Hooverville Then and Now: From Central Park Shacks to Modern Encampments: Comparing the Crises of Then and Now

Two Eras. One Crisis. The Same Haunting Question.

In the autumn of 1930, a sprawling makeshift village of tarp-roofed shacks and smoking stovepipes occupied the drained Lower Reservoir of Central Park — just out of sight of Manhattan's limestone wealth. Nearly a century later, tent encampments rise within view of those same towers.

How did we arrive at this exact same precipice twice?

Hooverville Then and Now takes you to the ridge overlooking both crises — and challenges you to solve the puzzle.

What You'll Discover

• How the 1929 financial collapse hurled engineers, stonemasons, and white-collar clerks into a park basin almost overnight
• How today's crisis — a slow-motion fracture of housing supply, wage stagnation, and frayed safety nets — produced the same tragic human effect through entirely different machinery
• How out-of-work professionals built a functioning society under the windows of society's elite — and how that community ultimately met its end
• What the diverging roots, societal blindness, and political choices of both eras reveal about why we seem condemned to repeat them

History rarely repeats itself precisely — but it rhymes with devastating clarity. By comparing then and now, Hooverville Then and Now offers a powerful diagnostic lens for understanding our current housing and economic crises, and what it will take to dismantle them for good.

By Lenny Piazza