Hamilton’s Great Depression ‘Shacktown’ is reminiscent of city’s homeless encampments

We must remember that these are exceptionally hard times. The majority of these people are without work. They have their little homes, and can manage to get enough to eat and scrape by. If they are thrown out bag and baggage, they will have nowhere to go."

- Hamilton alderman John Sherring, supporting Cootes Paradise squatters during the Great Depression.

The ragged tents are spread out on the sidewalk at the corner of York and Bay beneath the flashing FirstOntario Centre sign that towers above.

There are maybe a dozen makeshift homes outside the arena, stretching east toward the Hamilton Public Library in front of street level billboards for the Hamilton Bulldogs.

It's a scene, in the midst of the pandemic, that shows how marginalized people are struggling. And it's not the only encampment in the city. There are others beside rail trails and in parks with scores of other people living in enclosures made of nylon, polyester or canvas.

Tom Cooper, the director of Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction, says it brings to mind the so-called Shacktown' in Hamilton, an enclave of squatters living in ramshackle boathouses in Cootes Paradise during the Great Depression.

Shacks are more durable than tents, but many of the issues were the same.

Then, like now, people in difficult circumstances were trying to find their way by living on the edge of society.

Then, like now, the city tried to move them into more traditional housing, away from conditions that were seen to be unhealthy, unsafe and an eyesore.

Today we have a similar situation as before. We have a major economic upheaval 90 years later and people out of desperation are finding themselves in very similar circumstances as the Great Depression," says Cooper.

In recent years we have seen huge spikes in rental costs. For people who have to rely on affordable housing, it often just isn't there. So people are looking to have some kind of alternative shelter.

When desperation hits them, people look for other alternatives."

Sharon Crowe, staff lawyer at the Hamilton Community Legal Clinic, says, They are living on the fringes. They are the most marginalized people. They don't always do well with a lot of rules and restricted conditions."

Crowe has been involved in a legal challenge to prevent the City of Hamilton from clearing away homeless people living in public spaces.

As it stands now, a Superior Court injunction prevents the city from shutting down tent encampments until early September when the issue will be explored further. The move comes after tents were cleared earlier this summer at locations including Jackie Washington Rotary Park and the former John A. Macdonald Secondary School downtown.

Crowe feels the squatters should be left alone because, among other reasons, there is some justification to the view that living in a tent is safer for some than a multi-unit accepted shelter" during a pandemic.

An affordable housing shortage and a struggling economy are problems compounded by the anxiety about contracting COVID-19 in a communal living environment," she says.

McMaster University history professor Ken Cruikshank, has written about Hamilton's Shacktown and also sees similarities between then and now.

You do hear echoes. I don't know if the people who lived there (in Cootes Paradise) would think of themselves in the same category as people who are homeless but I suspect they are close to being in the same category," he says.

A big driver of the public debate at the time was the unsightly appearance of the tattered buildings and a push to spruce up the city's image.

In an article co-authored by Cruikshank with Nancy Bouchier, called The War on the Squatters, 1920-1940," the writers wrote: For city planners and urban reformers the boathouse colony was a problem. It stood in the way of their plans to transform Hamilton into an aesthetically-pleasing, and therefore a moral and orderly, city beautiful.'

Their cultural vision had no room for the tar-paper homes of working-class people and they determined that the houses must go."

There were fears of disease and fire and many saw the community of more than 100 boathouses and shacks as a retreat for the immorally inclined" where gambling, prostitution, and other crimes flourished amongst dangerous transients and outlaws beyond the authority of the city," the article says.

But with the worsening Depression through the early 1930s, the city faced opposition. The Depression gave them (the Shacktown residents) a bit of leverage because the city didn't want to be seen as pushing them out when times are tough," says Cruikshank.

Residents themselves dug in along with assistance from sympathetic civic leaders such as alderman Sherring and controller Nora Frances Henderson who said beautification goes a little too far" when we have to turn people out of their homes in these hard times."

But the drive to turn Cootes Paradise into a park and a more pleasant vista for a rejuvenated western entrance to the city was unstoppable. A fire that led to the death of two children and burned down six boathouses underscored inherent dangers of a community detached from city services.

In stages the shacks were removed through the 1930s, with a few last holdouts being demolished in the 1950s.

It left only memories of a unique community and a reference point to help understand the plight of the homeless in the decades to come.

Mark McNeil is a Hamilton-based freelance contributing columnist for The Spectator. Reach him via email: Markflashbacks@gmail.com