I can give a little context for that photo.

The location is typically given as 935 South State, which coincidentally enough is across the street from where I live in Chicago. So I've always been intrigued by it, but never found a lot of info on exactly how it was set up, or if there were similar operations elsewhere in the city.

At the time, that part of State Street was one of Chicago's secondary Skid Rows, lined with cheap bars, pawnshops, probably a couple of bordellos, and quite a few residential hotels. Some were respectable enough to attract railroad workers—the guys who were on the "extra board" for one of the railroads with stations a block or two away. Those guys would get enough work most months to be able to keep a room paid by the month, but during the Depression a lot of that work dried up as well. Other buildings along State were "cage hotels," with partitions that only went seven or eight feet high and chickenwire across the top of the cubicles to prevent entry by thieves or other miscreants but still allow shared ventilation. One of those cage hotels (the New Ritz) continued to operate on the block until about a decade ago. It's the building with the fire escapes in this view looking south.

I'm no expert on Capone, but we do know his headquarters was at the Lexington Hotel, northeast corner of Michigan & Cermak, 1.5 miles away. At the time, that wouldn't really have been thought of as the same neighborhood. It was pretty common for taverns of the era to offer free lunches as a way of encouraging noontime drinking. Capone, who'd come to prominence in Chicago operating the Four Deuces saloon (and underworld nerve center) for Big Jim Colosimo, would have known that tradition well. As for the actual operations of the soup kitchen, this history.com article seems to be as thoroughly researched as can probably be done 90 years later. A few additional details appear in this Mental Floss piece.

The South State Street Skid Row, which is discussed in Donald J. Bogue's 1963 book Skid Row in American Cities, began to fade away with the decline of passenger trains in the 1960s and closing of the South Loop train stations in the 1970s. The area was heavily redeveloped beginning in 1980.

Let's start with a big picture view. One of the things that tends to surprise people nowadays is just how patchwork the little relief available was at the height of the Great Depression. That came from a couple of sources. At the top, despite having any number of first hand reports of just how terrible things were from all over the country, Rappleye makes a very strong case for Hoover outright refusing to believe most of them, which conveniently fit his personal belief that the federal government had no role to play in direct relief. (When particularly moved, he'd quietly write a personal check here or there.)

Chicago, though, was among the worst of the worst indirectly thanks to Capone. As I've written before, without the concurrent state and local enforcement allowed by the Volstead Act, the risk of prosecution and penalties dropped substantially for most violators. In Chicago, this was even more pronounced by the massive opposition to Prohibition among the Catholic and immigrant communities; nonbinding 1922 and 1926 referenda against restrictions on alcohol had passed overwhelmingly, largely thanks to margins in those communities that in many precincts were well north of 80%.

And why not? Despite the outside reputation of Chicago as the murder capital of the United States, unless you crossed into that realm yourself by bootlegging or running other criminal enterprises (and paying Capone protection money, which by itself in the middle of the decade provided him something like $1 million a month), even as an imbibing customer, you had very little interaction with the violence in the streets except reading about it in the papers - at least until 1930, when faced with declining revenue and higher risk of prosecution, Capone decided to expand his empire to things like dry cleaning and other legitimate businesses and threatened - and sometimes used - violence against those who wouldn't sell out on the cheap. (More on business conditions in a moment.)

One of the other consequences of the citizen revolt in 1922 and 1926, though, was the 1927 reestablishment in power of one of the most genuinely corrupt and incompetent Wet politicians anywhere in that era, William "Big Bill" Thompson, who had already been forced from office under a cloud of allegations after a previous term, and whose ability to administer government was mostly predicated on bribes collected.

