---

K: Can you give me a physical description of Boulder when you arrived. What did it look like? M: Well, the downtown section looked very neat and nice. Then we got down to Avenue M, which was the last street on the east side of Boulder City. [We lived on Avenue M when we first arrived.] I didn’t think very much of it. Most of the houses were, I think you might even say, shacky looking. Some of them were built with whatever they had, and they really were not substantial housing, I don’t think. Some of them were better built than others, but it was sort of like a shack town, Avenue M, and that’s where everybody landed that were latecomers coming into town. That’s the only place that they could find to rent, was down there. K: Was that part of what was called McKeeversville? M: No. McKeeversville was over the hill, down in the valley. No, that was the east end of town. The very east end of town was Avenue M. K: Who had built those houses? M: Mostly, there wasn’t a company that built the houses on Avenue M. It was mostly individuals built their own homes, their own places. Avenue L had some duplexes where we. . .after about 5 or 6 months, why, we did have one of the duplexes. And they were built by a company, but I’m not sure what the company was. But they were pretty substantial, pretty nice places. Fairly nice, but you had to wait in line to get into one of those. K: What set that Avenue M area apart? You said that it was late arrivals. Was there anything else that set it apart from the rest of town? M: No, it was just that that was the only place available to rent, you see. The town was built from Avenue A on over to Avenue F, [which] was the last street that had company homes on it. No, there might be some beyond, but they were the bigger homes through California Street. And they were all what they called the company homes. The government homes were up north. They were north of Arizona Street and on up on Colorado and Denver Street. And then, of course, they had the [California Water & Power Company homes] and the other houses that were built in that section of town. This section of town was all the company homes. K: Can you describe the differences between the government homes and the company homes? M: Company homes were very, very different. The government homes were mostly brick and they were built very substantially. The company homes were fairly well built, but they were usually 1- or 2-bedroom homes, one bath. Most of the bigger homes, the 2-bedroom places, had a porch two thirds of the way around- - [a] screened-in porch. And then there was some smaller one bedroom ones. I don’t remember whether those others were later type houses that they could take out. They were more like a trailer home. They had some of those down below what is now New Mexico, but they were just brought in there. They weren’t permanent homes at all. And some of the company homes were not permanent homes, either. Some of them have been rebuilt now, and made into permanent homes. But [on] this street, Avenue H, I don’t remember whether there was any of the homes here. If they were, they were the homes that were taken off of the street. These are all new homes. These were all built later on. This home was built in the 1940s. So, evidently the homes that were built were taken off of this land.

---

Before You Build the Dam	Politics of Building the Dam	Construction of the Dam
Controversy over Naming the Dam	Oral Histories	A Last Look at the Hoover Dam