Julia Faisst

Ghetto Aesthetics: Performing Spatial

Inequality in The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Abstract: This essay investigates how residential apartheid in a racialized as well as class-
based ghetto is culturally performed in Chad Freidrichs’s 2011 documentary film The
Pruitt-Igoe Myth. The film functions as a transcultural ‘contact zone’ where poor black
inhabitants and white policy makers meet—yet debunks the myth only to a certain degree.

Cultural Performances of the Urban Ghetto in Contemporary

Television and Film and the Pruitt-Igoe Myth
The carefully staged and widely televised implosion of a public housing unit of the
Pruitt-Igoe complex in St. Louis on April 21, 1972, stands as one of the most iconic
as well as politicized cultural performances of spatial inequality and the demise
of the urban ghetto in the United States. Chad Freidrichs, writer, director, and
producer of the 2011 documentary film The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, makes this image
of willful destruction—a site- and time-specific performance that is corporeal and
completed by an audience—the central reference point of his equally performa-
tive film. The performative character of the film points to its effective nature as
an “active agenc[y] of change” (Turner 24). As a piece of cultural performance,
the film creates a metaphorical space, namely a “site of negotiation” that has a
particular outcome (Carlson 16). As Birgit M. Bauridl and Pia Wiegmink put it,
“cultural performances are not merely artistic productions but provide a space for
processes of cultural, social, and political affirmation, contestation, experimenta-
tion, and solution-seeking” (163). Yet whether the film constitutes a performative
intervention into the so-called Pruitt-Igoe myth (which will be explained shortly)
through repeating it, shall be up for debate. To be sure, through its repetitive char-
acter, cultural performance could act either as an affirmative agent, “uphold[ing]
societal arrangements,” or as a disruptive force, exhibiting “resistant potential” that
can “change people and societies” (McKenzie 30). Freidrichs’s film does fall in line
with Richard Schechner’s definition of performance as a reiterative continuum
of culture, politics, and economics: “Restored behavior is living behavior treated
as a film director treats a strip of film …. Performance means: never for the first
time. It means: for the second to the nth time. Performance is ‘twice-behaved
behavior’” (35–6). Freidrichs reenacts the historical (if already highly mediated)
266 Julia Faisst

event while performing a filmic resurrection—and possibly a rehabilitation—of

a deeply classed and racialized form of public housing.1
The performative space this unequal form of housing constitutes could be
regarded as a “contact zone,” a concept introduced by Mary Louise Pratt that has
become central to transnational American Studies. A “contact zone” demarcates
a social space where, in Pratt’s words, “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each
other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as coloni-
alism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world
today” (34). Indeed, while the space under consideration may be local, it points,
as Shelley Fisher Fishkin puts it, to global phenomena, such as forced dislocation
processes and the historical “spread of [human] capital” in the form of enslave-
ment (24). As such, the film as cultural performance turns the contact zone of the
poor black inhabitants and white policy makers into a social event where different
cultures encounter each other. In this transcultural “‘borderzone’ in which differ-
ent cultures meet and negotiate—violently or otherwise—their ‘neighborhood,’”
inequitable power relations are played out in the form of segregated housing
and related forms of spatial inequality that mark the actual neighborhood of the
Pruitt-Igoe (Rowe 12).
But let us, first, return to the historical performance of destruction. The actual
demolition of the massive postwar public housing project itself, completed not
even two decades earlier, had already been accompanied by an element constitu-
tive of performance: the presence of an audience. A first tensely anticipatory and
then cheering crowd is compared by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to the spectators
at a sports event: “The hush, like that of a football crowd awaiting the outcome of
a crucial place kick in the last seconds of a bowl game, was ended by sharp explo-
sions …. As the reinforced steel and concrete buildings crumbled into a rubble
a spontaneous shout arose from the spectators” (Leonard). Initially considered
an experiment, the dynamite demolition quickly gave way to the destruction of
entire blocks—and the reiterative performance history of what came to be called
the Pruitt-Igoe myth ensued. According to this myth, the rational and orderly
architecture of the fabled yet notorious Pruitt-Igoe project was supposed, in ac-
cordance with modernist urban design principles, to create more livable condi-
tions for the urban poor. By replacing the downtown “ramshackle houses jammed

1 Gwendolyn Wright’s chapter “Public Housing for the Worthy Poor,” in her classic
Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America, offers the most succinct
summary of the social history of urban public housing as a means to alleviate poverty
in the United States (220–39).
 Ghetto Aesthetics 267

with people—and rats” (Bailey qtd. in S.), and by designing social ills such as
crime and violence out of existence, its aim was to change poor people for the
better, supposedly improving their characters by changing their living condi-
tions. As the Housing Act of 1949 stated, the projects meant to pull people out
of the neighborhood slums and poverty, creating a modernist break with the
crumbling past.
Besides The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, one of the most prominent recent examples for
the cultural performance of class matters in regard to urban development can
be found in the quality television series The Wire, HBO’s take on the decline of
Baltimore public housing. In fact, the most iconic image of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
is woven into the very fabric of The Wire: it is no accident that Season Three kicks
off with the (if computer-graphically rendered) implosion of another dilapidated
modernist housing project, Franklin Terrace (figs. 1–2).

Fig. 1: Implosion of the Franklin Terrace housing project. Screenshot from The Wire
(Season Three, Episode One).
268 Julia Faisst

Fig. 2: Iconic photograph of the second demolition of a building of the Pruitt-Igoe

complex. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Policy
Development and Research, published April 1996. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/File:Pruitt-Igoe-collapses.jpg>.

