Missouri
I’m still trying to understand why this documentary was called “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.”
In 1954, downtown business interests and Disingenuous White Liberals (DWLs) built this massive public housing project for blacks in St. Louis. The idea was to cure poverty by moving them out of the blighted slums and into the “City of the Future.”
From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, the blacks systematically destroyed Pruitt-Igoe. They urinated in the elevators and halls. They broke the windows. They dumped their garbage everywhere. They demolished the custom designed “indestructible” light fixtures and other aspects of their apartments.
The Black Undertow made Pruitt-Igoe a no-go zone for the police and fire department. They turned their homes into drug and prostitution dens. They turned the halls of the buildings into a war zone. They went on a rent strike which deprived the housing authority of the money used to maintain the buildings. They physically gutted the buildings in order to sell the scrap metal.
It’s Whitey’s fault for moving to the suburbs, taking the jobs and the tax base, and refusing to live amid the living conditions created by Concentrated Blackness. If black children grew up without fathers, it is because the housing authority didn’t want unemployed men living in the building. If black people were shooting and killing each other and fouling their own nest, it is our fault for not caring about them and not spending enough money on them.
Watch the videos. You can’t spin this one.
It was ruined by desegregation.
No doubt about it. Same architect as the Twin Towers btw. The architect said that he was shocked by how destructive ‘human’ beings could get.
Lol. Human beings indeed.
As soon as desegregation was enacted decent working class folk ran off and built their own houses in the County.
I’m planning to visit St. Louis soon.
Hunter, good luck on the ghetto safari in St. Louis. See you tomorrow evening or Friday.
“urban housing project”
Zoo project-folks flee.
You’ll enjoy St. Louis. East St. Louis is where the fun is though!!
East St. Louis is an awful, awful place. My Dad used to sell ice cream over there as a young man and has all kinds darky stories.
One of my uncles was SLFD, and for the first half of his career, he was based at the third closest rescue squads to the PIs. Yeah, he has war stories. All the gray hair he ever got, the PIs gave him.
The P-I Myth is a crock of crap. It does all it can to absolve the black undertow that inhabited it from the blame from wrecking it. But any moron can watch it and make that obvious conclusion.
The year the P-Is opened, 1954, the Missouri Supreme Court outlawed de jure residential segregation. The reason the Pruitt-Igoe got that hyphenated name was because they were built before that happened, with segregation presumed. The Pruitt (named after a black WWII Air Force pilot from St. Louis) were for blacks, the Igoe (named after a longtime St. Louis white Congressman) were for whites. Well, after the ruling, most whites that might have wanted to move to the seggied Igoes didn’t move there at all, and the combined desegged P-Is became almost all black.
HW:
You have my e-mail addy. If and when you come, we’ll have to meet up.
countenance,
What does Blackjack look like now? What happened to it?
Deo Vindice
Blackjack now lives up to its name. It has for some time.
When the Feds wanted to shove in the first wave of north city blacks in the early 1970s in “low income apartments,” whites in Whitejack organized to try to keep Whitejack from becoming Blackjack. Well, then HUD Secretary George Romney sicked the FBI on those whites, threatening them with “civil rights violations” blah blah to make them back down. (I’m sure all this happened with Richard Nixon’s subtle approval.)
Will do.
I’ve never been to Missouri. I will let you know when I come.
That’s a shame, but entirely predictable in BRA.
So Mitt’s daddy was behind the destruction there, too.
I wonder if Mittens cried when he heard the niggers could move into Blackjack.
Deo Vindice
Watched the entire “documentary”, if a rewrite of history can be so labeled. There were many interesting clips, but notice how the film never even pretends to go over the Housing Authority’s side of the story. A fair documentary would have checked the balance books and verified or dismissed the Authority’s claims about upkeep.
No matter how the director tried, he couldn’t hide the greater proclivity to violence among the Blacks who lived there. Sure, trying to prove yourself to earn respect in the pack is fine, but when you overdo it you cannot have a First World society. Since, as Countenance points out, there are still now living cops and firemen who visited Pruitt-Igoe, it is a glaring sign of bias that none of them were interviewed about the reception residents afforded them.
Crusader:
The STLPHA is staffed with people who aren’t much better than the public housing tenants they “serve,” then or now. A lot of the money scheduled for maintenance went to anything but maintenance. One of the complaints you saw in P-I Myth was that the Feds budgeted money to build the P-Is but “forgot to budget money to maintain them.” Huh? That’s what tenant rent was for. Except the YKWs, both then and now, have a blaze attitude about bills.
