Toilet Paper Hero of Hoover Dam

While not much is known about Alabam, his job was to clean the portable toilets of the Hoover Dam construction site, removing refuse and adding lime to waste and restocking toilet paper in the toilets.

According to historians, Alabam was a one-man sanitation crew for over 7000 workers who shored up a rock-walled canyon to build an engineering masterpiece of Hoover Dam, eventually providing water to America’s West. Alabam, likely was from Alabama, and Liguori sculpted his likeness from a 1930s photo of the Depression-era sanitation worker, as a tribute to one of Hoover Dam’s unsung construction heroes. Liguori sculpted the figure in bronze in a two-week project, an eight-foot tall likeness and added in copper wiring from Hoover Dam’s electrical grid to represent the connection between the man and the engineering marvel in Nevada.

The Alabam statue is of an older man (likely in his seventies) in overalls, thick gloves and a fedora with a broom on his shoulder and an interesting garland of toilet paper rolls around his neck. The statue was unveiled on June 29, 2007.

With Alabam or The Toilet Paper Man of Hoover Dam, the artist paid his respects to an unsung, proud working-class representative and champion, instrumental in the many tasks that led to Hoover Dam becoming an engineering wonder. Aptly, the statue is located in front of Boulder City’s public washrooms.