As with many housing projects, the serial repetition of identical apartments found
in The Wire had originally been conceived of as a marker of equality; connect-
ing the various units through open galleries and skip-stop elevators was meant
to create localized forms of neighborhoods-within-neighborhoods. All these
architectural features were to foster close interactions between neighbors, and
thus contribute to the equality and democracy modernist architecture aimed for.
The so-called Pit of The Wire’s low-rises and its high-rise Tower take their cue
from actual Baltimore projects that had been, just like the modernist Pruitt-Igoe,
demolished in the past, including the McCollough Homes, the Poe Homes, and
Lexington Terrace. But while the Pit had once promised more democratic living
conditions, the grand design had turned into an abject space to be destroyed.
Out of its ashes—or in its debris—arose works of art such as The Wire and The
Pruitt-Igoe Myth.
 Ghetto Aesthetics 269

The central housing project of The Wire, Franklin Terrace, is introduced in

Season One, as the major location of the drug dealing operations run by the
Barksdale family. Yet it is in Season Three when housing and urban redevelop-
ment matters begin to not only serve to illustrate the violence involved in fights
over the territorial distribution of illegal income opportunities, but give way to an
extended discussion of the city’s corrupt political scene. As the detectives remark
in Episode Four about Russell ‘Stringer’ Bell, second-in-command of drug baron
Avon Barksdale, who whitewashes his criminal activities through investments in
housing projects, “worse than a drug dealer … [Stringer’s] a developer.” As it stands,
urban developers are the new drug dealers, or, more to the point, drug dealers now
opt to become urban developers. In The Wire, development means “the appropria-
tion and refinement of urban neighborhoods for speculative, privatized housing
for a new elite, rather than the broad enfranchisement of populations through
civil rights campaigns” (Kennedy and Shapiro 151)—whereby the criminalization
of the urban poor goes hand in hand with the criminal activities of characters
such as Barksdale controlling the housing situation of the urban poor as a means
to launder drug money.
Given the series’ story arcs that surpass the episodic, critic Peter Clandfield
considers it as particularly well suited to show the city as a “collateral victim
of indifference, unenlightened self-interest, and corruption among politicians,
developers, and other powerfully-placed people,” as it links “the concrete local
conditions of the city to the (apparently) more abstract economic, political, and
ideological forces shaping its spaces and their uses” (38). On a more hopeful note,
however, Clandfield further suggests that the neglected city can be rehabilitated,
“along with, by implication, many of its drug- and poverty-damaged citizens” (43).
One way in which The Wire implements chances for the redemption of urban
ghetto homes—or at least its inhabitants—is by zooming in on the situation on
the ground. Equally witnessed by a large crowd of bystanders, the demolition of
Franklin Terrace is performed similarly to that of the Pruitt-Igoe. However, the
visual and narrative focus lies on three of the project’s (soon-about-to-be-former)
inhabitants, rather than on the implosion of an already abandoned and utterly
impersonal space. By showing a group of young male inhabitants and their discus-
sion of ghetto life from up-close, the episode pinpoints the personal ramifications
the ghetto and its destruction has had and will have on its inhabitants:
‘I don’t know, man. I mean, I’m kind of sad. Them Towers be home to me.’ ‘You gonna
cry over a housing project now? Man, they should have blew the motherfuckers up a long
time ago you ask me.’ ‘Man, it ain’t all been bad. I mean, I done seen some shit happen
up in them Towers that still make me smile, yo.’ … ‘Y’all talking about steel and concrete,
man. Steel and fucking concrete.’ ‘Man, I’m talking about people, memories and shit.’
270 Julia Faisst

‘That ain’t the same. Look, they gonna tear this building down. They gonna build some
new shit. But people? They don’t give a fuck about people.’ … ‘Man, my whole life been
around them Towers, you know? I mean, I feel … Shit, I feel like I don’t got no home no
more.’ (Season Three, Episode Four)

Home, for the inhabitants-to-be, is a memory made of and performed in a particular

space. Losing this home then means not only losing one’s dwelling, but also one’s
memories (even if, as the men themselves admit, of successful drug trading as well).
When the trigger is finally pulled and the projects go up in smoke and ash, cheered
on by the surrounding crowd of bystanders, the young men stand silent, looking on
in disbelief and disappointment. Increasingly, however, everyone near the building
is engulfed in a billowing cloud of dust, pushing through the streets and into eyes,
taking views and breaths away, and causing people to duck and cover their faces
for protection. Home—and, by extension, the memories associated with it—have
become a liability in this urban wasteland. Deprived of their dwellings and exposed
to forces endangering health and safety, the physical, mental, and emotional evic-
tion of those on the classed margins is complete. Still, overshadowing the cheerfully
observed destruction, the focus on the personal stories surrounding the loss of home
calls into question the political and economic motivations behind the demolition.
That way, The Wire offers its own take on debunking the Pruitt-Igoe myth of blaming
the deterioration and demolition of a public housing project on the very inhabitants
who fondly call this project their home.
The first to debunk the Pruitt-Igoe myth was, in fact, a 1991 essay by Katharine
G. Bristol, which in turn became the critical blueprint for The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.
In what follows, I propose a critical reading of this performative film, taking
into account that such a virulent theme as the spatialization of inequality has at
this point arrived on the scene not only of documentary film, but also the most
popular of all media genres in the United States, namely quality television. In
other words, in order to fully understand the significance of the scenic blow-up
of a housing project in one of the most successful crime series of the twenty-first
century, The Wire, the discussion of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth should be well suited to
get at the bottom of the various aspects of myth making which surround so many
of the contemporary urban landscapes determined by class and race. As just
mentioned, Freidrichs’s documentary film sets out to debunk the long-standing
Pruitt-Igoe myth in the form of a visualized performance, following on Bristol’s
heels. As outlined in the opening of this essay, myth making—which could be
considered a form of cultural performance as well—depends on processes of
repetition of certain historical events and accounts thereof. In other words, the
myth only comes into being, and is then being perpetuated, through repetition.
 Ghetto Aesthetics 271

