A “Hooverville” was a shanty town built during the Great Depression by the homeless in the USA. Named after President Herbert Hoover, who was blamed for the economic collapse. During the 1930s there were hundreds of these slums and hundreds of thousands of people lived in them. One of the Hoovervilles was found in Central Park, New York City where scores of homeless families camped out at the Great Lawn at Central Park, then an empty reservoir.
