Dinky Dau's House

Ray Black is a Vietnam Veteran who has been forgotten by a nation and put out on the street by a healthcare system. Ray spends his nights between slabs of concrete and noise. He hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in over 40 years. Ray picks the underside of a bridge on Broad Street and I-24 in Chattanooga, TN; because he feels that he needs to live in a place that the sound can drown out the voices of guilt raining in his head. He replaces his tattered cardboard home with this newly suspended structure. It’s made of scrap metal from a nearby demolished steel mill. Ray welds the shell himself with the help of a local scrap yard from across the brow of Lookout Mountain. The interior is insulated with cardboard. He uses an old pipe cap for a stool and fashions a bed and desk out of large cardboard boxes.