@countenance
Nixon in fact jerked the leash on Romney more than a few times when pulled that crap. Say what you will about George Romney and his piss-ant cabinet position, and I won’t disagree with you, but Nixon was a decent president.
313Chris wrote:
Nixon in fact jerked the leash on Romney more than a few times when pulled that crap. Say what you will about George Romney and his piss-ant cabinet position, and I won’t disagree with you, but Nixon was a decent president.
But he didn’t exactly yank Romney back with the Blackjack deal. Besides, this was the same Nixon that was trying to sabotage George Wallace, and the same Nixon which administratively applied the civil rights legislation signed by his predecessor to Federal executive agencies and the way they enforced the law, and the same Nixon that really started affirmative action hot and heavy, and the same Nixon who partially helped to create the faux racial category “Hispanic,” at least in terms of Federal government business.
313Chris et al.:
Nixon and Co. discuss Romney/Blackjack:
http://whitehousetapes.net/transcript/nixon/455-022
Richard Nixon is a classic example of how White backlash politics were diverted and dissipated into Northern conservatism.
They blame everything but the real cause, niggers. We all know that.
They blame the architecture, it created a sense of isolation. That’s a joke.
Niggers have a low IQ, it’s well known, but there are many other psychological dysfunctions that go along with that, such as low conscientiousness. Niggers just don’t care. They’re not bothered by living in filth enough to do something about it, they want someone else to clean it up or fix it. Look at how happy they are in Africa living in abject poverty. Some people think that’s laudable, oh look, they’re so disadvantaged yet they’re still smiling, happy and dancing. No, that is part of the problem, they’re not bothered by it. When they see disorganization and uncleanliness, they just ignore it.
Was it really a problem that maintenance just stopped? More likely the amount of maintenance necessary was too much. One guy mentioned the elevators smelled like piss. Who is pissing in the elevators? Stupid, filthy niggers who won’t clean up after themselves and enjoy being destructive.
One black woman said when she got a record player, she turned it up as loud as it would go and opened the door so everyone could hear it. She was just smiling and thought that was so wonderful. This is how niggers still think today, that everyone wants to hear their obnoxious music. Such a different mentality from Whites who typically respect the privacy of others.
The black man asked, who are these White people that made my mother lie about my father staying with us. Typical black mentality, it’s not her fault that she’s doing something wrong and lying, it’s that White people made her lie. More “proper Negro fatigue” as Toure would say.
In an attempt to reduce vandalism and having to replace what was broken, White people installed light fixtures that were virtually unbreakable. What is the response of the niggers? They try even harder to destroy it.
The reporter asked the black man why they are protesting and refusing to pay rent when the rent money is what pays for maintenance, that the housing authority doesn’t have the money to pay for repairs. The black man responds, “that’s their problem.” No, it’s your problem, you self-entitled nigger.
The housing project didn’t fail, the people who occupied it failed and continue to be a burden on White society. Negroids are an evolutionary dead end.
Mark wrote:
One black woman said when she got a record player, she turned it up as loud as it would go and opened the door so everyone could hear it. She was just smiling and thought that was so wonderful.
That’s the part about how she wheeled the record player into the hall, yanked it up, and everyone on the floor came out and started dancing and having a good time. In ancient times, Galen observed that blacks are given to a concept that roughly translates from the ancient Greek word he used into the English word “merriment.” Myth tries to sell that as a virtue of the PIs, when in reality, spontaneously breaking out into voulez-vous les bon temps roulet with abandon and without care isn’t anything special about blacks, it’s TNB.
They’re not bothered by living in filth enough to do something about it, they want someone else to clean it up or fix it. Look at how happy they are in Africa living in abject poverty. Some people think that’s laudable, oh look, they’re so disadvantaged yet they’re still smiling, happy and dancing. No, that is part of the problem, they’re not bothered by it. When they see disorganization and uncleanliness, they just ignore it.
Here’s another movie that might be good for an OD virtual screening: The Ghosts of Cite Soleil. One of the young men featured prominently in the documentary vacillates back and forth between wanting to be a rapper and a politician, and a few other things. All the while, his immediate living area (a slum’s slum) is surrounded by human waste, which could easily be remedied by digging trenches and drainage paths. So this Bellcurvius of Haiti twirls back and forth in his mind from crackpot pie-in-the-sky fantasy about his career track, all the while oblivious to the shit around him and unwilling to do the simple things to alleviate it. You’re right: That’s not an example of virtue or tough-mindedness, it’s an example of mental weakness and stupidity and nonchalance.
