There are more than a thousand New Deal sites across New York City, but because most are unmarked their common connection to the New Deal goes unrecognized. The Living New Deal’s New York City branch is working to remedy that. Thanks to our partnership with the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, red, white and blue medallions will soon be installed identifying the New Deal origins of the city’s eleven Olympic-sized pools, all built in 1936 by the Works Progress Administration.
During the Great Depression and for going on 84 summers since, New Yorkers flocked to Crotona Park Pool in the Bronx, Astoria Pool in Queens, and Highbridge Pool in Manhattan, among others.  If the Living New Deal has its way, medallions will be placed at many other sites to recognize what the New Deal left to the city.
The medallion was designed to commemorate all types of New Deal projects, from pools to schools, public housing to post offices, playgrounds, courthouses and more,” says Peggy Crane, the Living New Deal’s New York City branch coordinator.
Because of the coronavirus, the city’s pools have yet to open for the summer. Stay tuned for the official rollout.

The New Deal’s contributions to the city are largely unknown, but they transformed the nation’s capital. Our forthcoming “Map and Guide to the Art and Architecture of New Deal Washington, DC” is meant to educate visitors, residents and federal workers about the vast New Deal legacy that surrounds them.
Among the District’s more than 500 New Deal sites are Rock Creek Park, the National Zoo, Howard University, Frederick Douglass’s home and the Federal Trade Commission Building. Along with details on major sites, the map features walking tours of downtown DC and buildings housing large collections of works by New Deal artists.The map launch, delayed by Covid-19, will take place early in 2021.
For the map’s cover, we chose a mural at the Department of the Interior, “Incident in Contemporary American Life,” by Mitchell Jamieson, depicting Marian Anderson’s Freedom Concert in 1939. After the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall because of her race, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the group in protest and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes offered the Lincoln Memorial instead. The event, nationally broadcast by radio, brought some 75,000 people came to the National Mall to hear Anderson sing.

Despite the lockdown, the Living New Deal is fanning the flames of growing public interest in the New Deal. Mentions of the New Deal in both mainstream and alternative media are on the rise. Reporters turn to us as one of the best sources of information on the New Deal era.
Our new monthly online newsletter, The Fireside, features articles and commentary by leading writers and historians. Our website, livingnewdeal.org, surpassed a million visits last year. Thanks to our network of volunteers, our national map of New Deal public works has grown to over 16,000 sites and includes profiles of many people and programs that defined the New Deal.
History tells us that crises often create the conditions for fundamental change. The Great Depression allowed the New Deal to create Social Security, recognize unions, introduce food stamps and modernize the nation’s infrastructure.
In these uncertain times, we are demonstrating that the New Deal is a model of leadership, action and renewed hope that has valuable lessons for public policy today.
Twice each year we ask for your donations to keep us on the job. As our thank you for a gift of $100 or more, we’ll send you a set of notecards featuring images of WPA posters from the Library of Congress. We are most grateful for your interest and generosity!

The Living New Deal is hard at work fueling the growing public interest in the New Deal as a model of leadership, hope and action in troubled times. Our website is a searchable archive of New Deal artworks, buildings, vast public works and the people and programs that helped our nation recover from the Great Depression and thrive. Through talks, tours and special events we highlight what the New Deal achieved.

During the current crises, we’re focused on fanning the flames of an emerging national discussion about the New Deal. We’re regularly cited in the media; our new online journal, The Fireside, offers news and insights about the New Deal; and we’re about to publish our map and guide to the nation’s capital, making visible the New Deal‘s lasting imprint on Washington, DC. We’re counting on your donations to keep us going. Please support us if you can. For your gift of $100 or more, we’ll thank you with a set of notecards featuring WPA posters from the Library of Congress.

Please take a moment to share your feedback with us by taking our brief survey.

With thanks, always,
The Living New Deal

We are happy to announce new and improved features to our online national map of New Deal sites. We’ve switched over from Google maps to a new platform, Mapbox.
Visitors to livingnewdeal.org will find a more colorful map minus much of the commercial clutter found on Google maps. There are color-coded markers for every mapped site for the New Deal agency responsible for the project and icons to represent the project categories. The pop-up summary for each site is clearer, as are the search, filter and location functions. We will continue to add improvements to make the map more user friendly.
Thanks go to our webmaster, Lisa Thompson, for all her good work over the months it has taken to de-bug the new platform. Please try out the map on your computer or mobile phone. We welcome your questions and feedback.

That the Living New Deal has accomplished so much, so fast, is in no small part thanks to our volunteer sleuths, who submit their New Deal discoveries to us. Our website now features more than 16,000 unique sites. We’re looking for some social media ambassadors to help us fuel the national conversation about the New Deal. Please repost our content and “Like” us on Facebook, retweet and follow us on Twitter, and tag and follow us on Instagram. Our online publications, The Fireside and The Lowdown reach more than 4,000 readers a month. Forward them to your friends and colleagues and invite them to join our mailing list. Subscriptions are free. If you have suggestions for our social media team,  email us at [email protected]. We look forward to crossing virtual paths with you soon.

Few records exist of any coordinated attempt to sum up all that the New Deal built. That’s probably because the one agency that might have done it— the Historical Records Survey (HRS), established in 1935, was shut down in 1943 during the war.
The HRS was originally part of WPA’s Federal Writers Project. Its charge was surveying and indexing historically significant records in state, county and local archives. The official mission statement was the “discovery, preservation and listing of basic materials for research in the history of the United States.”
The HRS accomplished a great deal in its seven-and-a-half years. How many historians, scholars, lawyers, librarians, and genealogists realize they are standing on the shoulders of WPA workers— many of them women— who preserved and organized the records they are using some 80 years later? Had the HRS survived a few more years it could have done the grand summation that the Living New Deal is now attempting. But then we wouldn’t have the fun of doing it. Learn more.

Since 2013, Lisa Thompson has tended Livingnewdeal.org, adding to and troubleshooting our website as it has grown in content and complexity. Her latest upgrades have it humming faster and smoother than ever. Lisa added a glossary of New Deal terms to our site, deciphering the alphabet soup of agencies like SSA, TVA, CWA, NRA, CCC, WPA, PWA or SEC. (LOL!) She’s now working on a mobile app and YouTube page.
Lisa became interested in theater while in high school in Newport Beach, California. Nowadays she’s writing and performing for “Write Away!” an online improv troupe. She’s also taking part in Monday Night Playground, a prestigious program for emerging playwrights. Her original play, “Strike Home,” recently received a staged reading at Berkeley Repertory Theater. “24 Hour Plays—Stories from our zoomed-out, spaced-out, spread-out humanity,” a series of viral monologues that actors film and post from their phones while sheltered in place, inspired Lisa to record a story of her own. Watch her perform “Murmurations.”