute to useful work under government supervision-the first slum clearance and low rent housing project.” The Housing Act of 1937 provided federal aid to municipal authorities for the redevelopment of slum areas into low income housing, and by 1941 there were over 200,000 people living in federally aided projects. One advantage that the federal monies gave city planners was the ability to put together large reconstruction projects using eminent domain to acquire the large blocks of property. (Domhoff 176)
During the years of depression in America and world war in Europe, utopian ideas for the city of the future were growing in the minds of politicians and urban planners. The United States had particular reason for concern because her cities were full of poor neighborhoods and dilapidated housing. By the end of World War II, much of the administrative machinery was in place to remake the American city. David Handlin describes the slum clearance of the 1940’s and 50’s as a “Federal bulldozer” which razed whole neighborhoods of supposedly substandard buildings in order to renew aging cities. The extensive interstate highway system was also built at this time, and it often sliced neighborhoods into pieces while connecting the urban centers to the sparsely populated suburban outskirts. (Handlin 232)
But what form would the cities take? Modernist city planners and architects early in the 20th century attempted to rethink building and urban design in a way that did not reproduce what they thought of as outdated modes of living. Both Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier were visionary architects and each had his own image of the ideal city of the future. Their ideas were remarkably similar considering how different the two men were. Both wanted to change the city from a place of dark, close streets to an open and bright natural environment. Wright’s Broad Acre city envisioned houses set on an acre each, and would have eliminated the modern city in favor of a continuous landscape of houses spread out from each other in order that each family could flourish. Le Corbusier, on the other hand, wanted to concentrate as many residents as possible into high rise apartment buildings thereby allowing the ground to be freed up for highways, green space and light. The skyscrapers would be beautiful modern buildings essentially set in parks. He called it the “City in a Park.” (Handlin 230)
Le Corbusier’s famous description of a house as a “machine for living” is the outgrowth of his practical use of standardized components in building designs that could be cheaply purchased and easily assembled on site. The use of mass produced “parts” for building was not merely for convenience, but for Corbusier, demonstrated a new aesthetic of harmonious, repetitive forms. (Fishman 179)
Le Corbusier’s masterwork Unite d’Habitation (Unity House) would not be built until 1947, but by its completion in 1953 in Marseilles, France, his ideas had inspired projects and buildings around Europe and in America. This ten-story high rise apartment building featured 23 different apartment layouts for different size families and had galleries or “interior streets,” as Corbusier referred to them, on several levels. These interior spaces would replace the social space of the urban street and allow the residents a place to interact and commune. The population for this project was intended to be about 1800 people. (Curtis 438)
Many factors created Pruitt-Igoe, but why didn’t it work? Did Pruitt-Igoe assist in pushing 234,000 people out of the city of St. Louis between 1950 and 1970? Aren’t there people living in high-rise apartment buildings all over the world today? There were some specific problems with the design and building of Pruitt-Igoe. Because of the federal money for the project, local contractors charged too much for the work and the city’s response was to raise densities, and cut amenities for the project. (Von Hoffman 3) Playgrounds for children were never built. The elevators were designed only to stop on the third, seventh and tenth floors. Recreational galleries and stairwells became danger zones and havens for criminals.
