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January 1940. "Tenants living in a crackerbox. Slum tenement in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania." Medium format negative by Jack Delano. View full size.
Can't quite figure out what the collection of overhead wiring is all about, but I wonder if it has anything to do with the dark fan-like marks where the wall meets the ceiling.
[You are looking at cobwebs and clotheslines. - Dave]
Head slap: Of course, me bad.
I have one EXACTLY like that sitting out in the garage.
Owners, or even renters with a good landlord, would have swept away those cobwebs and swept the floor.
I am also always stunned by the beauty of tenements. Yes, they were deathtraps, yes, they were tiny and disease ridden, but by golly, they knew how to do woodwork around that plaster.
Beaver Falls, Joe Namath's hometown.
Interesting - I don't know the nuances of the term and it's not widely used in my experience, but I always thought of a crackerbox as a small, single family type home. This appears to be a tenement building of some sort.
[As stated in the caption. - Dave]
Yes but those are contradictory terms to my understanding.
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