Shantytown, USA: Forgotten Landscapes of the Working Poor by Lisa Goff (review)

In the last few years, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other American cities with moderate climates and even milder political attitudes have suffered a new wave of informal encampments of homeless people. Tent villages housing tens or even hundreds of impermanent residents are a common sight on sidewalks, adjacent to freeway on-ramps, and under bridges. The incursion of such ragged lodgings into the accustomed order of the central business district shocks and offends many of those who occupy the "polite" sphere of the surrounding blocks.

Uneasiness over the presence of such makeshift settlements within the bounds of conventional society has a long history in urban America, as Lisa Goff demonstrates in her valuable survey Shantytown, USA. Goff takes readers on a striking journey through many informal communities to demonstrate their ubiquitous presence, despite our general inability to see them in the historical landscape. While the author's enthusiastic interpretation sometimes outpaces the available evidence, vernacular architecture scholars will appreciate both the record of the shanty's physical form that Goff provides and her examination of the important role shanties have played in the American psyche.

Goff rightly avoids arguing about a precise definition of her subject, as the origins of the term are lost in time and mythology, and the physical character of the shanty varied over time and place. Generally, the shanty form was similar in the country and the city: a single-story, one-room "hut" with a low ceiling that made use of whatever materials were at hand for construction. A sampling of the items listed in the index under "Shanty construction materials" is instructive: rough boards or planks, dirt or mud, tin cans, stolen fence posts, car and truck parts, palmetto thatch, and so on. Some of the construction types mentioned will be familiar to vernacularists, such as box houses, earthfast construction, and the flounder house. Goff points out the importance of shantytown layouts: they were not random, but rather used land forms, buildings, fences, and other devices to provide privacy and deter outsiders. Domestic spaces typically accommodated informal work activities as well as living quarters; so many shanty colonies featured subsistence or even commercial agriculture that most images of shantytowns featured a symbolic goat representing the rural aspects of these communities.

Goff is particularly interested in the cultural meanings of this building type. "The shanty was a migratory house form come to rest in growing cities," she informs us, "where it inspired a working-poor aesthetic of dwelling that reflected values of reinvention and adaptation" (90). Her higher purpose for tracking through this unfamiliar territory is to restore shantytowns to the prominent place they occupied in the minds of Americans historically and to understand how, like the scruffy homeless encampments today, the seeming disorder of these environments rattled middle-class sensibilities about how to live a proper and propertied life in the modern city. Goff sets up shantytowns and their unconventional occupants as a counterweight to the driving force of "the grid" (as in the city grid)—her metaphor for "a progressive American ideal grounded in ideas and icons of orderly settlement" (40).

Goff begins the expedition with one of the uber-symbols of "shanty-ness" in American culture: Thoreau's "cabin" at Walden Pond. The author has fun poking holes in Thoreau's representation of his modest pile: "At Walden, Thoreau built a shanty. In Walden, he persuades readers that it was a house" (3). She points out that Thoreau obtained much of the building material for his cabin by buying and tearing down an actual shanty belonging to Irish railroad worker James Collins and his family, who lived in one of the shantytowns that housed workers constructing the Fitchburg Railroad that passed by Walden Pond. Thoreau chose not to see these alternative households as part of his surroundings, nor did he value the shantyman's resilience...