Frank Buckley described such buildings as ugly Marxist boxes, and accused their designers of being “harshly inhumane.” In his essay “Architecture’s Nasty Authoritarianism,” Buckley compares Le Corbusier’s designs to the ideal city Germania envisioned by Hitler’s planner Albert Speer. The theory of modern living became more important than the established needs of people, and architects took away individuality and independence from the residents. (31,32) The urban historian Lewis Mumford directly addresses Le Corbusier’s plan:
The City in the Park does nothing to foster the constant give and take, the interchange of goods and ideas, the expression of life as a constant dialogue…by the nature of the high-rise slab, its inhabitants are cut off from the surveillance and protection of neighbors and passers-by particularly when in elevators. (Mumford 184)
Oscar Newman focuses on surveillance and safety in his assessment of Pruitt-Igoe. While teaching at Washington University in St. Louis, Newman noticed across the street from Pruitt-Igoe a two-story row house development called Carr Square Village. The residents were of the same demographic as those of Pruitt-Igoe but these apartments had remained stable and occupied throughout the building, decline, and demolition of the residential towers across the street. His interest in the differences between these two residential designs would eventually be developed into a government-supported doctrine of urban planning called Defensible Space. The thesis is simple: residents only take care of what they define as their own. So in a walk-up apartment where 2 families share a staircase and landing, an agreement about acceptable use and behavior in that semi-private space can easily be reached. However, contrast that with a corridor and stairway shared by 150 families and without security and cleaning staff, the semi-public spaces can quickly become unmanageable and dangerous. In fact, as this table demonstrates, crime increases with the amount of interior space available. (Newman 10)
Oscar NewmanNewman demonstrates his principles further by showing how a resident in a single family home considers not only his or her front yard to be somewhat private space, but also the sidewalk and even the parking space and street in front of the house. In other words, the individual feels ownership and therefore responsibility well into the public sphere. There is a stark contrast in an individual’s sense of safety when identifying a stranger on the street and seeing a stranger in the hall right outside the door. The entrances of high-rise apartment buildings often do not even relate to the street directly, forcing residents to take a circuitous route from parking lot across open space, to arrive at further unknowns once inside the building. In a civilized middle-class environment none of these factors would have been a problem, but in the case of Pruitt-Igoe and many other low-income housing projects, every small detail added to the despair and uncertainty of the residents. (Newman 15)
One resident of Pruitt-Igoe said of the place: “This is a city within a city and the people make their own laws.” Even the police did not like to enter these dangerous buildings. Lee Rainwater supervised a comprehensive social survey of the inhabitants and their problems, and he described the site as a “federally built and supported slum.” In his view the 57-acre site condensed the problems of poverty and race and exacerbated them. (18)
While it was essential to improve the lives of the poor in society, after the war, Americans were preoccupied with the newfound luxuries of life. The American dream of the single-family home with green lawn, dog, wife, and two kids was within easy reach. So while the middle classes moved away from urban centers, the poor were increasingly left behind and they became a burden on the cities that housed them. City administrators could not do nothing, and so clearing the vast sections of poorly maintained and substandard housing seemed the best solution. Michael Allen sums up the urban renewal craze: “The modernist desire for organization and efficiency grew into a drive to rebuild the city completely, and mass housing was the proving ground for disastrous new ideas.”
Another conflict of interest existed during the 1940s and 1950s, and the terms of this struggle are not unfamiliar today. In his book about power in American politics, William Domhoff describes municipalities as growth machines or producers of wealth through real estate development. The two interests were real estate developers who wanted to clear small buildings and slums in order to expand central business districts and major institutions such as hospitals and universities, and a liberal-labor coalition that was interested in providing housing for the poor. Their vision was to rehabilitate slums and build housing on vacant land rather than destroying neighborhoods. The Housing Act of 1937 was such a program. By building away from slum areas, the government avoided the costly prospect of using eminent
domain to buy out slum property owners at inflated prices. (Domhoff 173)
During the 1940s, economists and lawmakers worked on what some considered a “social and economic mess” left behind by past generations. The proponents of low-income housing succeeded in establishing that residential neighborhoods razed for renewal would remain predominantly residential, which was defined as over 50 percent. But when the housing bill was finally passed, significant concessions were made to the real estate interests. The most important and the one that still resonates today is the provision that once cleared, the city land could be sold or leased to private developers. This meant using federal tax money to take property by eminent domain, and then selling that same property at lower prices to large private developers who promised returns to cities in the form of increased revenue and tax base. For example, between 1956 and 1966, one out of seven Atlanta residents were moved out of their homes to make way for expressways, urban renewal, and a large building boom downtown. (Domhoff 175)
St. Louis was not alone in its struggle to recover from the ravages of poverty and unemployment. The planners of Pruitt-Igoe believed it would attract residents to the city and encourage more developments like it. The architect Minoru Yamasaki believed his “communal corridors” would be filled with happy children and mothers doing laundry, not trash-strewn, graffiti-marked war zones. But everyone was wrong and the project became the most publicized failure in the history of public housing in the United States. From a peak of 857,000 in 1950, the population of St. Louis has declined until recently. The city now has 348,000 residents. What followed the modern movement in architecture and in our culture broadly was a more intuitive approach to social and aesthetic problems. The reconnection to historical traditions in urban housing has caused most large-scale housing projects into be remade into 2 and 3 story walkups. Rather than tearing down entire neighborhoods, city planners now rehabilitate and fill in empty lots with similar houses.
