Carr Square Village: The Design That Worked Where Pruitt-Igoe Failed
In St. Louis, just a few blocks from where the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project once stood before its decline and demolition, another public housing development from the same era is still standing and occupied today.
Pruitt-Igoe was, for decades, the most cited failure in American public housing: 33 eleven-story towers imploded on national television after less than twenty years of use.
But Carr Square Village opened in 1942, more than a decade earlier, and has outlasted its more famous neighbor by more than half a century.
The two developments housed similar populations under the same federal funding rules, but one big factor in the stark difference in outcomes comes down to how each one was actually built.
Carr Square Village and Pruitt-Igoe: Same Era, Different Public Housing Design
The St. Louis Housing Authority built Carr Square Village as low-rise apartments, mostly two and three stories, arranged along ordinary city streets with front doors facing the sidewalk.
Like nearly every public housing project of its time, it was racially segregated, built to house Black residents while Clinton-Peabody, a separate complex, housed white residents under the same program.
When Pruitt-Igoe rose a few blocks away starting in 1954, it took a very different architectural bet: 33 towers of eleven stories each, set back from the street inside open lawns, connected by long interior corridors and skip-stop elevators meant to save on construction costs.
Both developments were funded through the same wave of federal housing law and were meant to solve the same problem: overcrowded, substandard housing for the city’s poorest residents, most of them Black families displaced by earlier slum-clearance projects. Only one of them worked.
Jane Jacobs, Oscar Newman, and Why Housing Design Matters
Architect and researcher Oscar Newman used these two housing developments to build his theory of defensible space, the idea that residents need small, clearly-owned spaces around their homes to feel responsible for them.
Carr Square Village’s rowhouses gave residents visible entrances and direct lines of sight onto the street, the kind of informal watchfulness Jane Jacobs described in the same years as the “eyes on the street” that keep a block safe.
Pruitt-Igoe’s towers, on the other hand, offered the opposite: anonymous hallways, unwatched stairwells, and open lawns nobody in particular was responsible for.
There was a financial dimension too. Low-rise buildings without elevators or miles of shared corridors were far cheaper to maintain, and Carr Square Village could keep functioning on shrinking rent revenue in a way Pruitt-Igoe’s towers never could once vacancies climbed and maintenance funding collapsed.
Other researchers have pointed to other macro-level social factors, such as St. Louis’s declining population and deindustrialization, rather than the design differences.
But although the picture is complex and design didn’t completely determine the outcomes, the insights about defensible space are a valuable contribution to understanding how we interact and make sense of urban environments.
The Carr Square Village Neighborhood Today
Pruitt-Igoe’s first tower came down in 1972, and by 1976 the entire complex was gone, leaving 57 acres that gradually became an overgrown urban jungle.
Carr Square Village did not have a similar failure moment, but its townhomes did get some publicity by becoming “one of the first public housing projects to convert from management by the Local Housing Authority to a program of tenant management” (City of StL).
The larger Carr Square Village neighborhood today is defined by the boundaries of Cass Ave to the North; Cole Street to the South; North Tucker Blvd and North 13th to the East; and North Jefferson to the West.
Today, a $1.75 billion National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency campus is rising just north of the old Pruitt-Igoe site, and some longtime residents see it as a long-overdue turning point for a neighborhood that spent decades in the shadow of its more famous failure.
For more on what happened nearby, read about Pruitt-Igoe’s rise and fall and its relationship to another lost building around it.
Next up: Read our full article on Pruitt-Igoe and what happened to the site afterward
Sources:
- Living New Deal, “Carr Square Village – St. Louis MO”
- Oscar Newman, Creating Defensible Space, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)
- NextSTL, “Groth Guide to Carr Square”
- City of St. Louis, Carr Square Neighborhood Overview
