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From urban jungle to bucolic woods

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, July 22, 2011 - I've driven by or biked alongside the Pruitt-Igoe Homes site for years, that huge urban jungle on the western edge of downtown. Long ago, in the late 1960s, I visited the project on a couple of occasions while the buildings still stood, when people still lived there. I've never had the guts to go into the wilderness that is the Pruitt-Igoe site by myself, however.  I got a chance to go with a group the other day,  and I leapt at the invitation.

Just punching in that word, "wilderness," had a rather startling effect on me just now. Wilderness has metaphorical punch as well as literal description. Literal description comes easy. A site that once accommodated a population of as many as 15,000 people today is overgrown, wild and fairly ominous, at least from the outside. Wilderness as metaphor has to do with conditions that existed at Pruitt-Igoe in the late 1960s and early '70s, its most benighted latter days, a time of extraordinary degeneration and disassociation, when it became a spiritual, emotional and sociological wilderness, and eventually a synonym for the failure of public housing efforts in the United States.

What began after World War II as a well-intentioned effort to provide decent housing for the disadvantaged ended in an extraordinary swamp of human tragedy and pathology. Although there were exceptions by the time the eclipsed sun of social engineering set on Pruitt-Igoe almost 40 years ago, leaving it literally in Stygian darkness, one legitimately could describe it as disaster without fear of contradiction.

What can be contradicted are many of the myths that evolved from this tortured project. Historian Charles Jencks declared that the death of the Pruitt-Igoe Homes signaled the death of modernism. Hooey. Architects and planners were scourged unfairly with whips of abuse for not having better understood the ethos of poverty. Innocent design elements, such as elevators opening on every other floor, were singled out as design criminals and were found guilty of complicity in murdering the dream.

Using various methods of demolition, beginning with immoral neglect, continuing with the time-respected bite of the headache ball and finally, indelibly, with implosions that were filmed and broadcast again and again and again, the Soviet-looking housing district was felled. In the near universal cinematic replication, the death of the Pruitt-Igoe Homes became an engrained visual presence in the human psyche.

What few wanted to face was the fact that practically every humanizing element of the original design was value engineered out of it. Value engineering -- in design and construction vocabularies a euphemism for building on the cheap -- specified all the buildings would be high rises, where originally the plans called for buildings as low as three stories. Where once there was variety, all dwellings were decreed to be identical modules, and serious efforts to humanize the surroundings with gardens or playgrounds were removed from the plan.

Thus, to fix blame on the principal architect Minoru Yamasaki, or his colleagues, or the residents, or Le Corbusier or modernism or the value and necessity of good subsidized housing for the disadvantaged is on its face absurd. Put blame where it belongs: on money, the paucity of it, that is -- money for implementation of good architecture and sensitive urban design and money to maintain a project housing as many as 15,000 men, women and children. We know quite well how to build good public buildings, including good public housing. However, when the bottom line is reached, all too often we hack away at it or flee from it altogether. And in other cases, once structures are built, we skip out on the responsibility of maintenance.

As I hiked the Pruitt-Igoe Homes site Thursday, I had difficulty making the gears of history mesh with the wild and mysterious landscape in which my fellow hikers and I found ourselves. What remains of material history is slim. There is an electrical system substation, which, in some subtle but marvelous details, reveals the virtuosity of the serious modernist Yamasaki. The beautiful modernist and marvelously detailed Pruitt School, designed by F. Ray Leimkuhler, remains on the south side of the site. It was part of the original ensemble but today is outside the forest.

Inside that forest, a visitor with his or her sights adjusted can be charmed and delighted that in the four decades since the project ceased to be, during the time in which the land was abandoned completely or used as a convenient dump, beauty has elbowed its way in, and trees

... in garments green, indistinct in the twilight/Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic ...

The hike boss turned to me at one point and said, "Queen Anne has been generous to us," a reference to Her Majesty's lacey floral gift to us all, which has spread all over the place. Nearby, crown vetch bloomed abundantly in purple glory. Overgrown paths, bordered by berms created from landfill, were shaded by mature trees, many considerable and some majestic. The landscape is remarkably free of litter, and what registers as ominous from the adjacent city streets vaporizes in the forest.

The vigorous, idealistic men and women with us on the hike -- urban Natty Bumppos all -- were clearly fascinated. But I sensed they shared a generalized, inchoate incredulity with me.

How can it be that scooting lizards and flirty yellow sulphur butterflies, locust trees and mimosas and stands of crown vetch and Queen Anne's lace, all so naturally and visually seductive, thrive in such abandon, in this place where human constructions failed so abysmally and fell with such dramatic and damning finality?

We know the answer to that question if we search our intellects and our souls.

We know, too, all too well, to avoid speaking it out loud.

Robert W. Duffy reported on arts and culture for St. Louis Public Radio. He had a 32-year career at the Post-Dispatch, then helped to found the St. Louis Beacon, which merged in January with St. Louis Public Radio. He has written about the visual arts, music, architecture and urban design throughout his career.