In St. Louis the void left by the Pruitt-Igoe project remains; the weed covered expanse is partially fenced in and vacant because the concrete foundations are too expensive to remove. This costly project still affects the lives of the residents of St. Louis who have to live with the symbol of a bad idea.
Works Cited:
Allen, Michael R. “Neighborhood Gardens and the Perils of Modernism” 17 August
2005. 1 December 2005. http://www.eco-absence.org/stl/ng/allen.htm
Buckley, Frank. “Modern Architecture’s Nasty Authoritarianism.” The American
Enterprise. 13 January/February 2002, 30-31.
Curtis, William J. Modern Architecture Since 1900. New York: Phaidon, 1982, 2001.
Domhoff, William G. Who Rules America Now? New York: Prentice Hall Inc., 1983.
Handlin, David. American Architecture. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985.
Hemdahl, Reuel. Urban Renewal New York: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1959
Keel, Robert O. “Pruitt-Igoe and the End of Modernity.” 9 May 2005. 20 November
2005. http://www.umsl.edu/~rkeel/pruitt-igoe.htm
Mumford, Lewis. The Urban Prospect. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956.
Newman, Oscar. Creating Defensible Space. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Policy Development and Research, April 1996.
Rainwater, Lee. Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Family Life in a Federal Slum. Chicago:
Aldine Publishers, 1970.
von Hoffman, Alexander. “Why They Built the Pruitt-Igoe Project.” Joint Center For Housing Studies, Harvard University. http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/PruittIgoe.html
____________________________________________________
St. Louis street department doubling the despair at the intersection of Arco and Newstead Avenues, June 2007. Reason: The stop signs (which have been disregarded anyway since the installation of the "pots" in 1992) were removed from the north-south street of Newstead Ave, and the street department felt that they should further barricade the end of the streets to avoid liability in the off-chance that little Johnny or Jamela might ride their bike into the path of a speeding automobile. Note Oscar Newman's observation below that when using his ideas, “by a four-to-one margin, more of them do it the wrong way.” Also note that the barriers being dropped into place above are the same--"jersey barriers"--as the ones used in the ill-fated "Phoenix Project" in Bridgeport, Connecticut (also discussed below).
Dividing white from black on the north edge of the Central West End,Walton St. @ Westminster
Creative sewer-pipe island, north of DelmarStreet Barriers in St. Louis
Jesse L. Watt
12/2004
12/2004
On all of us falls the blame for what is ugly in our
surroundings, what is inhumane and derelict.
surroundings, what is inhumane and derelict.
-Spiro Kostov
Beginning with a warren of one-way streets downtown, the newcomer driving in St. Louis will be stopped by innumerable stop signs, and turned back by signs that say, “Do not Enter” and “Street not Through.” A driver who happens to miss one of these signs may encounter a cul-de-sac, a row of round concrete planters, or a series of posts and chains blocking the way. If traveling down a particularly well-appointed street, a pedestrian or bicyclist may encounter an impassable fence and gatehouse. The original open grid street design, laid out long before the advent of the automobile, has been interrupted and altered by well over one hundred years of changing needs, both public and private. The American street has always been the place where people from different worlds collide, whether rich or poor, or from the country or the city. This paper will examine the role of the street in American culture, and specifically how it has redefined the way people can move through the urban environment, and how it adds to or takes away from the growing need of Americans for private space.
