Down by the river there’s a man living in a shanty.

His name is Manuel, he’s from Honduras and he says he’s lived around here for seven years. His home is a hovel of boards and plywood, though one wall is solid brick and mortar, over six feet tall. “I know how to build,” he says, pointing to an open bag of cement in his shack. He claims to occasionally work on construction sites in the city.

This is his sixth shack here in this fenced-in, weedy lot. The first five fell or burned down. He shows off charred foundations nearby. One day he lit a candle and walked away for a time. When he came back the shack was ashes and he was left with nothing – “without blankets, without gloves, without shoes,” he says.

He describes how he keeps warm during winters. “Excellent quality of jacket, special blanket,” he says. He stuffs his jacket with “special material. Let me show you here” and he scavenges for bits of wool that are strewn around the pavement. These, he’s trying to say, are what he uses to pad the space between his jacket and his clothes.

Several people live in this dead part of the city, close to the Renaissance Center, on the edge of downtown. There’s the man living in the Globe warehouse, and the person inside the little tent with a bike parked next to it nestled near some trees and tall grasses. Manuel speaks of a “hippie with a TV and VCR” living in a nearby empty building.

But his home is the most unique. He’s topped it with a sign taken from some printing shop. Toothpaste tubes, loaves of bread and dozens of pens are tucked into crevices in the brick or thrown around the lot. A dirty mattress lies inside.

He insists on being photographed while pretending to be reading, and holds a copy of “Old Yeller,” posing as if he’s a field scholar absorbed in his studies.

He speaks in a rambling stream of English and Spanish words made harder to decipher by the fact that he’s stark raving mad. He can speak for 10 minutes without saying a sensible thing.

There are a number of others like him, roaming the streets of the city, out of their minds, too crazy for shelters, but too clever to succumb to the elements.

He wanders the lot during the day, mumbling to himself and rearranging randomly placed items he’s found and brought here, engaging in tasks that make sense to nobody but him. “I did plant a food plant,” he says, watering a clump of dirt with a pumpkin seed in it, just before winter. “In six months the fruit is here.” Though no such thing will happen, the effort shows he plans on still being here then, too.