As the product of such repetition, the myth, then, is performative. Accordingly,

its various cultural performances inhere the potential to affirm, resist, or even
subvert earlier versions of this very myth. Somewhat surprisingly, however, The
Pruitt-Igoe-Myth does not explicitly pay tribute to Bristol’s theoretical frame-
work of myth making; it never even traces the particular naming of the myth
she identified. Still, this does not mean that The Pruitt-Igoe Myth does not call
upon this kind of myth as other examples of cultural performances expose and
tackle it—and can thus act as performative intervention into this myth. In that
vein, the film aligns itself both with television series and a small but significant
number of contemporary films (both documentary and narrative) which are set
in urban ghettos, as I will show a bit later. Seen together, they stand as cultural
performances bent on pointing to racial if not outright classed social ills and to
the structural distinctions of their (mostly black) and poor inhabitants vis-à-vis
non-ghetto residents. Importantly, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, rather than blaming
the decline on its victims, takes class differences and (di)visions as its subject. It
explicitly draws, as Bristol would have it, the “connection between social indif-
ference to the poverty of inner city blacks and the decline of Pruitt-Igoe”—and
thereby enacts a view that, for several decades, had been neglected: namely, that
the Pruitt-Igoe should be considered as “a product of institutionalized economic
and racial oppression” (Bristol 167–8). Considered this way, the film, both as
Marvin Carlson’s site of negotiation and Victor Turner’s active agency of change,
does play out the subversive potential of reiterative performance and acts as the
kind of disruptive force its audience needs to reckon with.
To be sure, before the Pruitt-Igoe turned into a myth, that is, before its rapid
deterioration and subsequent implosion within a mere eighteen years of the com-
pletion of its construction in 1954, the complex had been deemed a revolution in
modernist architecture. Not incidentally, architecture theorist Charles Jencks drew
on the powerful imagery of willed destruction not only on part of the engineers
staging the photogenic implosion, but also on part of its supposedly negligent
African American inhabitants, if in a polemic manner:
Modern Architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 pm (or therea-
bouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were
given the final coup de grace by dynamite. Previously, it had been vandalized, mutilated
and defaced by its black inhabitants, and although millions of dollars were pumped back,
trying to keep it alive (fixing the broken elevators, repairing smashed windows, repaint-
ing), it was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom. (23)

On the surface, the Pruitt-Igoe, designed by Japanese American architect Minoru

Yamasaki, whose World Trade Center Towers would see willful destruction later
272 Julia Faisst

on as well, morphed into the prime image of the failure of modernist architecture.
More importantly, however, it became the major symbol for all the ills surround-
ing public housing projects in the United States. It was thus the idea of race- and
class-based public housing—along with the plight of its almost exclusively African
American inhabitants—that was primarily blown up in the “willful ruination” of
the Pruitt-Igoe (Freidrichs, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, Director’s Commentary).2
The performance of the decline of urban living space in The Wire is a direct
successor to architectural historians Colin Rowe’s and Fred Koetter’s assertion (in
their 1978 Collage City) of the end of the seemingly inadequate modern city (or,
more to the point, its supposedly inadequate inhabitants) via doomed construc-
tions such as the Pruitt-Igoe:
[I]t is a city which has shrunk to very little—to the impoverished banalities of public
housing which stand around like the undernourished symbols of a new world which
refused to be born …. [T]he city of modern architecture, both as a psychological con-
struct and as physical model, had been rendered tragically ridiculous the city of Ludwig
Hilberseimer and Le Corbusier …, the former city of deliverance is every day found
increasingly inadequate. (5–6)

Not entirely surprisingly, Rowe and Koetter reserve the term ‘impoverishment’
to describe the allegedly inevitable outcome of modernist public housing gone
awry, rather than attribute it to the systemic class inequalities its inhabitants were
forced to undergo, especially given the lack of adequate living conditions (5–6).3
The first critic to recognize and point out that Jencks, Rowe, and Koetter,
amongst other historians of architecture, do nonetheless describe “the project as
Modernist not only in formal terms, but in political and social terms as well, as
reflecting an agenda for social engineering,” was, again, Bristol (169). Her essay
“The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” builds on sociologist Lee Rainwater’s 1970 participant
observer study, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum. While that
book does not aim to address the larger institutional and ideological forces behind
Pruitt-Igoe, it bases its findings on the “intimate personal life in a particular ghetto

2 In the original design of 1951, the Pruitt-Igoe was envisioned as a segregated housing
project, with the ‘Pruitt Homes’ (named after Wendell Pruitt, an African American
fighter pilot in World War Two) housing the black population and the ‘Igoe Apart-
ments’ (named after William L. Igoe, a white U.S. Congressman) as its white coun-
terpart. However, when the Supreme Court ended segregation and a Missouri court
desegregated public housing in 1956, the Pruitt-Igoe quickly devolved into an enclave
of black, impoverished housing.
3 It is somewhat curious that the caption of the iconic photograph of destruction next
to the text misspells the housing project as “Pruit-Igoe” (Rowe and Koetter 6).
 Ghetto Aesthetics 273

