Residents of Greenbelt, MD have created a petition to save their beloved town from changes in the Prince George’s County zoning ordinance that would weaken protections against ill-considered urban development. Greenbelt is the only one of the three New Deal Greenbelt Towns that retains most of its original features and is a National Historic Landmark. If the current Residential Planned Community Zone is eliminated without replacing it with a Neighborhood Conservation Overlay Zone, the unique character of Old Greenbelt could be impacted by incompatible development. Petitioners are looking for an outpouring of support to protect the town. For more information, contact Molly Lester at [email protected]. change.org/p/ejordan-greenbeltmd-gov-protect-old-greenbelt
Living New Dealer of the Month: Gabriel Milner
This summer our longtime Project Manager, Gabe Milner, moved on to a new job and a new life. Gabe had been a pillar of the Living New Deal team for three years, keeping the operation running and organized down to the last detail. Always cheerful and ready to help, he was a model of efficiency and good will. Gabe is now teaching AP US and African American History at the Episcopal School of Los Angeles, a diverse school drawing students from around greater L.A. Gabe was the author of many blurbs for “Living New Dealer of the Month” and now it’s his turn. Thank you again, Gabe, for all you did for us!
Edith Hamlin and Me
After I organized Coit Tower’s 50th anniversary celebration in San Francisco in 1984, Edith Ann Hamlin and I became good friends. During the next six years, I often visited her at her studio in the Excelsior District of San Francisco.
Hamlin was 82 then and had been part art of the California and Southwest art and scene for more than half a century. Her studio had a huge Hopi clay pot and several large woven Native American baskets. One of her large landscape paintings of the Southwest rested on a tall easel.
Born in Oakland, California, Hamlin’s interest in art began early in life on sketching trips with her father. She won a two-year scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute, formerly the California School of Fine Arts, and was one of four students chosen to paint a mural on the school’s walls. By age 22, she knew she wanted to be a muralist.
Hamlin moved to New York to attend Columbia’s Teachers College, but when she heard there might be work for artists in San Francisco, she learned to drive and headed west in a Model A Ford—a trip that would cement her career as an artist.
Edie arrived in San Francisco in time to get the job— one of 26 artists to paint murals at the city’s landmark Coit Tower, the first Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). Launched in 1933, PWAP hired artists for their abilities not their need for “relief.” Hamlin learned fresco painting on site. Her mural, “Sports and Hunting in California,” is on the tower’s second floor.
Three years after her Coit Tower commission, Hamlin got hired by the Works Project Administration (WPA) to paint two 8 by 24 foot murals in the library at San Francisco’s Mission High School. It was a prestigious assignment. The huge murals took Hamlin and four assistants a year to complete. Artist Maynard Dixon, whose studio was a few doors from Hamlin’s on Montgomery Street in the city’s bohemian North Beach district, helped Hamlin paint the faces of the Spanish conquistadors, missionaries, and indigenous people depicted in the Mission High murals.
Dixon and Hamlin shared a fascination with the Southwest and Native Americans. Following Dixon’s divorce from Dorothea Lange, he and Edie married and moved to Tucson, Arizona in 1939. They kept a summer home and studio in Mount Carmel, Utah, near Zion National Park until Dixon died in 1946. Edie recalled those years as the happiest of her life.
She returned to San Francisco where she continued to paint until her death in 1992. I’ll always remember our lively discussions, her warmth, and encouragement.
Sally Swope is a travel writer and author of My Shangri-La, My Adventures in Asia. She is a contributor to the Castro Courier in San Francisco. Email
CWA Models Found in Museum Attic
Attics sometimes become unintended archives. At the Museum of the American Indian in Novato, California, director Colleen Hicks and archeologist Teresa Saltzman made a serendipitous discovery early this year. In January 2016, they found nine models of ancient Southwestern Puebloan structures in the museum’s attic—dusty and forgotten for more than 35 years.
Inscriptions on the back of the handmade models revealed that they were created in 1934 by seven different artists working for the Civil Works Administration— one of many New Deal programs to put unemployed people to work during the Great Depression. In this case, the artists were commissioned for educational and documentary purposes as part of a reconstruction project at Aztec Ruins National Monument in New Mexico, an important preserve of Ancestral Puebloan structures.
