ABSTRACT
In January, 1934, the writer was hired by the Washington Emergency Relief Administration to investigate Hooverville, one of the newer and increasingly popular residential districts of Seattle. During a widespread and protracted slump in real estate and the building trades, this area had been favored with an extraordinary "boom"—an expansion in open, noisy disregard of carefully drafted graphs and diagrams which showed clearly the critical state of a bed-ridden economic system. From the sandy waste of an abandoned shipyard site, almost in the shadow of the multi-story brick and steel sanitaria of indisposed business, was swiftly hammered and wired into flower a conglomerate of grotesque dwellings, a Christmas-mix assortment of American junk that stuck together in congested disarray like sea-soaked jetsam spewed on the beach. To honor a distinguished engineer and designer this unblueprinted, tincanesque architecturaloid was named Hooverville.