setting” of some 10,000 residents. By drawing “on the large body of literature on
the structural position of Negroes in American society as background for its anal-
ysis of Pruitt-Igoe private life,” it, remarkably, maps the residents’ increasingly poor
living conditions onto both class-based and racial discrimination (Rainwater 1–2).
As Bristol explains, budget constraints imposed by the Public Housing Admin-
istration had a severe impact on the final design: “In addition to the elimination
of amenities, such as children’s play areas, landscaping, and ground-floor bath-
rooms, the cost cutting targeted points of contact between the tenants and the
living units” (165). To detract from the architectural ills, the Pruitt-Igoe’s rapid
deterioration and ultimate demolition got blamed primarily on the perceived be-
havioral shortcomings of these very people, mostly black migrants (an estimated
10,000 residents, which made up 98% of the complex), who had been moved from
overcrowded St. Louis slums to the initially shiny 57-acre development site with
its 33 high-rises of 11 stories each—rather than on the issue of poverty itself. That
way, it fed into the so-called culture of poverty thesis which (as it was discussed
by early scholars of culture and poverty such as Oscar Lewis and Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, when the Pruitt-Igoe still stood tall) held the very poor responsible
for their own underprivileged states of living.4
Significantly, contemporary documentaries such as The Pruitt-Igoe Myth and
television series such as The Wire have acknowledged class matters as an inher-
ent part of ghettoization for the past couple decades. In performing the ghetto
and exploring oppression on the street level, they stand in the tradition of hybrid
photographic-textual collections such as Jacob Holdt’s American Pictures (1977),
the result of the Danish photographer’s five years’ travel through the United States
while he lived with members of the lower classes, as well as Camilo José Vergara’s
The New American Ghetto (1991), in which the sociologist and photojournalist
documents the decay of urban environments in places including Chicago, the
South Bronx, and Detroit. They range from Spike Lee’s 1995 crime drama Clockers
(based on the Richard Price novel of the same name), to Dennis Hopper’s police
procedural crime film Colors (1988) on gang life and violence in Los Angeles, to
The Wire (2002–2008), and to the 2009 Harlem drama film Precious (based on
the novel Push by Sapphire).

4 In fact, the culture of poverty theory witnessed a resurgence in the twenty-first century.
A new generation of culture scholars now “typically rejects the idea that whether people
are poor can be explained by their values. It is often reluctant to divide explanations
into ‘structural’ and ‘cultural,’ because of the increasingly questionable utility of this
old distinction” (Small, Harding, and Lamont 8).
274 Julia Faisst

All these televised and filmic performances honing in on violence, decay, depriva-
tion, and poverty in black ghetto culture acknowledge that the structural separation
of spatial apartheid does not only come in the form of the racialized ghetto but in
that of class-based segregation as well. As Liam Kennedy points out, “‘ghettocentric’”
films of the ‘new black wave’ emerging in the 1990s in particular (including Boyz
n the Hood, Straight Out of Brooklyn, New Jack City, and Juice) not only posed “a
challenge to the dominant Hollywood system of racial representation” but, equally,
formed the focal point of critical debate “for issues of gender, class and national-
ism within black popular culture” (116). Independent urban documentaries that
perform the aestheticization of the ghetto along racial and class lines may, to date,
be rather scarce, and tend to focus on racial and social uplift on the individual level
rather than structural, that is, economic, political, even architectural, underpinnings
of race and class distinctions. Nonetheless, like The Wire and The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,
a number of documentaries do shed light on the ideological groundings. They do
so by employing the intimate and rather emotional lens of its protagonist-residents’
stories and living conditions. More often than not, these ‘Hood films’ are produced,
directed, and starred in by insiders who originate from within the ghetto commu-
nity. Clifford Jordan’s Why We Bang (2006), for instance, takes into view the history
of the Bloods and Crips gangs in South Los Angeles through interviews with current
and former gang members, while Hoop Dreams (1994) and The Interrupters (2011),
both by Steve James, document the story of, respectively, two boys embarking upon
a baseball career when getting recruited by a white high school a far commute
away from the Chicago ghetto they live in and the so-called ‘Interruptors,’ a group
of former gang members in inner-city Chicago who seek to end ghetto violence
by walking the streets and preventing fights on behalf of the organization Cease-
Fire. Similarly, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth attempts to capture an insider view—through
camera close-ups, the use of historical family and other community photography,
interspersed commentary by scholars including sociologist and civil rights activist
Joyce Ladner (who studied the lives of women at the Pruitt-Igoe when a graduate
student at Washington University) and architecture and urban planning professor
Robert Fishman, as well as extensive interviews with a selected number of former
residents of the housing complex.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: Intimate Re-Scalings of Systemic

Classism and Racism
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth accomplishes to make everyday goings-on and communal
pleasures such as meetings in the airy hallways, playing on the grounds, or on-site
dance parties come to life, mainly through the frequent insertion of black-and-white
 Ghetto Aesthetics 275

