Pruitt-Igoe Today: What Replaced America’s Most Infamous Housing Project

The 33 towers of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis came down in the 1970s. A small deli across the street watched the whole thing happen, and today, a $1.75 billion federal intelligence campus occupies part of the same land, which officials have said is helping to “right the wrongs” of mid-century urban policy.

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, who would later design the original World Trade Center, and financed through the federal Housing Act of 1949.

That act launched 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 residents, most of them black and low-income, who had lived there.

The complex was originally planned to be 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 positively. Former tenant Ruby Russell called her 11th floor apartment “a poor man’s penthouse,” recalling “a very beautiful place, like a big hotel resort.”

But 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, which was what urbanist Jane Jacobs was describing 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.

The Towers Fall, and a Family Deli Across the Street Remained

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 nearby that housed a nearly identical population without ever collapsing the same way.

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.

On Cass Avenue, directly across the street from the site, a small one-story commercial building remained. It had been built in 1956, the same year Pruitt-Igoe was completing its final construction phase, and was built by the Richardson family as a delicatessen to cater to the 12,000 residents arriving at the housing project.

In 1966, the building was leased by the Urban League of St. Louis, which had taken over operation of St. Louis’s anti-poverty program, used it for job training, Head Start enrollment, and health classes for Pruitt-Igoe residents. The larger program was limited by resource constraints, but was an effort to address the human consequences of federal housing policies that had already started to fail.

The building hasn’t played a big role in stories about Pruitt-Igoe, but it stood through its early years, decline, and its demolition.

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.

Pruitt-Igoe Today

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), a federal intelligence agency that produces mapping and imagery analysis for national security purposes, broke ground in 2019 on a new $1.75 billion western headquarters campus directly north of the former Pruitt-Igoe site in the early 2020s.

The campus opened officially on September 26, 2025, with NGA Director Frank Whitworth hosting the ceremony, joined by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe.

It’s the largest single federal investment ever made in St. Louis, and the facility consists of a a 700,000-square-foot building alongside two parking garages, visitor center, and a delivery inspection facility.

Today the location of the old Cass Avenue deli 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.