Photography by Isaac Sievers, courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
People were thinking that the worst was over when Elliott’s Cut Price Department Store opened in 1931. Bankers weren’t tumbling from windows; the stock market woozed a bit less woozily. But what was unfolding under the Free Bridge spoke otherwise. In 1930, a broke Soulard produce vendor, Gus Smith, built a cabin from pallets and scrap metal under the bridge and dubbed it Happyland. His ersatz suburb blossomed: Happyland soon bordered Merryville, which bordered Hoover Heights. An open kitchen called the Welcome Inn set up under the bridge, employing shanty wives to shuck green beans that would go into canned soups they’d later warm over an open campfire. In 1933, St. Louis’ unemployment spiked at 35 percent. If you had 50 cents, you didn’t buy trifles; you bought bread—or cheap beer in a dark bar as the Whiskey Bottle Boys played “The St. Louis Blues” on liquor-bottle xylophones, a perfect, absurd, and hopeless theme song for desperate times.
