Hotel de Minto is More Complicated than Cheery Charity

Photos of the "Hotel de Minto" sometimes make it look like a charming act of charity.

Yesterday's piece in Salem Reporter repeats that frame, oversimplifies, and erases much of the ambiguity around the "hotel." In our current politics, it risks operating as a de facto kind of copaganda, perhaps intended by the City as a way to shore up support for a mode of homeless shelters.

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From the piece:

Hotel de Minto was sometimes referred to in jest as the name of Salem’s city jail, but it was actually a place where transients stayed who had nowhere else to go. The earliest mentions of the hotel can be found in the Oregon Statesman beginning in 1885.

The Minto name is associated with three of Salem’s early city law enforcement officers who were descendants of the Oregon pioneer John Minto....

Local newspaper accounts reported that Hotel de Minto was open and managed by Salem’s police from the late 1800s and through 1925.

However, during the Great Depression, then-Police Chief Frank Minto opened the Hotel de Minto as a shelter and a place to get a hot meal - serving a need in the community as it had historically.

Early mentions of the "Hotel de Minto" are clear that it was primarily carceral. Any jest about the minimalist accommodations was sardonic and ironic.

June 10th, 1887

A few years later, under a different head of police, it was called the Hotel de Gibson. Its occupants had little choice in the matter. And the goal was not to serve people in distress but to "rid the city of the hobo element."

Sept. 15th, 1903

The place, in or near the City jail and at old City Hall, and the phrase "Hotel de [Chief of Police]" has a pretty specific meaning and cultural context built up over two generations. The Hotel was not primarily an act of generosity or charity. Vagrancy was a crime, and the Hotel the containment and punishment.

February 7th, 1923

By the time of the Great Depression and the Hotel's association with the federal transient relief service, it may be that the valence changed some. There are accounts of people seemingly "applying" for a night at the Hotel, but the threat of arrest and greater punishment might have compelled people to make that "application."

In 1934 Lord & Schryver helped with a redesign of the Auto Camp Grounds into what is now Pringle Park. Laborers from the Hotel de Minto worked on the landscaping. It's a little ambiguous how truly "voluntary" was the work, however. It was very much a shelter with strings attached, and there may have been a threat of greater punishment had people not checked themselves into the Hotel de Minto.

April 19th, 1934

Other news items clearly underscored carceral themes. In 1932 a central function of the Hotel was that the residents be "under police surveillance." People were limited to 24 hours only, and could not be readmitted for two weeks. The message clearly was "move along now." 

Many people camping in cars or tents here are residents, and a shelter that kicked them out after a day or two would not at all make a dent in our housing crisis. So its mode of "serving the community" is different from what our current conditions require.

October 4th, 1932

A year later, transients at the Hotel might be "listed for placement in concentration camps." After World War II we understand the phrase with more deadly gravity, but it is still dehumanizing in the Salem of 1933.

December 14th, 1933

In a case from 1938 a person had exceeded their time at the Hotel and they were expelled from Salem after being charged with vagrancy.

February 4th, 1938

The Hotel de Minto was not primarily some beneficent charity or altruistic gesture. It is very much part of a system of criminalizing homelessless and joblessness and of making them go away. To say that "The work of Frank Minto received national recognition for creating a place to take care of the transient population during the hard times of the Depression" is to understand "care" more as "take care of an unwanted problem" than "give care to someone in need."

Additionally, most of the "transients" seem truly to be people on the move, often associated with riding the rails, and not residents of Salem who camp in tents and tarps or in cars. The modern meaning and purpose of a homeless shelter is often quite different - though of course not always so.

The piece isn't false, but it definitely has a perspective and bias, and does not represent the Hotel de Minto with its full range of meaning and ambiguity in history.

Previously:

• Here, on the rhetoric of dirt, especially: "City Council, November 18th - On the Hobo Element, Purity, and Danger" (2019).
  
• A history talk postponed because of Pandemic times, "Panel at the Mill to talk in March about Hobo Element in History - Postponed" (2020).
  
• And a piece not mentioned, which covers the same territory, at the SJ, "Old city hall 'hotel' served Salem's homeless during Great Depression" (2018). The journalistic convention to omit citations and credit is so strange. Especially online where it is easy to link or to drop notes at the bottom of a piece, and word count is less of a factor.
• For more on the Auto Camp, see this brief note on its origin in the early 1920s.