In the 1984 a citywide crime prevention program was initiated which changed the way the city dealt with crime. Operation Safe Street consisted of five inter-connected programs which brought together the law enforcement community with strong citizen participation to fight crime. Project Porchlight asked residents to keep porchlights on overnight as a deterrent to crime. Project Home Security helped residents by installing deadbolt locks, window pins, peepholes for doors, and window bars in their houses either free of charge or at a minimal cost. Project Quiet Street was a plan of street modification which closed streets to through traffic, with the purpose of keeping most non-residents out. Operation Safe Street also participated in the national Neighborhood Watch Program, and published a monthly newsletter focused on crime prevention. (Clark, 2002)
The entire operation had a 4 year phase-in process and so by 1988, the whole city was under the provisions of Operation Safe Street. Since local residents and business people were made part of the decision making process, some of the neighborhoods did not participate or withdrew from Project Quiet Street. After approving a 6 month trial period for the barriers, they were installed by city ordinance. When the 6 months ended, neighborhoods could choose whether or not to keep the closures in place. The temporary barriers consisted of concrete sewer liners or pipe, filled with dirt which made them quite difficult to move. (Wagner, 1997) An example of an ordinance reads thus: “WHEREAS, the temporary closing of Arco Avenue at the east curb line of Newstead Avenue will enhance and increase the stability of the neighborhood adjacent to said street…” (Ordinance #62461, City of St. Louis)
A press release from Operation Safe Street July 20, 1983 describes the intentions of the program:
"The street designs intended to limit access of through traffic to neighborhoods and provide for a greater sense of “neighborhood” in the selected communities. The proposed street changes are designed to create a greater sense of “proprietary control” of the residents over their neighborhoods and have been designed with the leadership of the neighborhoods involved, the aldermen of the Wards affected and the city street department. By limiting access to these neighborhoods we hope to effectively eliminate the activity of criminals from outside the area and thus allow us to concentrate our efforts of enforcement on those criminal elements which may exist within the target neighborhood."
A study on the effects of these street modifications was in made 1997 by Allen Wagner, a former St. Louis police officer. He studied two adjacent neighborhoods under Operation Safe Street, one that utilized Operation Quiet Street, and one that did not. His surveys found that reported crime “annually rose or declined without apparent reason,” and could not be attributed to the street barriers. However, the fear of crime in the neighborhood affected by the barriers (principally residential burglary) was significantly reduced. Also there was a reduction citywide in burglaries that may have been related to the barriers. But Wagner adds: “The impact of street modifications on the reduction of crime, by themselves, has still to be documented.” (1997)
Julie Alferd, the current director of Operation Safe Street said in a recent interview that budget cuts have eliminated the street barriers from their programming. However, the use of these barriers has become desirable for neighborhoods, and thus a tool in the hands of the aldermen and street department. But as for their original purpose, and context, placement of the barriers seems no longer connected to any crime fighting program. Tom Gerrien, an employee of the street department believes the street barriers "make people feel safer", but don't affect the actual crime rate very much. Some ongoing problems with these barriers include the loss of city services, like snow plowing, and parking in front of the barriers. In some cases people can’t be stopped from driving up on the sidewalk and around the planters, and they can also become problematic loitering spots. The goal of giving residents greater control over their environments seems to have its aim the privatization of the public streets of St. Louis. (personal communication, November 20, 2004)
The older cities of America have benefited from the concept of urban living exemplified by the historic private streets of St. Louis. As the automobile allowed Americans to relocate to more private idealized lives, the role of the street in public life diminished. Streets also became more dangerous as traffic increased and less desirable as places for social interaction. The gridiron pattern of the old cities and towns could not simply be turned into calm curving streets lined with trees so an evolution began which adapted this pattern into a more controlled and civilized livable design.
