The town made do with makeshift schoolrooms until the city won the right for state-funded schools to be established on the federal reservation upon which Boulder City was situated. On the other hand, there was no provision for schools in the burgeoning city, probably because the Bureau of Reclamation expected that single male workers would populate the town. There were limits to the number of different types of stores allowed in the city, and all who wished to begin a business were screened for character and financial viability. The most radically modified portions of DeBoer's plan were in these lower-class residential blocks, where open space and parks were largely eliminated.Ĭommercial development was restricted and severely regulated under Sims Ely, the city manager.
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Managers were housed further down the hill, and dwellings for manual laborers were located furthest away from the public buildings and parks. The most important employees had their residences on top of the hill nearer the apex. The status of the workers on the Hoover Dam was reflected in their house sizes and locations. The town was designed to house approximately 5,000 workers. The provision of green landscape was another expression of the Bureau of Reclamation's "mission to reclaim and 'green' the American West." Nevertheless, its allowance for public space and copious amounts of landscaping earned it the moniker "Nevada's Garden City". The plan was deemed too expensive to carry out in its original form and was modified to allow for more regular block sizes. The plan submitted by DeBoer in 1930 was formal and symmetrical with a park and the Bureau of Reclamation building at the termination of the two main axes. There was to be an emphasis on a clean-living environment for dam workers. Because the Hoover Dam project itself represented a focus for optimism for a country suffering from the effects of the Great Depression, the town itself was to be an additional manifestation of this optimism.
DeBoer had been a planner for Denver, Colorado, and was to design many towns and suburbs around the Rocky Mountain region. īoulder City was carefully planned through federal supervision as a model community, with Dutch-born urban architect Saco Rienk de Boer contracted to plan it. Their ramshackle edifices were collectively known as "Ragtown".
Men hoping for work on the dam project had begun settling along the river in tents soon after the precise site for the dam had been chosen by the Bureau of Reclamation in 1930. Its sole reason for existence was the need to house workers contracted to build the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River (known commonly as Boulder Dam from 1933 to 1947, when it was officially renamed Hoover Dam by a joint resolution of Congress). The land upon which Boulder City was founded was a harsh, desert environment. History Beginnings as federal company town
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