a tale of two camps

Here’s an interesting juxtaposition: from Minnesota Public Radio, the 55th anniversary of the burning of Swede Hollow:

Some people thought of it as a sort of stopping off place on their way to greater prosperity, but for a lot of people it was the place where they lived. So, you paid five dollars a year for a right to live in that Swede Hollow. Early immigrants who came there, settled there. Some of them worked at the Hamm’s brewery just above, some worked in construction in St. Paul. There’s some indication that some of those Swede Hollow people helped build James J. Hill’s House.

And from the New York Times, a photo essay about an immigrant camp perched on the bluffs above Union City, New Jersey:

“I was shocked that people could live like this so close to a great city like New York,” she said. “I wondered: How did they live? What were their days like?”

What’s the difference between these two shanty towns? Besides half a continent, half a century, and a few shades of skin color, not a thing. Swede Hollow (and the Irish camp nearby, Connemara Patch; Minneapolis had the Bohemian Flats on the west bank of the Mississippi) have taken on a gauzy layer of nostalgia, and upstanding people can proudly trace their immigrant roots to such hardscrabble settlements. But the similarities are much greater than the differences.

The piece on Union City’s camp notes that it has “been there for decades”; much as we would like to imagine that shanty towns are a new development of our current economic distress, they’re a much more systemic phenomenon. Where there’s a need for cheap labor–whether to build a railroad monopolist’s mansion by the cathedral, or to clean a hedge fund manager’s Manhattan apartment–there will be off-the-grid, casual camps for people who can’t afford more than discarded tarps and tar paper. The powers-that-be regard them with a wink and a nod, at least until they become more inconvenient than the laborers they house are worth.