as well as color photographs. More often than not, these still images are put in mo-
tion and thus gain a quality that is more performatic, i.e. reminiscent of performance
and its constitutive elements such as motion, spatial and temporal specificity, and
corporeality. They are shown in rather rapid sequences, which buttresses the impres-
sion of abundant quality of living and joyful celebrations of the inhabitants’ lives in
the projects. The archival photographs are one way to frame the buildings in more
intimate ways, presenting the lives they enable in more humanizing terms. Like the
socio-spatial living conditions they depict, they function like Caroline Knowles’s
“active archive space,” namely, as active agents: “Space is an active archive of the
social processes and social relationship composing racial orders. Active because it
is not just a monument, accumulated through a racial past and present … it is active
in the sense that it interacts with people and their activities as an ongoing set of pos-
sibilities in which race is fabricated” (80). This, once more, is reminiscent of Turner’s
definition of cultural performances. When describing them as agencies of change,
he makes use of the metaphor of the eye “by which culture sees itself ”—drawing
“the analogy … not with a mirror but rather with a reflexive verb ‘whose subject
and direct object refer to the same person and thing’” (24). In The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,
the medium of photography acts as this reflexive eye. As a result, the film’s turn
to photography—whereby it straddles the line between still and moving photo-
graphs—pierces through that most familiar narrative of the Pruitt-Igoe, namely the
myth of its downfall. Re-scaling the projects from their overwhelmingly large size
and forceful control to a more human scale brings about a mental shift on part of
the audience that acts as a performative agent of change. Despite their rather rapid
succession, the photographic series lend themselves to capture a much wider range
of moments than that of the overpowering implosion. By way of frequent repeti-
tion, they invite us to dwell on them as performative acts and re-envision the lives
of the inhabitants as they were actually still occupying a more habitable and hence
full-fledged version of the housing complex.
That said, the film tends to fall prey to the more familiar archive in certain
regards, including the photogenic iconicity of the projects’ destruction. Over
and again, for example, footage of the implosion is shown throughout the docu-
mentary, primarily in the form of the collapse that is repeated multiple times
with a voice-over stating, “it’s a powerful story, with a tragic end.” This invokes
a discourse of inevitable tragedy that does not do much justice to capturing the
actual causes for this decline. In contrast to The Wire, which frames its images
of destruction in more explicit personalized ways, the film exposes a tendency
to participate in the performative re-enactment of the Pruitt-Igoe myth the di-
rector expressly had set out to tackle head-on. Rather than as a disruptive force,
276 Julia Faisst

the film here acts more as an affirmative agent which, as Jon McKenzie puts it,
upholds societal arrangements (30). Similarly, a myriad of wide-angle shots of
the inhuman size and scale of the ghetto, juxtaposed with images of kids van-
dalizing cars and dilapidated interiors filled with filth and trash, do not mingle
easily with the attempts at re-scaling and thus humanizing the inhabitants’ liveli-
hoods as described earlier (fig. 3). Nevertheless, resistant potential can be found,
for instance, in an image of kids going down a slide, faces turned against the
background of the imposing buildings. This image already contains the idea of
the ensuing downward mobility of its as of yet young and innocent residents.

Fig. 3: Wide angle shot of the projects. Screenshot from The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.

As a consequence, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth does performatively re-envision the

projects as an ongoing project, in much the same way as Architectural Forum
had described it at the time of construction, that is as “vertical neighborhoods
for poor people in a city which up to now has lived 90% in single houses ….
[T]he new plan saves not only people, but money” (mayor Joseph M. Darst qtd. in
“Slum Surgery in St. Louis” 129). Except the film shows the vertical idea of upward
mobility (as evidenced in what one resident calls her “poor man’s penthouse,” as
will be discussed later), as decidedly pointing in a downward direction.
 Ghetto Aesthetics 277

Colonizing the City vs. Performing the Projects from Within

Indeed, the new ghetto consisting of vertical neighborhoods functioned much
like the old one in terms of race-related poverty and joblessness. In John Cater’s
and Trevor Jones’s words, it was a “‘Third World within,’ a space existing in the
same economic relationship to the surrounding white city as does the colony to
the metropolis” (148). On the one hand, this “city within a city”5 (Venkatesh 8)
is based on the premise of separation: poor blacks in the ghetto are thoroughly
segregated from the white middle class in the more affluent suburbs constructed
in great numbers around the same time. On the other hand, the “internal colo-
ny” (Bennett 170) is predicated on the intimate ties between the financialization
of these suburbs (and the conglomeration of highways leading to it with great
speed) and the public policy planning that goes into the erection of housing
developments in major U.S. metropolises, including the Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis,
the Robert Taylor and Cabrini-Green Homes in Chicago, and the Bronx River
Houses in New York. In short, ghetto and suburb are as socio-economically
interdependent as are colony and metropolis. Tellingly, Elizabeth Birmingham,
a scholar who gives thorough thought to the structural racism implemented
into the discreet infrastructures of the Pruitt-Igoe from its earliest days on,
also turns to the language of colonization, forced (slum) removal, and even
imprisonment, when speaking about the experiences of home on part of the
residents themselves. According to Birmingham, the buildings, as an “urban
reservation,” managed to both contain and segregate its residents in wasteland
tracts, ultimately rendering these residents “‘home’ less, because the place they
live cannot be a home” (293). Instead, the reservation-like setting functioned as
a form of “actual prison … complete with bars on windows and doors, chain link
fences, guards, and enforced segregation from the larger community” (304).6

5 As Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh points out, one of the first uses of the term appeared in
reference to Chicago’s black ghetto in St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s ethnography,
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (290n9).
6 As one of the tenants puts it in Rainwater’s study: “This is a city within a city …. Yes,
the environment here is very bad. If a person could get on the outside I’m sure that he
wouldn’t be here. If I could get on the outside and still get the conveniences that I have
here I wouldn’t be here either. By the conveniences I mean water, gas, and electric all
being included in one bill” (18). One of the most sustained discussions of racialized
residential segregation, pinpointing particular social uses of space, and especially the
poverty that feeds into it, as major factors of racism, can be found in Douglas S. Massey
and Nancy A. Denton’s excellent study on the construction and continued persistence
278 Julia Faisst