The black man asked, who are these White people that made my mother lie about my father staying with us.
That’s because those blacks were on AFDC, which actually started in the New Deal, not the Great Society. AFDC clients were presumed to be single mothers with children whose father was not present for some reason, so Federal AFDC rules didn’t allow people with fathers/men in the house from getting AFDC. However, states co-adminstered and co-funded AFDC with the Feds, and during the early days of the PIs, Missouri didn’t allow AFDC clients to own televisions or have home telephone service, as the assumption was that if you could own a TV or have phone service, not that cheap in those days, then you probably had unreported income on the side and didn’t need AFDC. However, by about the early to mid 1960s, TV and phone service got affordable enough such that they weren’t markers of obvious prosperity.
Nixon knew what the score was, but by the time that realization fully dawned on him I think he also realized he was checkmated as far as politics-as-usual goes. Politicians who followed him were even more beholden to the system. That’s why the metapolitical project is so important.
“Important,” however, doesn’t mean “easy.” It’s very troubling that the people who best understand the important of metapolitics go about it in the most bizarre, off-putting way imaginable. The old WLP article recently posted at CC is a good example of what I mean. WLP had as clear-eyed a view of what was going on as anyone has ever had, and he also had a knack for explaining it in clear, concise, hard-hitting terms. (The only thing I’d take issue – serious issue – with in that article is his completely unwarranted insistence that different races have “different types of minds.” It’s true to a point, but the differences are far less than he assumed.)
And then what does WLP do with all his understanding and knack for explanations? He hides out with his cats in the W. Virginia woods and fantasizes about armies of racial rebels leaving the streetscape dotted with corpses dangling from lampposts. Unreal.
CC itself is hardly any better. (If I read another Evola essay I’ll…) Just what do these people have against baby steps, learning to walk before trying to run, and getting through the first grade reader before taking on James Joyce? Or is that their yen to impose race-as-religion on society just gets the better of them every time?
Racial identity is “thin soup.”
It is too weak to be the foundation of nationalism. You see this constantly in WN with all its petty infighting.
Slumgullion hunter, slumgullion.
Hunter,
Yes and no. That’s to say, that’s one way to read it, but another way is to say the reason that there’s so much infighting is that people care about race. They don’t bother hammering these issues out with people they see as totally distinct from themselves. It’s only when there’s, let’s say, a degree of ‘ball park’ likeness that it seems worth the effort.
It must also be acknowledged that another major culprit here is the attitude people seem to imbibe from those they regard as ‘racial leaders’ that having a strong (or uncompromising) racial identity absolutely requires you to despise anyone falling outside your group. Isn’t one of the first things that newly minted VNNers or Stormfrontniks do is post some news story or personal account that, they think, highlights just how horrible [fill in the blank] ethnicity is, and how they’ve got it coming, and so on? Given this, it’s really not surprising that there are so many fiery exchanges.
The current site is fallow. The State should build a supermax prison on the old site. A good old NU for the aspiring astronauts.
John wrote:
The State should build a supermax prison on the old site.
There already is a prison near that site. It’s called the “norfside,” virtually a prison in and of itself. It’s where good playas reprezent, knowatimsayin?
I worked for a company that did lighting retrofit and replacement in order to reduce energy consumption. One of these projects was in a negro storage facility in Knoxville TN. We were asked to come up with something that prevented the removal and sale of the lamps (“bulbs”) inside the fixtures. We had no solution to that problem directly. What we ended up doing was installing fixtures that used what is called a GU24 base. They can be removed easily, but do not work in a standard Edison base.
It is amazing what has to be done in order to try staying a step ahead of the thieves and vandals.
It looks like Joe is over on Diversity is Chaos …
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=8959798840444903970&postID=1724684578954617087
There is no program that can uplift blacks except for the blacks employed by the program, it is all a waste, anything predicated intellectually on the Blank Slate Theory is a waste. Hell while contards such as the Beck cult languish in backward stupidity, even the white libtards are looking for the exit away from BRA, “we’re not ‘racists’ we’re hipsters.”
Well… the architecture is repulsive. Nothing could be LESS Southern than these weird apartment buildings of any kind.
Now, they seem to be trying to solve the Northern needs in what they try in the “New South”—- where McMansion Tract Homes are placed close together, creating a larger, tenement flat with more privacy, but no real grass or anything growing one would have to care for, or being overseen by HOAs who hire foreign labor to spray cookie cutter plants and care for the “grounds.”
