Across from Pruitt-Igoe: A Small Building That Watched It Rise and Fall

On Cass Avenue in north St. Louis, directly across the street from what was once the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, a small one-story brick building stood for decades after the towers came down. It had been a family deli, then an anti-poverty station, then an abandoned commercial building without a roof on a block that time had passed by.

By 2017 it was gone, cleared like so much else in the area. The building hasn’t played a big role in stories about Pruitt-Igoe, but it stood through its early years, decline, and its demolition in the 1970s after less than two decades

How Pruitt-Igoe Became America’s Most Infamous Housing Project

The Pruitt-Igoe housing complex opened in 1954, when the St. Louis Housing Authority completed the first of 33 eleven-story concrete towers on a 57-acre site in the city’s DeSoto-Carr neighborhood.

The project was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, later the architect of the original World Trade Center, and financed through the federal Housing Act of 1949 as part of a wave of urban renewal projects intended to replace what city officials called blighted neighborhoods. To build Pruitt-Igoe, the DeSoto-Carr neighborhood itself was demolished, displacing the low-income Black residents who had lived there.

The complex was originally planned as racially segregated, the Pruitt Homes for Black residents and the Igoe Apartments for whites. A Supreme Court ruling desegregated it before it opened, but white residents left quickly, and by the early 1960s Pruitt-Igoe housed almost exclusively African American families, many of them among the city’s poorest. At its peak it housed more than 10,000 people, and it was, for a brief moment, something residents described with genuine warmth. Former tenant Ruby Russell called her 11th floor apartment “a poor man’s penthouse,” recalling “a very beautiful place, like a big hotel resort.”

The decline came fast, and much of it traced back to the design itself. Yamasaki’s towers rose out of open lawns with no porches, stoops, or storefronts facing them, leaving little of what urbanist Jane Jacobs was describing in those same years as the eyes on the street that keep city blocks safe. Underfunding, deferred maintenance, and the concentrated effects of poverty and segregation overwhelmed the project within a decade of opening.

A Family Deli Opens Across the Street

In 1956, the same year Pruitt-Igoe was completing its final construction phase, the Richardson family built a small commercial building at 2411 Cass Avenue, directly across the street from the northern edge of the new housing complex, and opened a delicatessen there. With 12,000 residents arriving at Pruitt-Igoe, the timing made sense. The building itself was modest, a one-story structure with a decorative face of modern brick on its front wall and plain concrete block on the sides and back, the kind of small commercial building seen all over to serve neighborhood residents.

From Corner Store to Anti-Poverty Station

By 1965, Pruitt-Igoe’s problems were severe. Vacancy rates were climbing, maintenance had collapsed, and the project’s 33-tower design, with its skip-stop elevators and long interior corridors, had created public spaces inside the buildings that no resident felt ownership over.

Architect and researcher Oscar Newman later pointed directly to Pruitt-Igoe in developing his theory of defensible space, the idea that people need small, clearly-owned spaces around their homes to feel safe in them, and he often contrasted it with Carr Square Village, a low-rise rowhouse neighborhood immediately across the street that housed a nearly identical population without ever collapsing the same way.

The Urban League of St. Louis, which had assumed operation of the city’s anti-poverty program in September 1965, identified the area around Pruitt-Igoe as a priority. In 1966, the organization leased the Richardson delicatessen and opened it as the Pruitt-Igoe Neighborhood Station, one of four such stations serving districts of concentrated poverty across north St. Louis.

From 1966 through 1969, the little brick building on Cass Avenue offered job training and placement, sex education, tutorial programs, Head Start enrollment, and health classes to Pruitt-Igoe residents. The residents who used the station formed an advisory committee and helped the Urban League reach more families and identify resources beyond what the program’s public funding covered. It was a stopgap rather than a solution, but it was an attempt, made with limited resources, to address the human consequences of a federal housing policy that was already visibly failing.

The Urban League’s lease ended in 1969, and Model Cities, a subsequent federal anti-poverty program, briefly used the building as an office before that program too wound down. The building returned to the Richardson family and eventually sat vacant.

As the Towers Fell, the Building on Cass Avenue Remained

The first Pruitt-Igoe tower was imploded on March 16, 1972, in a nationally televised event that architecture critic Charles Jencks would later call “the day Modern architecture died.”

By 1976 all 33 buildings were gone, leaving a 57-acre expanse of rubble that gradually became an urban forest, its boundaries marked by chain-link fence and barbed wire.

The neighborhood around it continued to hollow out, and the block on Cass Avenue where the Richardson family had built their deli in 1956 was still there, though the world that had given it purpose was gone.

The small building remained for decades, with the open lawn of the former Pruitt-Igoe site visible across the street through a chain-link fence. By 2016 the facade was largely intact but the roof was totally gone and the interior had collapsed.

Writing about the building in 2013, local historian Michael Allen of the Preservation Research Office suggested it still had a chance to be saved, calling it a modest monument to a chapter of St. Louis history that few buildings had witnessed as closely. That hope, however, did not pan out, and by 2017 the building had been demolished.

A Federal Campus Where a Neighborhood Once Stood

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), a federal intelligence agency that produces mapping and imagery analysis for national security purposes, broke ground on a new $1.75 billion western headquarters campus directly north of the former Pruitt-Igoe site in the early 2020s.

The 2411 Cass Avenue site, home over the decades to the Richardson family’s deli and the Urban League’s neighborhood station, fell within the footprint of the NGA’s campus preparation and surrounding redevelopment.

Today its location is on the edge of a parking lot serving the federal campus.

For another story of a small building that outlived the community it was built to serve, the Sunshine Grill in Dayton, Ohio tells a similar story of loss, near the factory where the Cheez-It was invented.

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Sources:

• Preservation Research Office, Michael R. Allen, “Mid-Century Modernism, Race and Equality: Two St. Louis Landmarks” (2013), preservationresearch.com
• BlackPast.org, “Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project, St. Louis, Missouri (1956-1976)”
• Unseen St. Louis, “The Failed Promise of Pruitt-Igoe”
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “McKee buys Pruitt-Igoe site,” Aug. 14, 2016
• Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)
• Sage Reference, Encyclopedia of Street Crime in America, “Defensible Space Theory”