Hortense Davis sat beside neat stacks of new magazines in the pristine administrative office at Penn South, the 1960s high-rise housing cooperative development for low- and moderate-income workers in Chelsea. She was asked to ponder life there across 20 years.

“Perfect,” she said after a shrug, stumped to come up with some complaint. “Especially if, like me, you live alone and don’t drive, because it’s close to shops and transportation, it’s secure, the grounds are beautiful in the summer.” Ms. Davis, a 76-year-old former Brooklynite, has an apartment on the ninth floor, facing the Hudson. “It’s like a penthouse,” she told me. “I like to stand at my window and watch the ships.”

I went to Penn South this week, having seen “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Chad Freidrichs’s shattering documentary, now at the IFC Center. Pruitt-Igoe was the notorious St. Louis public-housing complex, demolished in 1972. Images of imploded Pruitt-Igoe buildings, broadcast worldwide, came to haunt the American consciousness. Critics of welfare, big government and modern architecture all used the project as a whipping boy. “The day that modern architecture died,” Charles Jencks, the architect and apostle of postmodernism, called the demolition.