With the aid of landmarks, the contemporary photograph (below) was recorded within a few yards of the historical one (above). On the far left horizon of the 1930s scene, parts of the Smith Tower, the City County Building and St. James Cathedral may be lined up to determine the site of this tidy Hooverville residence. Since the early 1970s this site has been a home for containers many times bigger than the improvised homes that once crowded these reclaimed tidelands.

Let us now praise both the unnamed builder and the architect of this elegant little shack. They were almost certainly the same person: a single, middle-aged man without means except those scrounged to build his tidy Great Depression home.

Our architect's one-room studio with attached kitchen has an ornamental front porch that makes a whimsical allusion to grandeur. The bathroom is unattached and away, resting on a short dock over Elliott Bay. This minimal home was one of about 500 built during the mid-1930s in Hooverville, a tideflats shantytown on the cleared acres of an abandoned shipyard south of Pioneer Square between East Marginal Way and Elliott Bay. An essayist writing in American Architect magazine described Hooverville homes as made "from local materials, honestly used." In this example one of the scrounged vertical boards showing is stamped "Northern Pacific Railroad."

This was not the first time squatters had taken up residence in the region. The early settlers — the Dennys, Terrys and Maples — built cabins and lean-tos on land that was not yet theirs by either treaty or outright conquest, rationalizing their land grabs as "making claims."

The Hooverville land grab began in 1932, when a flying squad of down-and-out men fed up with the flophouses around Pioneer Square joined to hastily raise their shack town. One week later and on schedule, the city acted on its threat and burned it down. But these men and many more just as quickly returned and built a mixed-race community that policed itself and eventually, working with city officials, tidied itself for curious visitors and the postman. Eight years later, this sprawl of small shanties was torched again — this time without much complaint or resistance. Many of the single men would later get jobs helping build warships near where they once lived.

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.