Thanks to its disconnection from sidewalks, shops, and public buildings, it kept
its inhabitants on the ‘inside’ they clambered to get out of.
As many of its counterparts, the Pruitt-Igoe did not offer its inhabitants a
chance to succeed on this disadvantaged ‘inside’ within the perimeter of St. Louis
proper. Maintenance depended on scarce rent money; families broke apart when
male heads-of-household lost their jobs and had to move out (under the man-
in-the-house rule, children lost welfare benefits if an able-bodied male lived in
the home); televisions and telephones were banned from the premises; build-
ings turned into prisons devoid of human caring—featuring drugs, prostitution,
and shootings. Residents fell prey to the forces of white flight: the large-scale
migration of whites from mixed-race urban areas to more racially homogenized
suburban regions caused steep declines in both population and work in the
inner city. Poor maintenance and the withholding of human interconnections
exacerbated the residents’ struggles. Subsequently, the violent crime and van-
dalism must be understood as a response to class and racial discrimination. In
other words, systemic classism and racism were the cause, aim, and outcome of
the Pruitt-Igoe’s degeneration, brought about to a large degree through policies
of denial implemented by the Housing Authority—which is, notably, the main
and important argument the film seeks to pursue. The Pruitt-Igoe stands as a
perfect example for the kind of residential segregation that, in Thomas J. Sugrue’s
words, was “the most visible and intractable manifestation of racial inequality
in the postwar city” (8).
Still, while The Economist states that “abstract policy decisions and large-scale
economic changes are difficult to render compelling, no matter the medium, but
this documentary succeeds in finding the drama,” whether or not the film actually
finds its drama in the visualizations of the policies remains up for debate. What
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth does is to powerfully juxtapose various media and their
voices, as promotional reels in “cheerful primary colors” (S.), advertising materi-
als, and interviews with former inhabitants are contrasted with photographs of
decline and footage of urban wastelands grown since, keeping the voice-over of
the narrator, who fills the audience in on the historical background, to a mini-
mum (fig. 4).

of the black ghetto in the first half of the twentieth century, American Apartheid: Seg-
regation and the Making of the Underclass (1993).
 Ghetto Aesthetics 279

Fig. 4: Interview with former resident Jacquelyn Williams. Screenshot from The Pruitt-
Igoe Myth.

The first-hand reports by three female and two male former residents are shot
against a white wall, taking them out of the historical context the film otherwise
aims to recreate and into a space which is equally performatic and performative.
Set on a blank stage, these reports act as a cultural contestation of the Pruitt-Igoe
myth. In its blankness, the space allows for a renewal of the residents’ life stories.
While the affection for their home is rendered comprehensible in The Wire as it is
enacted on the very site of their soon-to-be-former home, inhabitants here are re-
moved from their actual former habitats. As a consequence, the story the residents
tell can be quite different from the policy story of neglect: for it is one of affection
as well. The selection of this small group of people renders the perspective on the
Pruitt-Igoe largely positive. That said, what does get lost in the process is a sense
of representativeness of voices telling a story that may be both less coherent and
more complex than that of warm attachment. The small sample of voices, in ad-
dition, results in some gender stereotyping: the female interviewees in particular
insist on the joys of electricity, functional furniture, and modern appliances, and
point out the “warm sense of community”—“I am not alone, I am not afraid,” says
one, speaking to a strong sense of safety and security). Another recalls the views
from her “poor man’s penthouse,” alluding to the familiar metaphor of vertical
uplift—as well as a promised land: it was “like an oasis in the desert—all that
newness.” For these female former residents interviewed, at least, modernism did
not function in “alienating” ways (Moore).
280 Julia Faisst

As stirring as the stories are, what the film falls short of is its own premise,
namely to visualize institutionalized policies of racism and thereby fully resist the
lure of the myth: the voices of city officials, administrators, legislators, and police
officers are absent from the film. The documentary lifts the Pruitt-Igoe narrative
onto a personal level, both by making the inhabitants relive their experiences and
by building an ever-increasing emotional momentum. This puts quite the burden
upon the interviewees’ shoulders: it is as if they were asked to talk their way out
of the argument that they were the kind of depraved people responsible for the
demise—an argument that is problematic to start with. When one interviewee
breaks into tears, stating that the Pruitt-Igoe was “a good thing … it was our
home” (my emphasis), the viewer is confronted not only with a subjective story
of a human being capable of emotions, but also a sentimentalized version of the
residents’ plight. Somewhat paradoxically, by handing over a sense of agency to
the residents and trying to regain human scale in the project(s), the film falls into
the trap of romanticizing people’s poor living conditions and thereby the “‘poverty
pride’ school of reporting” that, as Sieglinde Lemke puts it (drawing on Katherine
Boo) “pit[ies] the poor and blame[s] the government” while viewing those poor
as “innocent, deprived, suffering, and lacking in volition” (101).7
What is more, the documentary neglects to fully address the modernist aesthet-
ics of the buildings responsible for the calamities (such as the skip-stop elevators
that kept breaking down or the long, unwieldy internal galleries, which were sup-
posed to function as vertical hallways to foster a communal spirit yet facilitated
criminal acts). While the amenities of the apartments are praised by the newly
moved-in (if only shown by way of archival photographs), the poor quality of the
building materials, imposed by the Housing Authority of St. Louis due to financial
constraints in the early days of construction, is left out of the picture, at least in the
interviews. In a way, the stories of the former residents wind up being too personal

7 As Lemke points out, “poverty pride” is one of the two modes of reporting on poverty
which journalist Katherine Boo distinguishes between (the other being “poverty
porn,” which tends to focus on the reporter’s ‘heroic’ act of temporarily becoming
part of the underclass and sensationalizing poverty): “In the sentimental school of
poverty reporting,” Boo writes, “poor people are rendered innocent, without voli-
tion—ciphers subjected to horror upon horror in a monochromatically miserable
place …. For writers who care deeply about … ‘the plight of the poor,’ this insist-
ence on virtue is strategic of course. But it contradicts something most of us know
and accept in our personal lives: that suffering doesn’t always, or even usually, build
character. So why do we expect people with fewer resources and more social isolation
to find it improving?” (52).
 Ghetto Aesthetics 281

and small in scale in order to address the wide-reaching and impersonal-seeming

policy decisions that were mostly responsible for the demise.

