Read American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work for Free Online

up collections to keep the property of their fellows out of the hands of banks.
    But efforts such as these had no wide effect, and shantytowns filled with the homeless became the most visible signs of the nation’s distress. Areas of cities and pockets of countryside resembled war zones where civilians took shelter in the rubble. Depression humor had given these places a name, “Hoovervilles,” just as the president’s name was attached to other signs of destitution for which, as people saw it, Hoover bore the blame. Empty pockets pulled inside out were Hoover flags. Jackrabbits or other small game that could add substance to a meager stewpot were Hoover hogs. Hoovervilles sprang up almost overnight, at railroad junctions, alongside city dumps, on riverfronts, and in parks and other vacant lands. When empty and abandoned buildings were available, the homeless occupied them, too.
    The Hooverville in Seattle, Washington, sprawled over nine acres of a defunct shipyard near the docks south of downtown. City officials burned it down twice when it sprang up in the fall of 1931, but relented after the squatters rebuilt it a third time. It eventually grew to 479 acres with 639 residents; an unemployed lumberjack named Jesse Jackson kept the peace and was the colony’s liaison with the city and nearby businesses. More than a thousand people lived in a Hooverville alongside the Mississippi River in St. Louis, where they built a church from orange crates. Two hundred men lived in the Youngstown, Ohio, dump, some in huts burrowed into the refuse. The incinerator provided winter warmth, and they got some of their food from the dump’s garbage house, where they competed for the rotting scraps with local women foraging for their families. Connie Eisler Smith, whose father had invented a way to mass-produce radio tubes and incandescent lamps and thus was spared the ravages of the depression, remembered at age five riding in the family’s chauffeur-driven car past the city dump in Newark, New Jersey, and seeing shacks of tin and cardboard built in the garbage piles. Pittsburgh’s shantytown, by the railroad yards five minutes from downtown, spread over a city block and housed 300 residents who proclaimed Father Cox, of the January march on Washington, their “mayor.”
    In New York, where the legally elected mayor, “Gentleman Jimmy” Walker, was a corruption-tainted playboy unsuited to governing the city in hard times, these impromptu communities popped up in every corner. The New Yorker magazine suggested that anyone “wanting to see civilization creaking” should visit a shantytown near the Hudson River piers. Some of the city’s homeless took up residence in Central Park. An unemployed carpenter named Hollinan made a home out of a cave and lived there with his wife for almost a year. Another man converted a baby buggy into a makeshift shelter. A group of out-of-work tradesmen set up near the obelisk behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, building shanties out of bricks and egg crates that were made to withstand the ravages of winter. They called it Hoover Valley. The place grew from a handful of shacks in December 1931 to seventeen the following summer. Its residents could look west above the tree line and see the towers of Central Park West’s luxurious apartment houses, or east to the elegant buildings on Fifth Avenue, many now half empty as even the rich downsized to save money. City police and parks department workers tolerated the inhabitants of Hoover Valley and generally treated them with respect, bantering with them on their patrols through the park but otherwise leaving them alone. Eventually the health department ordered the colony shut down for lack of sanitation, but new arrivals were building foundations for their own shacks even as the department was preparing its written notice of eviction.
    Efforts to solve homelessness were the same haphazard, uncoordinated mess as those meant to create jobs. In Connecticut,