This worked while the money was good, but as the citizens of Chicago found out the hard way, when things got bad and they actually required services from City Hall, the Second City may very well have been the single worst place to reside in the entire United States. From Kobler:

"No major American city suffered more, for the nationwide economic disaster was here compounded by the prodigality of the third Thompson administration. That year it squandered $23,000,000 above what it could collect in taxes. Outraged citizens organized a tax strike. Fifteen hundred municipal employees, among them teachers, firemen and policemen, had to be dropped from the payrolls, and those kept on went weeks without pay. To make work for its unemployed members, the Chicago Typographical Union ordered those who had jobs to lay off two days a month. With state, county and city treasuries running dry, private groups passed the hat to keep the schools open. Teachers dug into their savings to feed their pupils. "For God's sake," the superintendent of schools implored Chicagoans, "help us feed these children during the summer!" A starving child died on admission to the Children's Memorial Hospital. "Why do we have to go naked and hungry?" cried a Negro mother, speaking for thousands in the Negro ghetto.

A Midwestern drought inflicted further hardship. Homeless families slept in underpasses and tunnels. Clusters of shacks called Hoovervilles made of packing cases, tin, tarpaper and cardboard dotted the outlying parts of town. The International Apple Shippers' Association was promoting the sale of surplus apples with the slogan "Buy an apple a day and send the Depression away," as men who had once held well-paid jobs stood on street corners, an upended crate for a counter, hawking the fruit at a nickel apiece. With exceptional luck an apple peddler might earn $6 in a day."

This abyss, then, was what Al Capone returned to after 9 months in state prison in Pennsylvania that ended in early 1930 and a subsequent vagrancy charge in Florida that kept him away from Chicago until the summer.

And Capone's own businesses were far from immune, as he discovered when he could finally have relatively private conversations about what had happened while he allowed Johnny Torrio and Frank Nitti to run things in his absence. From Bair:

"...He had to think about what could be done to heed the warnings Jake Guzik was raising about how revenues on every front had declined now that the Depression had gripped the entire country. For the next several days, Capone huddled at the Western with Guzik, who told him how sales of beer and whiskey were steadily dropping so that if projections were correct, by the end of the year they would be two-thirds less than what they had been in the heyday of the 1920s. The bad news continued, because gambling and prostitution were down as well."

On top of that, even a year before the federal tax evasion prosecution that eventually toppled him took place, Capone now faced a sketchy warrant from a publicity seeking local judge, John H. Lyle, who had tried to run for mayor in 1927 and wanted another shot based off of building a reputation as being the only public official who actually stood up to the mob. This wasn't serious - Lyle would eventually lose to Thompson in the Republican primary in 1931, after which Thompson lost to Anton Cermak in the general election - but it was, indeed, yet another headache.

So how do you battle all this bad publicity? Open a food kitchen! But it was better than that, since as Bergreen writes there was a much more subtle goal when he did so in late 1930:

"The tide of emotion obscured certain facts about the soup kitchen. Although Capone stated that the soup kitchen cost $10,000 a month to operate, he probably did not pay its costs himself; he “encouraged” local bakeries, meatpackers, and coffee roasters to donate to his cause, and what Al Capone told them to do, they did. More importantly, at the same time that he fed the poor, he raised the wholesale price of beer in Chicago. For as long as anyone could remember it had been $55 a barrel, but in the early weeks of December, when the soup kitchen was at its height, it went to $60 a barrel, with the increase being passed along to the customer. Meanwhile the cost of producing the suds remained constant, at about $4 a barrel. Even as Capone gave to the poor with one hand, he took with the other, yet because he had timed the maneuver to coincide with the soup kitchen, he managed to escape criticism."

So no, Capone didn't change his stripes at all - besides trying to increase his revenue by both raising the price of beer and obfuscating the new victims who were threatened as he tried to expand the businesses he owned to replace revenue that he'd lost. It did, however, figure in most of the stories told about him by his defenders in years to come, because if Capone was doing more for the common man than "the entire federal government" (more than a bit of an exaggeration, but still), then was it really appropriate to lock him up and throw away the key?

As far as the demographics of who actually patronized the kitchen, while it's an interesting question, unfortunately that's not something my sources discuss much; the one comment that was made in a Harper's Weekly article on the subject was that support for Capone extended to even women in upper class families at the time, although it doesn't sound like the one interviewed in that article actually ate at the kitchen.

Herbert Hoover in the White House, (Rappleye, 2016), Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (Kobler, 2010), Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend (Bair, 2017), Capone: The Man and the Era (Bergreen, 1994)