The historic private streets of St. Louis now stand in sharp contrast to their poorer cousins, the sewer pipe street barricades. Private streets were initially conceived as a means for wealthy citizens to insulate themselves from encroaching industrialization and the swelling population of the city. Before zoning became common practice in urban areas, a small factory could be built right next to a residence, so an essential component to successful private streets was an agreement among its residents about the uses of the street.
The first of the private places was founded in 1867 by a surveyor named Julius Pitzman. His first design, Benton Place, featured one entrance and a divided roadway with trees and grass in the center. Access was restricted by blocking one end of the street. Other designs would block both ends of the street and access would be from the center cross streets. Pitzman would go on to design 47 more private places as the city grew. (Newman, 1974)
Around this same time, in 1868, Frederick Law Olmstead would lay out his first realized design for the suburb of Riverside, Illinois. Riverside featured curving, tree-lined streets, and houses set back from the road a minimum of 30 feet. A pedestrian walkway separated from the road by a strip of trees would complete the most common form of the suburb as we know it today. “Olmstead associated poor living conditions with physical layouts of American cities…he criticized the gridiron system for rectangular blocks with overcrowded row houses.” (Southworth, 1997)
Oscar Newman considers that the automobile took the concept of the protected urban street and drove it out to the suburbs where public streets seemed private. He goes on: “Consequently the potential advantages a private street could offer in the urban milieu were to be somewhat obscured for several decades to come.” (Newman, 1974)
The automobile suburb first laid out in 1928 at Radburn, in Fairlawn, New Jersey would have a profound effect on the American street. Michael Southworth in his Streets and the Shaping of towns and cities points out that while Radburn was the first such development to make extensive use of the culdesac, it retained the interconnectedness of the grid by having bicycle and pedestrian pathways that allowed passage denied the automobile. The amount of dedicated park land in the development would not often be replicated because residents prefer larger private lawns rather than public spaces. Acknowledging the power of the automobile to disrupt residential life, Southworth holds, “when entering a neighborhood the automobile must be calmed.” (1997)
In response to rising rates of urban crime in the 1960s, Congress passed the Safe Streets Act in 1968. To counterbalance a 144 percent rise in the rate of reported crime nationally, this legislation allocated funds for supplementing existing crime prevention efforts, and for research into new crime fighting models. Oscar Newman, an architect and urban planner undertook research into the private streets of St. Louis which had undergone huge social and economic changes along with a 240 percent rise in crime between 1960 and 1970. “While surrounding public streets have lost their middle-income residents and have fallen victim to speculative forces, the private streets have offered an environment which residents perceive as secure, and in which they choose to live.” (Newman, 1974) Forces that destabilized neighborhoods included blockbusting in which a black family was moved onto a block and when fear caused the white residents to sell, their houses were bought up by speculators and sold to black families at inflated prices. In another practice, called redlining, banks would judge whole neighborhoods unstable and thereafter not lend money to people wanting to buy or fix up the housing there.
Newman’s findings were developed into his thesis for crime prevention in architecture and city planning termed “defensible space.” It was born out by studying the notorious Pruitt-Igoe and other large scale government housing projects that had failed in their purpose of housing low-income families decently. The goals of this doctrine were to reduce opportunities for crime by good design and target hardening.