Performing the Myth: Narrating, Showing, Debunking

Admittedly, the myth is hard to debunk through performative means, especially
given the lack of archival footage that would depict the everyday lives of the
residents, and especially the sense of community they speak of. At the time this
footage (including short political and educational films) was shot, there was more
interest in the aberrant than the normal. Consequently, the limits arising from
the non-availability of visual material pose an enormous challenge to the visual
performance of regular life at the projects. The documentary’s way out of this
dilemma is to juxtapose the ‘truth’ of the residents’ experience with the ‘truth’ of
the images of decline. Yet again, it does not help the film’s cause that the footage of
ultimate collapse features so prominently throughout the movie, as do countless
wide-angle shots of the inhuman scaling of the ghetto or the trashed interiors.
In fact, when the film follows up a Housing Authority representative calling the
inhabitants “trash people” with precisely those people cleaning up, the discredit-
ing metaphor of human disposables is beat by unfortunate literalism—topped
by reels depicting even more blatant racism in the form of white suburbanites
engaging in spiteful trash talk about the inhabitants of the Pruitt-Igoe. Similarly,
cutting a story of a resident enjoying Christmas lights against the background of
lit lots that are now emptied out undermines rather than proves the otherwise
endearing holiday story.
Despite its intentions, the film performatively affirms more than debunks the
Pruitt-Igoe myth, which becomes most obvious at the end of the film, as well as in
the way it is framed. To end the documentary with the statement of one resident,
“When I feel bad, I don’t intend to, I think of Pruitt-Igoe,” equates the failure of
the project with feelings of human degeneracy, when all is said and done. And
to frame the film with a drive alongside the site that has turned into a wasteland
today, an urban forest filled with debris, whereby one interviewee invokes an
imaginary dog threatening him, that the viewer then hears bark, implements pre-
cisely the fear-mongering that surrounded the Pruitt-Igoe and that the authorities
invoked in justifying its destruction. But how to find a way out of this dilemma,
that is, how to disrupt a myth that still needs to be performed—especially if this
performance is necessarily based upon a logic of repetition wherein a myth comes
into being only through repetition in the first place?
What the film does succeed in is in narrating the causes (via the voice-over)
and showing the effects of under-maintenance and poor housekeeping practices on
282 Julia Faisst

part of the Housing Authority of St. Louis as well as the national suburban policies
that resulted in a massive wave of white flight (and jobs) to the suburbs—which,
consequently, defined places such as the Pruitt-Igoe “by the strategies of ghetto
containment and inner city revitalization” (Bristol 170). Even while the projects
became technically de-segregated, the process of white flight resulted in a hyper-
segregation. Indeed, one could say that no other law contributed as much to racial
segregation as the housing laws that went into effect in the United States in 1949.8
Processes of home making, (sub)urbanization, and poverty entered an inevitable
and unfortunate alliance. As Mike Davis brings it to the point: “‘Overurbaniza-
tion’ … is driven by the reproduction of poverty, not by the supply of jobs” (16).
“Urban renewal” was quickly dubbed “Negro removal” (by no one less than James
Baldwin), and shaped the country for further segregation.9 Unsurprisingly, one

8 On how federal housing, taxation, and transportation policies “effectively reinforced

residential segregation [persisting] in America’s residential communities today”
through the financialization of the suburbanization of America on part of the federal
government from the 1930s through the 1960s, see Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M.
Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality, and esp.
chapter 1, “Race, Wealth, and Equality” (139). To similar ends, David M. P. Freund
examines the close alliance of federal homeownership, finance programs, and suburban
growth in metropolitan Detroit in his Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial
Politics in Suburban America, following Thomas J. Sugrue’s inquiry into the interac-
tion of race, residence, and urban policy after World War Two, also taking Detroit as a
key node in the history of persistent racialized poverty in his The Origins of the Urban
Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Kevin Fox Gotham offers insight into
the racialization of (sub)urban space through the Federal Housing Administration
and the real estate industry in metropolitan Kansas City from the turn of the twentieth
century to the present in Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City
Experience, 1900–2000. For a legal take on housing segregation and economic inequal-
ity as a Civil Rights issue, focusing on the effect of the 1962 Housing Discrimination
hearings in Washington, D.C., on the current foreclosure crisis, see Brian Gilmore’s
“Chances Are: Lessons from the 1962 United States Civil Rights Commission Housing
Discrimination Hearings in Washington D.C. for the Current Foreclosure Crisis.”
9 In a 1963 interview with psychology professor Kenneth B. Clark, following his, Martin
Luther King’s, and Malcolm X’s meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy on
the strategy of integration, novelist James Baldwin remarked: “They were tearing down
[this boy’s] house, because San Francisco is engaging—as most Northern cities now
are engaged—in something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes
out. It means Negro removal, that is what it means. The federal government is an
accomplice to this fact” (Clark 42). For a more optimistic take on more recent shifts
towards racial integration through “direct and indirect local strategies,” creating more
stable multiethnic and multiracial neighborhoods in places including Chicago, Queens,
 Ghetto Aesthetics 283

