The former site of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project , along Cass Avenue, looks nothing like the complex of 33 11-story buildings it once was in the 1950s and ‘60s. The buildings, which were originally designed to be the public housing of the future, were instead demolished and razed to the ground barely 20 years after they were constructed.
Bob Hansman’s new book about the rise and fall of Pruitt-Igoe, simply titled “Pruitt-Igoe,” which came out on July 17, tells the stories of the people who lived in those buildings. In his book, he quotes a young mother who, in the 1970s, expressed his misgivings.
“All you people do is come down here and meddle in our lives so you can get stories and master’s degrees and write some damn book,” she said. “It may do you some good, but what good does it do us? We still get busted pipes and flooded apartments. We still get raped, robbed, murdered. You write to live, and I struggle to live. Hell.”
In writing it, however, Hansman (a professor in the art school at Washington University) didn’t want it to exploit the people who lived there – he wanted to make a tribute to their stories.
In trying to tell the story of Pruitt-Igoe, Hansman was confronted with multiple narratives.
“There were some people that approached me and said, ‘Don’t write anything good about Pruitt-Igoe.’ And then there were some that said, ‘Don’t write anything bad.’ And all of these people lived there. This was not going to be a single person’s memoir.”
The book focuses on that array of voices within Pruitt-Igoe.
“It’s not about the buildings, it’s not about statistics,” Hansman said. “Statistics are misleading. I believe in opinions. Opinions just are what they are.”
The book takes the form of a narrative. “I wound up telling it as a story, not as a collection of artifacts and facts, because I wanted people to feel something when they read the book,” he said. “It’s like a sacred trust. I wanted to give it as a gift to the people that lived there.”
Kim Gaines and Kathy McClellan were two young girls who were found murdered in the Pruitt-Igoe complex. Hansman tells their stories in the book, alongside photographs of the girls, which he said were extremely difficult to find.
“I got in touch with the extended family of Kim Gaines, and they’re very happy that those two little girls will not be forgotten,” said Hansman. “They’ve pretty much been left out of every other account, somehow. So to be able to – right at the last minute, as the whole neighborhood’s being wiped out – to be able say, ‘They were here.’ To have the memory of these two little girls back meant a great deal to me.”
The book comes out as the neighborhood surrounding the Pruitt-Igoe site is cleared to build National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) West headquarters, which is especially poignant for Hansman.
“The neighborhood’s gone,” he said.
Even the church he attended for many years, Grace Baptist, which was “literally across the street from the entrance to Pruitt-Igoe,” was demolished. Though Hansman doesn’t want to paint himself as anti-progress, he wishes the people in the neighborhood were allowed more of a chance to control what happened to the place they lived.
“There’s always certain people making decisions, and other people living with them,” he said. “I would like to see, at least in the future, more respect shown for people.”
His book tells the stories of some of the people who lived there long before the NGA West project, and before the implosion of the Pruitt-Igoe buildings became a symbol for the failure of urban high-rise housing projects. It tells both the good and bad sides of Pruitt-Igoe. Most importantly, it focuses not on the buildings, but on the people who lived their lives inside them.
“This is like a love letter to the people,” he said. “It’s saying, ‘You did this. You survived this. You lived, you know? You lived.’”