At root—- is the whole lack of creativity, the not WANTING to have an area to care for, to grow things in, to think about what might grow, to CHOOSE plantings, to take responsibility for one’s own environment, etc.
Imo—- yankees always do some version of this. The whole idea is public— public parks, huge tenements, etc.
Modernity, itself, (all of it) is just sort of disgusting and totally non-southern, imo.
Seriously, any northern or “city” architecture does look like just more prisons. Then when they try to fix it with public plantings, it just looks worse, (imo). Clearly, there are people who think modernity and public parks, etc, really are “beautiful.” Others just stare at it and note how the architects and landscape architects all went to the same school. The mind-numbing sameness and lack of originality is endlessly depressing for this other type of person.
One more thing—- it probably has to do with some aberrant form of “christianity,” where the people are gutted, in terms of wanting to create their own environment, in accordance with their own thoughts, feelings, ideas, etc.
White people live in places like that, too. The whole “high-rise” culture.
Like, the white narrators going on and on about why this prison-style thing is so great. Forget the black people who lived there. Why did any whites think it was modern and great? What kind of white people are those, lol.
Racial identity is “thin soup.”
It is too weak to be the foundation of nationalism. You see this constantly in WN with all its petty infighting.
No, and their form of racial identity is pretty ambiguous to begin with.
Race combined with ethnicity is much stronger, you need a historical, cultural and linguistic bond to tie it all together. You have that with the South much more than the North, the North is bound only by abstractions and religion.
They have a lot of infighting because they have no roots, nothing in common. They’re of various ethnicities all trying to come together as White, and it’s not that simple. Furthermore a lot of them are mentally ill to begin with like your buddy Harold Covington.
Dixie Girl wrote:
Seriously, any northern or “city” architecture does look like just more prisons. Then when they try to fix it with public plantings, it just looks worse, (imo).
I respond:
What the PIs replaced, if properly maintained and inhabited by First World people, would have been far more attractive. St. Louis was this close to being the Paris of the western hemisphere.
On the flip side of the coin from this depressing stroll down the PI memory lane, and being mindful of the fact that HW may soon be my guest, here are some more positive views:
http://countenance.wordpress.com/category/st-louis-house-tour/
What we ended up doing was installing fixtures that used what is called a GU24 base. They can be removed easily, but do not work in a standard Edison base.
It is amazing what has to be done in order to try staying a step ahead of the thieves and vandals.
That’s funny, I have an outdoor fixture that uses that base. Not for the reasons you mentioned, it just happened to be the cheapest one with a photo cell on it.
Niggers will even go to the trouble of stealing copper pipes, and that takes work. You know if they put as much effort into education, at least in a trade and working hard as they do being destructive and stealing, they’d make a decent living. Some of them have learned that but unfortunately too many of them haven’t. Too many of them are just willfully stupid and criminal.
White people live in places like that, too. The whole “high-rise” culture.
I know what you mean, it’s all rather soulless and hive-like, you see that with Asians as well. They’re all packed in together like ants.
I enjoy the country life, though I do like modern amenities. I like open spaces, I need at least a few acres to stretch out in. You can walk out your front door and see nature instead of people and traffic.
“It is amazing what has to be done in order to try staying a step ahead of the thieves and vandals.”
Higher taxes, inflation and rising prices of goods: aa erosion of foundations.
“Who is pissing in the elevators? Stupid, filthy niggers who won’t clean up after themselves and enjoy being destructive.” It’s a failed organism that shits in its own nest.
“Niggers will even go to the trouble of stealing copper pipes, and that takes work. You know if they put as much effort into education, at least in a trade and working hard as they do being destructive and stealing, they’d make a decent living. Some of them have learned that but unfortunately too many of them haven’t. Too many of them are just willfully stupid and criminal.”
Well, you see, folks often derive job satisfaction from not just the bux, but from other, less tangible, rewards. The perks of stealing copper pipe, aside from the $$$$, that makes it a preferred occupation for a black guy over, say, being a bricklayer, is the emotional distress they concomitantly get to inflict on some White person.
Aren’t there nice high rises though in the big cities? Luxury apartments?
So far, I’ve watched only the first of the three video clips, Mr. W.: extremely informative, in spite of itself. Great post, great thread.
The original idea was to have the white half subsidize the black half wasn’t it? It might have even worked had they not busted down segregation and restrictive covenants.