resident interviewed reads the fights frequently ensuing in the Pruitt-Igoe as at-
tempts to mark one’s territory in spatialized terms: “Nobody wanted to be at the
bottom”—everybody tried to be on top and regain a sense of control that was
systemically taken away from them.
As the film points out, the use of media played a significant role in actively
countering this desire to keep an upright position. As mentioned earlier, televi-
sions and telephones were banned from the premises—a form of control that
isolated inhabitants from their non-immediate surroundings, and effectively cut
them off from the history taking place outside (such as, to name only the most
pertinent one, the Civil Rights Movement). It literally confined them to the logic of
the ghetto. The documentary shows this problematic media history and counters
it by bringing together multifold visual material. It thus attempts to correct the
conundrum of repetition that merely affirms the myth on a formal level, trying to
escape the prison environment the inhabitants attest to, an environment devoid
of humanity and caring that, in turn, became the cause of vandalism.
Eventually, years of neglect would lead to the physical collapse of the Pruitt-
Igoe complex. Empty buildings housed an empire of drugs that was used by the
authorities to stigmatize its residents, as if the Pruitt-Igoe had exploded first from
the inside, before it was imploded from the outside. Conveniently, public hous-
ing, long considered un-American and socialist because it was not private and
free market and because profit could only be gained from the construction of the
buildings, was considered failed. As Joseph Heathcott reminds us,
[w]hile the project clearly failed by any reasonable measure of performance, the modern-
ist high-rise was never inherently problematic …; nor is public housing programmed or
destined to fail …. The notion that projects lack defensible space and, therefore, provide
breeding grounds for crime does not explain high crime rates in older, low-rise neighbor-
hoods …. The problems and challenges of Black families in public housing have always
had much more to do with racism, oppression, poverty, and welfare policies than with
housing form. (450)10

The documentary undertakes the much-needed attempt to “learn from the

failures” of public housing, embedded in a specifically detrimental social and

and Oakland, see Michael T. Maly’s Beyond Segregation: Multiracial and Multiethnic
Neighborhoods in the United States (3).
10 In regard to the question whether public housing constitutes a ‘disaster’ in and of itself
and should therefore generally be torn down, David J. Madden helpfully adds: “Many
critics of ‘indefensible space’ or ‘high modernist’ utopianism don’t seem to realize that
when tenants organize, they almost always seek to improve, protect and expand public
housing rather than privatize or demolish it” (377).
284 Julia Faisst

economic context, and to do better. Yet it correctly states that housing “cannot
deal with the trouble of American cities alone,” a point Cedric Johnson buttresses
when he argues that The Pruitt-Igoe Myth “leaves us with the conclusion that af-
fordable housing itself is not enough, but that contemporary urban struggles must
be guided by even deeper commitments to social democracy and redistributive
politics” (222). Within the performative space of the documentary, one inhabitant
is right on when he calls the decline of the city of Pruitt-Igoe a “slow-motion Kat-
rina,” an equally appalling outcome of failed public policies.11 Both New Orleans
and St. Louis left a great number of their (mostly black) inhabitants homeless.
The documentary closes with the aforementioned female former resident stat-
ing: “It was our home. It was a good thing.” In her view, it was good simply by its
virtue of offering a supposed haven of safety and security. The demolishment of
this home meant, to her and many others, human dispossession in the form of
homelessness. So the question remains: What, besides the inhabitants’ bittersweet
memories, is left after the politics of destruction, as well as the images and texts
that performatively veer (and maybe necessarily so) towards the racist and classist
tendencies of the historical circumstances they reiterate? What can replace the
urban wastelands caused by racial and social oppression—the spaces of inequality
which themselves are sites of lack and poverty and that all too frequently become
merely aestheticized today?
The Pruitt-Igoe myth will continue to cling to not only the Pruitt-Igoe but to
many other housing projects such as The Wire’s (semi-)fictional Franklin Ter-
race which already are or are about to be demolished, even after the advent of
the documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth—precisely because the housing complex
is “a neoliberal fable used to justify dynamiting other social housing develop-
ments across the world” (Madden 380). Mitigating the Pruitt-Igoe myth through
visual performances, and letting housing policies and urban poverty related to its
construction and demise come into view more fully, would quite possibly mean
to seriously rethink not only the meaning of failure in relation to one particular
housing complex, but also to many other forms of spatialized inequality—in the
form of granted and denied homes—in the midst of current movements ranging
from planned rebuildings of public housing in the style of the new urbanism to

11 What Katrina and, by implication, public policies destroyed in one big sweep, the
Housing Authority of St. Louis began to demolish from the very inception of the
Pruitt-Igoe plans, which causes architect William G. Ramroth, Jr., to argue that, while
other catastrophes began once the actual process of destruction started, “[i]ts disaster
scenario plays in reverse: Its destruction marked the end of the disaster” (163).
 Ghetto Aesthetics 285

other forms of less discriminatory and more integrated projects of urban revi-
talizations.
The Pruitt-Igoe Now ideas competition, co-launched by the director of the
St. Louis-based Preservation Research Office, Michael R. Allen, and Nora Wendl,
laid out in detail in Wendl’s article “Pruitt-Igoe, Now,” could be considered a first
step towards this goal. As yet another alternative space of cultural performance,
the competition’s entries suggest future development of the as of now largely
overgrown and dormant site as a “contemporary vision of utopia,” regarding ar-
chitecture as secondary to various “systems of remediation and production—from
agriculture and horticulture to light industry,” as well as to community-based
frameworks (Wendl 109). Quite possibly, then, rather than denying the Pruitt-Igoe
the status of a highly mediatized myth (a “powerful symbol,” in Wendl’s nomen-
clature; 109), the performative value of this very status could begin to act as the
disruptive force McKenzie speaks of. While not taking away from the complexity
surrounding the genesis and development accompanying any myth, this would
be more prone to generating the kind of expanded discourse (via performative
images, texts, as well as urban planning) that would, as The Wire begins to do, actu-
ally debunk not only the politics but also the concrete aesthetics which encompass
allegedly failed forms of housing the poor in transcultural contact zones.

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