Shantytown

This week saw the removal of a recently constructed landmark in my neighborhood: a place I’d begun to call the Fountain Street Shantytown.

It sprung up approximately 3 weeks ago, starting out looking like a camp. In a spot behind a mini mall that’s popular with the regular neighborhood homeless folk, there was a mattress, a couple palettes, a stool – just a pile of stuff really.

Within days it evolved into a much more distinct dwelling. That Saturday, I first saw the inhabitant, who had long stringy hair and always dressed in a long skirts and black felt sun hat, walking up and down in front of the camp. Her face was smeared with black-paint-smeared and she held a broom overhead. Although I was in my car, it startled me. She seemed to be marking her territory.

Walking home from work around 10 p.m. a couple days later, I saw her again. The night seemed uncharacteristically dark despite the nearly full moon. Dressed in a black lace blouse, she was seated at the stool in front of a table and was moving her arms and hands as if playing the piano. But there was no sound. From my place across the street, I stopped to check if I might be able to take a photo, but it was too dark. She turned her head slowly in my direction and raised her arm before wiggling stiff fingers to wave at me. Needless to say, I was a little creeped out.

The next morning, I was walking to work and saw her arranging the area, moving a palette propped up against the building and adjusting a painting balanced on a pipe.

That night when a sudden rainstorm caused a heavy downpour, I was relieved to see the mattress area covered in plastic as I was coming home after dinner. When I walked by the next morning, she was dancing. Over the next couple days, the area kept expanding, now with more stuff and places to sit – and soon others were there with her during the day.

And then the writing appeared on the sidewalk nearby.

The same afternoon the message showed up, I crossed paths with her on the corner. For the first time I saw her close enough to notice she had an Adam’s apple. The next day I saw her entertaining the others at the camp. She’d removed her hat and was wearing a pair of tiny white-framed sunglasses as she played a small, stringless guitar. A couple days later, she seemed to be painting something on a board. And I saw her with the silent guitar again.

This was becoming an anthropological fascination for me. I tweeted my observations and told stories to my friends. Amid the news of the Sacramento homeless camp and families struggling in the Central Valley, this seemed like my hipster neighborhood’s version of dealing with the ugliness of the economic downturn. But like all of these situations, it needed to be fixed.

On the walk home from a bar last weekend with my roommate, she confessed to having called the Department of Sanitation to report the site as one of illegal dumping. They’d scheduled cleanup for Thursday. While I was surprised at how close to me the camp's demise had originated, I knew this day had to come. But it came early. The Shantytown was gone by Tuesday.