- pknitty86
On Sunday and again next Thursday, the Gene Siskel Film Center screens The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: An Urban History, a new documentary about an ill-considered St. Louis housing project—demolished in 1972, it lasted for all of 18 years. Fred Camper, who reviewed the film for the Reader, says it’s affecting: “The opening, which shows the mix of forest and rubble where the homes once stood, is especially poetic, its empty spaces later filled in for the viewer with archival footage of the project, lovely initially but gutted in its later years.”
On his blog, Lynn Becker provides some history of the project; as in Chicago, he writes, public housing in St. Louis followed a familiar path of social disintegration: