Jefferson and Cass Avenue

Pruitt–Igoe was initially seen as a breakthrough in urban renewal. One early resident described her 11th floor apartment as a "poor man's penthouse". Pruitt–Igoe was officially desegregated by a Supreme Court decision in 1954, and as many as 40 percent of the initial tenants were white, but by the mid 1960s it had become exclusively African American.

Pruitt–Igoe consisted of 33 eleven-story concrete apartment buildings, clad in brick, on a 57-acre site, on the north side, bounded by Cass Avenue on the north, North Jefferson Avenue on the west, Carr Street on the south, and North 20th Street on the east. Each building was 170 feet long; most contained between 80 and 90 units, although some buildings had up to 150. The complex totaled 2,870 apartments (1,736 in Pruitt and 1,132 in Igoe) housing more than 10,000 people at full occupancy.

At 3:00 pm on March 16, 1972, the St. Louis Housing Authority demolished the first of thirty-three high rises of the Pruitt Igoe housing project through detonation. One month later, the agency demolished a second tower. These highly-publicized and well-documented events were not supposed to usher the end of the notorious housing project, but to foster its rebirth. Instead these incidents would become trauma that has never been resolved for St. Louis, or for the nation.

The spectacle of the detonations created momentum toward the accelerated death of Pruitt-Igoe, and led to public sentiment against high-rise housing and even modernist architecture. For decades, architects and historians have mythologized Pruitt Igoe's failure as the "death of modernism," and have placed the blame on the architects, Helmuth, Yamasaki and Leinweber, for problems that are now known to be the result of complex political and economic circumstances. Minoru Yamasaki himself expressed his belief that the project was a failure, and made no mention of it in his autobiography. The architect's own last word on Pruitt Igoe, like the site itself, is a void.

After more demolitions by sensational detonation on July 15th, 1972, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the St. Louis Housing Authority decided to demolish all of the remaining buildings. By 1977, the last block was demolished and the site cleared. Residents never returned to what had become their neighborhood, and the 57-acre site would sit dormant until 1989, when the St. Louis Public Schools developed 14 acres for a public school site. Since Pruitt–Igoe's demolition, various plans have been put forth for the use of its site, including a golf course, a business park, and a 50-story tower. An elementary school was built on part of the site in 1995, but as of 2023 most of it remains vacant, even as adjacent lots have been redeveloped.

In 2020, Ponce Health Sciences University announced its intention to construct an $80 million facility on the site. When completed, the facility is planned to house the Ponce Health Sciences University School of Medicine in St. Louis. In 2021, a developer submitted zoning applications for the construction of office buildings and a hotel on the site. An urgent care center named after the former Homer G. Phillips Hospital was built in 2022, but restrictions related to the construction of a new headquarters for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on an adjacent lot were reportedly stalling the redevelopment of the site.