How Khrushchev was built in America, and what did it lead to

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

When assessing the consequences of the Cold War, some analysts are of the opinion that the United States has outperformed the Soviet Union in almost all respects. And the only exception to this rule, perhaps, is the era of early space exploration.

However, upon closer examination, one can find at least one more area where the USSR, if not won a convincing victory, then at least reduced the confrontation to a confident “draw” with a score of 1: 1. We are talking about residential housing construction.

The first round of this competition, tentatively titled "who will build better and more for the people", was won, rather, by the Americans, who, since the beginning of the 30s of the last century, began to build quite nice houses for the poor citizens of their country: three- or four-room, with a hot water supply, as well as albeit small, but its own front garden and backyard.

In the Soviet Union, the idea of mass construction of detached houses for citizens began to get accustomed only after almost 30 years. But if individual cottages in the USA became one of the brightest symbols of the country, that very "one-story America", then the fate of such plastic buildings in the USSR was very deplorable.

But with high-rise housing construction, everything turned out exactly the opposite. Even if in Moscow, not to mention other cities of the country, whole “sleeping areas”, entirely consisting of painfully familiar “Khrushchevs” to every Russian (which, by the way, are still quite highly quoted on the secondary market), still stand today, then their most famous American counterpart, as they say, very quickly ordered to live a long time. How did it start and why, in fact, did it not grow together?

St. Louis "Pruitt-Igoe", which was inaugurated in 1954, even from the point of view of a modern Russian man in the street, was quite an impressive residential complex, which, to be honest, and now could "fight" on equal terms for buyers with many domestic "economy class residential complexes". Judge for yourself: 33 high-rise buildings (11 floors each), the first floors of which were originally allocated for laundries, storage rooms and other non-residential auxiliary premises, richly landscaped adjacent territory with recreational areas, spacious public gallery spaces. The infrastructure was also well developed - at least two schools were attached to Pruitt-Igou. In general, everything, according to the basic principles of the famous Le Corbusier, modern, comfortable and functional. The author of a "miracle" hitherto unseen in America was made at that time by a little-known, but undoubtedly already gifted Japanese architect Yamasaki Minoru(the same one that later designed the tragically famous New York World Trade Center, destroyed during a series of terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001).

Great hopes were pinned on this complex, and more likely not so much of a social as of a political nature. Indeed, the day before in Missouri, the principles of segregation of black and white populations were abolished, so the opening of Pruitt Igou, on the construction of which was spent incredibly much at that time ($ 36 million), was presented as a monument to international friendship.

And this project began to function rather pompously: keys to comfortable apartments were handed over to thousands of families from the very “lower classes” of St. Louis society, who had previously lived in the most real slums. At the same time, the lucky ones did not have to pay anything for their accommodation, except for utility bills, and these bills were issued to tenants at a significant discount, so that in the end they could be called rather purely symbolic.

However, it soon became clear in practice that, contrary to the opinion Karl Marx, in this case, it was not being that determined the consciousness of the residents, but on the contrary, their previously acquired habits and inclinations began to determine their conditions of existence in this “communal paradise”. Almost immediately, "Pruitt-Igou" became a kind of "marginal state" with its own laws and concepts.

So, according to the recollections of local residents, there was almost never lighting in the entrances, since the bulbs either broke out of hooligan motives, or were twisted for resale literally a few minutes after they appeared. The galleries, originally designed for residents to celebrate together, have become an excellent arena for bloody showdowns. Moreover, there was even a kind of "temporary gradation": in the morning, schoolchildren were trying to sort out the relationship here, in the afternoon, older teenagers gathered wall to wall, and the time from dusk to dawn completely belonged to adult crime bosses and their henchmen.

“A girl or woman who recklessly found herself in the entrance without an escort,” recalled the one who grew up in this complex. Lucy Stoneholder, - almost immediately dragged herself into the freight elevator, where a group of local thugs was already waiting for her, after which the elevator was blocked by them from the inside somewhere between floors, and heart-rending screams of the victim for help shook the air for hours in vain. If the police preferred to look here, it was only during the day and only with a serious increase, because even they feared for their lives."

The result, as usual, was a little predictable. Five years later, only less than a third of the tenants remaining here (those who could, left at the first opportunity) were able to pay that very meager communal payment in full. After another 5 years, there were no more than 2% of such solvent tenants. By this time, there are no more normal personnel left in nearby schools, and all residential buildings are conditionally subdivided into “bad” and “good”. At the same time, the latter differ from the first only in that it is still possible to find untouched facade glazing in them here and there, the heaps of garbage in public places are not so huge, and fatal shootings occur somewhat less often. In the mid-60s, a little more than ten years after the ceremonial commissioning, the Pruitt-Igou, with its utilities destroyed below the critical level, and 99.9% populated exclusively by blacks, was an ideal location for filming grim post-apocalyptic action films.

In 1970, this area of St. Louis was officially designated a disaster zone, and local authorities have no choice but to take the most extreme measures and begin resettlement of "Pruitt-Igou". It looked something like this: sane residents are given orders to move to another place of residence, after which the police, together with army units, cordon off the tower-house, “clean up” it, catching out marginals and other asocial personalities, after which the building explodes safely. Two years after all thirty-three buildings were literally wiped off the face of the earth, the area was sowed with lawn grass, and the municipality of St. Louis is forced to spend time and energy on the next socialization of the "children of" Pruitt-Igou ".

By the way, it cannot be said that the Americans did not learn any lessons from the sad fate of this complex. On the contrary, local officials have learned a lot since then. In particular, now they do not concentrate social housing in large volumes in one specific place, so as not to provoke new "hotbeds of social tension."They prefer to evict malicious defaulters for utilities (as well as too zealous offenders) without regard to the composition and level of income of their families. Finally, they simply prefer to build social housing, which is, by default, devoid of any attractiveness and coziness with comfort. “Thus,” say some American sociologists, “we are encouraging the employers of such facilities to make certain efforts in order to change their own lives for the better.”

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