The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1932-06-27
BY DOUGLAS MCDONALD

east corner of West and Springs
Streets-only few blocks from Wall
Street-homeless and unemployed
men are living in holes duge out of
the ground, in shacks sunk into de-
serted cellars, in Lighthouses made Of
boxes pieced together.
Over $50 unemployed have been
living here, harassed by the police
and starving for many months. This
is in Manhattan, in the heart OF
New York City.
On the north end of this block,
walled in (and the unemployed walled
out) by a high tight board fence,
the new freight station of the New
York Central is being built. But
the south half is barren and unfenced
the houses having been torn down.
The unsightly cellar holes and piles
of broken brick are all that remain.
All, that is, except the homes OF the
unemployed, the miserable shacks
and boxes flinlsily erected in the
shallow holes where houses formerly
stood. There are perhaps fifty of
these shacks, though the number is
difficult to estimate because many OF
them are small coffin-like boxes,
hidden behind somewhat larger
shacks, and concealed from the wind
and from view in holes.
Homes under Capitalism
In one shack, made-as are all the
shacks-from pieces of wooden boxes,
strips of rusty tin or sheet iron
picked up from dump heaps, stove
had been improvised from common
lard tin, hole cut in the bottom and
old pieces of rusty stove-pipe at
tached and fastened together so that
the chimney reached up through the
low leaky roof. In filthy hunks ar
ranged in one corner, taking up half
the space of the small room, three
men, Negro workers, have lived and
slept through the winter months,
going out daily on the hopeless quest
for work. One of the men was
skilled worker, carpenter and mol
der, but had had no work for seven
months. The other two-all three
real workers who had been self
supporting all their lives - were
unskilled laborers. A cripple lived
few feet away in dog-house-8 by
3 feet, and Ia feet high-lned
with pieces of corrugated cardboard
torn from discarded paper boxes, and
bedded down with newspapers. 1t
was so low that he could only lie
down after crawling through the tiny
| square hole that served as door. An
other man, who had been working on
the stock market for two years be-
fore the depression, lived in a
wretched hut-wretched despite the
effort to give semblance of home
likeness to a mongrel mailing together
of nondescript boards and pieces of
tin-stood in the door of his hut. =.
and trembling from hunger.
Three-fourths of the $50 men are
Negro workers, always the hardest
hit among the masses. But in these,
huts are also Mexicans, Italians,
Spanish and few Irish. They are
bona fide workers, many of whom
had wives and children to take care
of, but whose families have long ago
been dispersed, or have died. AS we
talk with them, we find that one has
been living here four months, an
other six months, another eight
months. All had jobs at one time,
and lived in rooms or in rented
apartments which, poor as they
might be, were better than the cave
huts they now occupied. One man,
an Italian, had been in business
he said,-had run bowling alley on
Avenue A for several yeras.
Pick mp Some Food
How do they live? They pick up
waste wood for their fires, to keep
warm, to heat water, to cook car
rot or potato they pick up around
the market. Some odd job may be
picked up once or so in a week,
bringing in dime or quarter
cleaning up mess in yard or
cellar, watching a truck for half
hour while the driver gets his lunch,
some such trivial task-and then
few wieners are bought, or loaf of
bread.
Why don't they go to the Num-
cipal Lodging Hou5e on the East
River? One and all agree that the
|Municipalf Iodaiug House In worse