Pruitt-Igoe: Modernist Architecture Poisoned at Birth – No Place Without Spirit

The Cold War testing of the spread of zinc cadmium sulfide in urban areas that had similarities to the architecture of Soviet cities was part of Operation Large Area Coverage, or Operation LAC. In 1997 the National Research Council claimed that the spread of the powder posed no significant health risks to the population of the United States.

However, Lisa Martin-Taylor’s research at the University of Missouri indicates that segregated areas of St Louis where people of African-American descent were living were also subjected to a covert spin off of the Manhattan Project, and that in 1953-54 and 1963-65 secret tests were carried out by the US military to test the effects of weaponized radiation on the black population of these dense residential areas.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, Martin-Taylor identifies the site of Pruitt-Igoe was where these tests took place, described as a “densely populated slum district” of St Louis. A possible unknowing participant in this testing program was Doris Spates, a cancer survivor, whose fathered died in 1955, two years after the first tests, and whose four siblings also died of cancer at relatively young ages. Spates was born in 1955 on the top floor of one of the Pruitt-Igoe housing blocks. What she or her family did’t know, is that on the roof of the building, the US military had been and were to be spraying chemicals as part of Operation LAC and the Manhattan Project spin off by the Manhattan-Rochester coalition. Another witness, Mary Helen Brindell, recalls Army planes dropping a powdery substance, which she had to go and wash off her face at the time.

Robin

https://nulluslocussinegenio.c....om/2016/04/25/pruitt