As a life-long St. Louis county resident who has been reading your website lately, I was very interested to see this post. I hope you let us know when you will be visiting.
St. Louis was greatly impacted by the great migration, as was Chicago, Detroit and a number of other midwestern/northern cities. St. Louis is one of the most southern of those cities.
For those who suggested East St. Louis is where the real problems are, this is incorrect. Although East St. Louis is indeed a complete wasteland, it is no different than North St. Louis, which is the black section of the City of St. Louis. East St. Louis is basically North St. Louis as a self-contained city. As for the actual City of St. Louis itself, there are still fairly nice areas and neighborhoods, but its the neighborhoods that haven’t been abandoned by white fight. From what I’ve read, St. Louis probably more closely resembles Detroit than any other major city, only Detroit is worse because the white flight there was almost complete, abandoning virtually the entire city. That didn’t happen completely in St. Louis. It’s still happening slowly though, and the crime that used to be more or less contained to north St. Louis is now dispersing throughout the city. Although the mayor and liberal urban apologists will tell you violent crime in St. Louis is down, it’s more brazen than ever and is dispersing throughout the city and county:
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/st-louis-police-commander-survives-ambush-while-on-special-patrol/article_b3c62c32-6a07-5a46-a8ed-ca6865934b52.html
Dixie Girl, and Mark,
These hideous buildings all emrge fomr the Bauhaus style. It’s called “German” – but it’s not.
It’s Yids.
Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyers, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Patrick wrote:
St. Louis was greatly impacted by the great migration, as was Chicago, Detroit and a number of other midwestern/northern cities. St. Louis is one of the most southern of those cities.
I wouldn’t call St. Louis the city or metro area southern in as much as I would call the state as a whole mid-to-outer south. As far as the great migration, blacks from Mississippi who wanted to go to Chicago but who didn’t have the full train fare to make it to Chicago settled for St. Louis. The reason ESL got hit well before STL was because the railroad line that ran from MS to Chicago did run through ESL, but railway politics prevented a direct link to St. Louis for quite some time.
rom what I’ve read, St. Louis probably more closely resembles Detroit than any other major city, only Detroit is worse because the white flight there was almost complete, abandoning virtually the entire city. That didn’t happen completely in St. Louis. It’s still happening slowly though,
If Portland, Oregon and Detroit are book end on how good or bad a modern American core city can be, St. Louis is in the middle. Actually, what’s happening slowly is the city population getting less black. While most of the gentrifying city neighborhoods never fell to the black, some are being taken back from them.
Simpsons episode mocking (jew) “architect” frank gehry:
What is the address of the vacant lot that used to contain Pruitt-Igoe? I thought that I read a few years ago that somebody was going to purchase the site and build something or other on it.
Which black neighborhoods are going white?
I used to live in St. Louis County, and I would love to move to St. Louis if the crime problem could be fixed. I looked up some information about Clayton (my old neighborhood) and was surprised that the Clayton schools are now 23% black, and the city of Clayton is now 8% black. (The school district lines are larger than the city lines, so blacks from Maplewood, etc., attend school in Clayton.) Frankly, I would not spend money to buy property in an area that is apparently going black, even though it appears to be going black rather slowly.
Does St. Louis still have that school bussing program to let blacks from the city attend school in the suburbs?
Obviously a case a Whitey’s Fault, especially the chimp-outs at the block parties.
What is Whitey’s Fault is letting the Jews build an open air jail in St Louis. It looks like Gaza.
Even though prisons, gulags, human warehouses, reservations or internment camps are areas in which the Judaic mind excells, especially, this should be another no-go area for Jews.
The original idea was to have the white half subsidize the black half wasn’t it? It might have even worked had they not busted down segregation and restrictive covenants.
It might have lasted longer with more rent from Whites, but would have eventually ended the same way it did.
The rent from Whites wouldn’t have changed all the other aspects that led to its demise, black vandalism, black crime, black filth. It’s a total waste of money. You can’t civilize people who have Stone Age DNA.
By the time they were destroyed, the blocks were notorious for violence, vandalism, chaos and squalor. Police and firemen refused to go there, as missiles would be hurled at them from high levels if they did. If Yamasaki, in common with Le Corbusier and other modernists, believed that rational architecture could make people behave better, Pruitt-Igoe seemed to prove the opposite. So, in Jencks’s words: “It was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom.”
Too bad we can’t put this third-world Union out of its misery, boom, boom, boom.