Photograph by Paul Ockrassa, from the collection of the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.
In the ’30s, every big city had another little city within its borders, built near train tracks or industrial waterways or dumps. It was where you went after you lost your job and your house, where you patched together shelter from scrap metal, driftwood, and junk; nailed flattened sardine cans over holes in the floor; or curled a sheet of rusty tin into a tipsy chimney that puffed smoke over a tar-paper roof. “Hoovervilles” were named for the president we blamed for the Depression, and St. Louis’ was the largest. It ran a full mile along the Mississippi River, near the Municipal Bridge. It was so big, it spawned suburbs—Hoover Heights, Merryland, and Happyland—and 8,000 people lived there at its peak. There was a scrap-metal church and an orange-crate church (whose dedication in January 1932 was covered by The New York Times) and on any given morning, an improvised civic life. People sent their kids to school, hung wash, angled for catfish and turtles, or walked three blocks to the Welcome Inn, where they stood in line for baskets of bruised turnips and stale bread. Chicago burned its Hooverville; New York sent demolition crews to Central Park. In 1936, St. Louis sent a crew of Works Progress Administration workers to tear down the Mississippi River shanties. Or most of them—as late as the 1960s, the Globe-Democrat found people still living there. Mr. and Mrs. Charles Keenan’s shack had running water. Some might blink hard at the busted panes fixed with plastic sheeting, the porcelain veneer worn right off the sink, or the curtains, which look like they were spun from spider webs and soot. But the Keenans had wallpaper and tile, they had coffee to brew in the percolator, and they had food to season with that giant box of pepper on the stove. They don’t look peaceful, or joyous, or anything but faraway-eyed. But search their faces and you also see something steely and grounded, and the thought, It is ours.
