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July 13, 2006
Gowanus Lounge explains Pruitt-Igoe
The Gowanus Lounge explains Ron Shiffman's reference to "Pruitt-Igoe" in his statment of support for Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn and his coming out as an Advisory Board Member.
Shiffman writes [emphasis added]:
I fear Forest City Ratner’s proposal will become the Brooklyn equivalent of Pruitt-Igoe, the notorious St. Louis public housing towers that have since been demolished. Quite frankly I do not believe that any of the decision makers from the Borough President to the Governor have a grasp on how overwhelming and out-of-scale this development is.
Gowanus Lounge:
Pruitt-Igoe is a planner code word for a project that is beyond awful, for something that is so fatally flawed that the only solution is blowing it up and, then, showing the video to an entire generation of planning students as a warning. That's Pruitt-Igoe coming down, of course, in the photo above.
NoLandGrab: Is Shiffman being hyperbolic? Perhaps not, when one considers - among a plethora of issues - the historic nature of the proposed project's scale and density, FCR's and the ESDC's refusal to include the East River crossings in the environmental study, and the failure of elected officials at every level to push for serious traffic-management solutions.
Posted by lumi at July 13, 2006 8:49 AM