Newman recognized that it was not only the physical closing of these streets that kept them intact but the formal association among the residents that gave them the feeling of cohesion. In exchange for a small tax break, the residents owned their streets and paid dues to maintain them and to deal with other neighborhood issues. An advantage of the private streets was the awareness of who was in the neighborhood at a given time. This “surveillance” enabled outsiders to be identified by residents or police. (Newman, 1974)
Privatizing a street required the formation of a street association among the residents. The private street seemed to offer a model of a design that could be applied to public streets. But Newman warned planners, “Without privatization, the physical closure of a street is the result of an external decision making process over which the residents have little control.” Even with approval and feedback from current residents, barring public thoroughfare will eventually effect people in unexpected ways, and without an updated participation in the efficacy and purpose of such measures leave some individuals out in the cold Why not privatization without association? (1974)
Another planner to study St. Louis in the 1970s was Donald Appleyard. In his book Livable Streets he notes that there are many traffic control devices that can be installed at very little cost to the city. However, they have very complex side effects that belie the ease of installation. “The best barriers are those that blend so well into the street environment that motorists do not realize they are being controlled by them.” (1981)
Forest Park Southeast neighborhood: Permanent alterations, representing a financial investment in the aesthetic of the street: Norfolk or Swan @ S. Taylor Ave.In 1992, Dayton, Ohio initiated a neighborhood stabilization effort in an area with rising crime and traffic problems. Eleven streets were closed with metal gates hung on brick columns bearing a logo and the name Five Oaks. Alleys were also closed, effectively creating several small neighborhoods out of one larger. One year after these changes took place, crime was reduced significantly, 25 percent overall and 40 percent for violent crime. Traffic was reduced by 67 percent, and accidents by 40 percent. Home sales and values also increased in the area. (Clarke, 2002)
Another city to use diverters to lower crime was Bridgeport, Connecticut. In 1992 diagonal barriers were placed across two dozen intersections. They were intended to create loops that would eliminate through traffic in a neighborhood that was plagued by suburban drug buyers with easy access to a major interstate highway. While much debate and planning preceded the installation of the barriers, there was no budget for this emergency measure and "jersey barriers" were donated by the state and installed by the National Guard. This corruption of Newmans concept did significantly reduce drug traffic, but the residents found in 1998 that the reduction in crime was not worth the stigmatization of their neighborhood. Zane Yost described what went wrong with the Phoenix Project in Bridgeport: “Doing the right thing in the wrong way created confusion and justifiable anger…Every objection to the Phoenix Project relates only to the degrading ugly concrete barriers with their implication that these residents are less respected than in other parts of the city.” (1998) In fact other parts of Bridgeport do have landscaped, permanent alterations to the grid including cul-de-sacs and loops. These neighborhoods are among the most desirable places to live. Oscar Newman interviewed for an article about the Bridgeport barriers said hundreds of cities have tried his ideas and “by a four-to-one margin, more of them do it the wrong way.” (Halbfinger, 1998)
The street closures in St. Louis have naturally increased pedestrian activity and improved the functionality of many streets for their residents. When traffic is eased, children can play more safely, the number of strangers driving through the neighborhood is reduced, and a feeling of ownership and responsibility is encouraged. Even in the best of circumstances though, where the utilitarian concrete barrels have remained, so has a sense of powerlessness over the environment. The barriers, put in place either temporarily or permanently by way of a city ordinance, demonstrate innovative planning but a lack of financial commitment. Neither the residents nor the alderman have taken the next step and committed to a integrate the closures into the streetscape. Twenty years after Operation Safe Street began, many of the original residents and business owners are long gone. New residents may be puzzled by the concrete pots at the end of their streets. Some respond by planting and tending the barriers. Others have painted them as community projects. Some simply attempt to keep the concrete planters from becoming concrete garbage bins. All over the city, residents and business owners take care of their own private spaces, and the public space that surrounds them. To complete Kostov’s call to duty: “To all of us belongs the credit for the beauty we fashion and the love, the excitement, the grace we allow it to contain.”
References:
Appleyard, Donald. (1981). Livable Streets. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Clarke, Ronald V. (2002). Closing Streets and Alleys to Reduce Crime: Should You Go Down This Road? U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. www.cops.usdoj.gov.
Halbfinger, David M. (1998, February 7) Bridgeport Removing Barriers that Slowed Crime but Marred Streets. New York Times, p. B1.
Newman, Oscar. (1972). Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design. New York: Macmillan.
Newman, Oscar. (1974). The Privatization of Streets in St. Louis: Its effect on crime and community stability. New York: Center for Residential Security Design.
Southworth, Michael, & Ben-Joseph, Eran. (1997). Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities. New York: McGraw Hill.
Yost, Zane. (1998, August 2). Bridgeports Barriers, What Went Wrong. The New York Times, p. C3.
