One New Thing: Tribeca Cinemas

This evening Kristin, Cat, Kim and I took a trip down to Tribeca Cinemas to FINALLY see the Pruitt Igoe Myth which was playing at an Architecture and Design festival.

First, I'll talk about the theater. It was very cute and tiny. When we entered the theater I was worried because it was old fashioned (i.e. no stadium seating), which is worrisome for a short person like myself. Luckily I was able to see just fine. The workers were really nice, which is always a plus in New York! They had a lounge area where you could get drinks and a little art and architecture library set up for the festival. I would definitely like to come here again for another movie. The only bad thing was that for every four chairs you had only three drink holders! Luckily Cat had downed her coke before the movie, otherwise we would have been in quite a pickle!

Now, let's talk about the movie! Me and Kristin have been dying to see this for months! It is about the Pruitt Igoe projects in downtown St. Louis and why they failed. I guess the common 'myth' blames the architecture of the buildings. Too large, no sense of community and no sense of pride. As is the usual in St. Louis, the downfall of Pruitt Igoe was blamed on the residents instead of looking at the social issues that led to its failure. For example, how the government quit paying for it's upkeep. How in order for families to be allowed in, no men could be living there, thus splitting up families. How they put such restrictions on the residents that it turned into a place you wanted to get out of rather than stay in. How white flight wasn't predicted by the city, ruining their development plans. There were great and heartbreaking interviews by former residents. 

An interesting thing I didn't know about the City of St. Louis was that it has strict boundaries. Other cities were able to buy up land and expand, so when the move to the suburbs happened they were able to still count fleeing citizens as residents. But when the middle-class exodus happened in St. Louis, the city lost all of that taxable income.

I recommend that you all see this! It definitely helps you understand the problems of St. Louis much better. I hope one day it can bounce back.

- Megan Leigh

I also thought the movie was excellent, but I expected a little more talk about architecture--since architecture figured so prominently in discussions of why Pruitt Igoe failed, and also since the movie was playing at an architecture film festival! I think the makers were trying to make the point that you could explain the downfall of Pruitt Igoe without even considering the architecture of the place. But I would have liked to hear what the actual residents thought of the skip stop elevators, the public spaces, etc. It seems like they would be the best judges of some of the theories that have been offered up, and I was sad that we didn't get to hear their thoughts on whether architecture did contribute to Pruitt Igoe's problems in some way. In the few parts of the movie where people did talk about the architecture, the high-riseness of the building for example, they seemed to have viewed it pretty positively, which is interesting.

-Kristin