20151024 (failed housing)

Pruitt-Igoe* public housing in St. Louis, Missouri, 1954

Pruitt-Igoe public housing in St Louis, Missouri, 1976

Nobody ever built old houses or

Developed a community to be

A bad neighborhood with unsafe

Schools Jane Jacobs Oscar Newman

Aside for a moment there has 

Always been shoddy construction

For a while a place is new then in

A very few years it’s dilapidated

Usually a bad roof or foundation

Houses fall apart from stresses 

On the top or on the bottom

Some built over a hundred

Years ago are as solid today as

Ever often the homes of the 

Very wealthy built of the

Finest materials best concrete

Mortar seasoned clear grain wood

Even in places like closet walls

With devotion money no object

As if they were building cathedrals

Still there was patching over the 

Years at high costs money 

Still no object survive today 

Falling into hands not so flush

Basically sound abounding 

In architectural detail suffering

Perhaps some rash updating 

Remuddling we call it but many

Are in hands enthusiastic for the 

Tasks so we have hope for these

Structures but there are others

Very famous buildings which

Failed to survive three decades

Seeming to have been built with

Demolition explosives spec’d

In the blueprints Churchill once

Said first we shape our buildings

Then they shape us the rest of 

Their lives should the failures 

Of mass public housing Pruitt-Igoe

Cabrini-Green be laid at the door 

Of modernism the Bauhaus the

Ville Radieuse of le Corbusier

Naive Futurists or was it due

To many things in concert

Racism flight from the cities

Decentralization of industry

The factories which raised

European immigrants to the

Middle class the war machine

That moved west some of the

Same designs that thrive in

Scandinavia caused the American

Poor to trash their own homes

Welfare policies that drove

Husbands fathers from their

Families wretchedly mismanaged

Exposed whole generations 

Of urban youth to violence 

On a cataclysmic scale now

Infused into the culture so

Solidly it may never leave 

These huge experiments blessed

By world renowned architects

Social planners blew up in

Their lifetimes their faces

Seeming to underscore the

Worst stereotypes give the poor

Something for free they’ll

Destroy it

c. J.S.Manista, 2015

*www.pruitt-igoe.com,  The Pruitt-Igoe Myth - A Documentary