The models, constructed of plaster of Paris, wood, and stone, weigh about five pounds are about 9-inches high and 8-inches deep. Intricately detailed, the models represent archeological sites in national parks, including Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and Aztec Ruins.
Some of the models, like that of the Pueblo Bonito, perfectly mirror structures at Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a place many Puebloans today consider their ancestral roots. Beginning around 850 AD, native people built a highly developed society at Chaco Canyon. Many Pueblo people today take annual pilgrimages to these sites to honor their ancestors.
Each model is dated and signed by the artist: Elizabeth Seabrook, Arthur Moore, Ruth Flores, Dick Dalryup, Bert Frost, Glen Berger, and Asa Putnam. But little is known about the models or the artists whose signatures they bear. The National Park Service has contacted museums around the country for any information about the CWA models, some of which are yet to be accounted for. They hope is to display them at the Aztec Ruins National Monument in honor of the National Park Service centenary this year.
Established 48 years ago as a repository for archeological artifacts from the indigenous Miwok people, the museum has evolved into an educational and cultural center for the Bay Area. The CWA models are part of the current exhibition of photographs of ancient Puebloan sites by California photographer Tom Benoit, on display through July 2016. www.marinindian.com
Colleen Hicks, MA, Executive Director, has been the Director of the Museum of the American Indian for 10 years. Teresa Saltzman, MA, is an archeologist and rock art specialist at the museum. Joshua Horowitz, Ph.D is on the museum’s Board of Advisors, and teaches history at Dominican University and San Francisco State University. Email
George Grant, Photographer of National Parks
More than eighty years after President Franklin Roosevelt established the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), it remains one of the most memorable of the New Deal programs. Endearingly called FDR’s “Tree Army,” the CCC was key to an unprecedented era of environmental restoration and parks development that took place in the 1930s. Photographs of CCC “boys” at work and enjoying camp life played an important role in promoting both the parks and the CCC’s achievements.
The task of documenting the CCC, especially in western national parks, belonged to George Alexander Grant. A Pennsylvania native, Grant fell in love with the West’s rugged landscapes while stationed in Wyoming during World War I. Laboring in eastern factories after the war, Grant yearned to return to the West. He landed a seasonal job at Yellowstone in 1922. There he picked up a camera—perhaps for the first time—and produced images that impressed the park’s Superintendent Horace Albright. Grant reluctantly turned down a coveted ranger position at Yellowstone in hopes of working for the Park Service as a photographer. Six years of correspondence with Albright–and Albright’s appointment to Director of the National Park Service in 1929– led to Grant’s becoming the Park Service’s first staff photographer. Just months later, the nation was plunged into the Great Depression.
By 1933 Grant was the chief photographer of the National Park Service and on the front lines of a golden age for national parks. That year marked the creation of the CCC and FDR’s executive order nearly doubling the size of the parks system through the addition of national monuments, battlefields, and historic sites. Grant would spend the next seven years chronicling the CCC’s work in national parks. His finely detailed images depict men laboring on the shores of Jackson Lake in the Grand Tetons; pausing for lunch amid the grandeur of Glacier National Park; restoring historic fortifications at Vicksburg National Military Park; clearing snow from roadways in Rocky Mountain National Park; and tackling camp chores like laundry and getting a haircut.
Like the photographs of his friend and contemporary, Ansel Adams, Grant’s vivid black-and-white photographs were seen by millions of Americans. Through these images, Americans could see the results of the CCC’s labors and the physical and emotional sustenance the work provided its enrollees. Yet, Grant has remained virtually unknown because nearly all of his published photographs were simply credited “National Park Service.”
The Park Service’s 2016 centennial year is an ideal time to remember the contributions of this unknown elder in the field of outdoor and landscape photography.
Ren and Helen Davis are writers and photographers based in Atlanta, Georgia. Their newest book, Landscapes for the People: George Alexander Grant, First Chief Photographer of the National Park Service (University of Georgia Press, 2015, $39.95) complements the National Park Service Centennial commemorations. The Davises have co- authored six books, including Our Mark on This Land: A Guide to the Legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps in America’s Parks, published in 2011.