Environment: The Tragedy of Pruitt-lgoe

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American cities more than most others suffer from the good intentions of urban planners. A case in point is the swing to highrise, low-rent housing projects in the 1950s. Built to literally lift the poor above the grime of slums, they instead deteriorated into vertical slums that now contribute so much to the congestion, isolation and ugliness of U.S. cities that urban planners often must wish that they could just knock them down and start over from scratch. St. Louis will soon do just that.

Last week St. Louis' city planners got an official O.K. for their proposal to demolish two eleven-story units in Pruitt-lgoe, a mammoth low-rent black housing project located a few blocks from St. Louis' downtown section. Eventually the wrecker's ball will level most of the 31 other buildings.

The $36 million project, designed by Architect Minoru Yamasaki (who also designed New York's World Trade Center), attracted national attention as a model of public housing when it was built 16 years ago Its 33 slablike buildings contained modern plumbing, and there were plans for garden apartments and generous landscaping. Yamasaki's "skip stop" elevators opened on only every third floor, which he hoped would become galleries for strolling and games.

Ghost Town. Today Pruitt-lgoe is a case study in misery. Three-fourths of its 2,800 apartments stand empty. Rows of abandoned, windowless buildings loom against St. Louis' skyline like a modern ghost town. Yamasaki's galleries, ill-lighted and unpainted, are havens for junkies and muggers.

The reason Pruitt-lgoe failed is sociological and financial, rather than racial. Planners built in the worst slum in St. Louis. Many of the first tenants were drawn from the high-crime area, and brought their problems with them. As a result, the working-class white and black families living in Pruitt-lgoe began to move out. With apartments empty, St. Louis welfare officials pressured the Public Housing Authority to admit more welfare cases.

The result was disaster. The proportion of welfare cases grew until they made up the majority of the project's population. The children of these deprived families formed street gangs, terrorized tenants and vandalized buildings. Because families earned no money, they could not pay existing rents. Rents were lowered, while maintenance costs went up, causing such a strain on the PHA that funds that would have been used to keep up smaller public-housing projects around the city had to be diverted into Pruitt-lgoe.

Rampaging Junkies. Caught in the squeeze, city officials had no choice but to skimp on services. Untended, facilities began to fall apart. Elevators stalled. Because windows were inadequately screened, several children fell out.

Pruitt-Igoe's slide into disaster was also caused by economy measures that compromised Yamasaki's original design. Landscaping was reduced to a few oases of green. Steampipes were left uncovered, and a number of people were severely burned. Public toilets were eliminated from the ground floors and playgrounds, and out of either urgency or irritation, children resorted to elevators or hallways to urinate. Cramming 12,000 people into 57 acres of land exacerbated already grim social problems.