ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1963 Boone Hammond climbed to the fifth floor of one of the Pruitt buildings to knock on the door of a two-bedroom apartment which opened to the tiny stairwell landing. Mrs Coolidge invited him into the living-room after he explained that he was a student from Washington University interested in knowing how she felt about living in Pruitt-Igoe. As they sat down at the kitchen table in the combined living-dining room, he observed that the apartment was clean but bare, without any other furniture, floor covering, or curtains on the windows. Hammond learned later from the Housing Authority records that the Coolidges had been married about a year and a half and that they had a fifteen-month-old son. Mr Coolidge was twenty-one years old, and Mrs Coolidge, nineteen. Mrs Coolidge explained that they had lived in their apartment for only three months, having lived in the West End of St Louis for the first few months of their marriage. Both, however, had grown up in Pruitt-Igoe, and he learned later that both their parents still lived in the project.
