Jan Roosevelt Katten, A Remembrance

Jan KattenJan Roosevelt Katten was a doyenne of dining, décor and design. She brought people together in celebration and support for causes she cared about, including the Living New Deal. She was one of our first friends and earliest advisors. Jan’s 1000-watt smile brightened every gathering, as did her stories about growing up during the Depression in a household of women; having tea and cookies at the White House as a young girl; riding horses at Hyde Park with her Aunt Eleanor, the First Lady. Jan tossed out words like “divine” and “marvelous,” in reference to art, music, horses, dogs, desserts and life in general. She made molehills out of mountains and looked elegant while doing it. She predicted that the Democrats would take back the White House, and that she wouldn’t likely see her next birthday—her 91st. Jan died on November 5. Even as her energy dimmed, her spirit and smile never did. She was marvelous.

History in Bloom

Visit the Berkeley Rose Garden via the slide show:

by Susan Ives
As development marched toward the Berkeley hills in the 1920s, the ravine carved by Cordonices Creek was considered too steep for houses. A street car trestle was constructed to span the gap. With panoramic westward views of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate, the 3.6-acre canyon captured the imagination of park advocates.

Renowned Berkeley architect Bernard Maybeck designed a terraced amphitheater with a redwood pergola, and landscape architect Vernon M. Dean and Charles V. Covell, founder of the East Bay Rose Society, finalized the plan. The City of Berkeley applied for federal funds available under New Deal public works programs.

Construction on the Berkeley Rose Garden began in 1933. Hundreds of men employed by Civil Works Administration and, later, the Works Progress Administration, worked over four years to install the garden. The Civil Works Administration (CWA) also built the adjacent tennis and handball courts at Cordonices Park.

Native rock quarried in the Berkeley hills form the amphitheater walls and terraced rose beds. Paths wend through the garden and native woodlands. A footbridge spans Cordonices Creek where it emerges at the canyon floor to form an oval pond. Maybeck’s redwood pergola serves as a trellis for climbing roses. Along the six curved stone terraces are more than a thousand rose bushes, at their most spectacular in mid-May.

The garden was officially dedicated on September 26, 1937. According to newspaper accounts, on hand were the Berkeley Municipal Legion Band and “the full staff of the park department, to assist in managing the crowds.” 

The garden was designated a City of Berkeley Landmark in 1995.  Since then, the original sign was replaced with a replica. The entrance to the garden was reconstructed in 2002. The pergola is currently undergoing renovation.

The rose garden remains one of the city’s most cherished public spaces.  It is open from dawn to dusk and is wheelchair accessible via a pedestrian tunnel under Euclid Avenue that connects the garden to Cordonices Park. 

Read more:

Bay Area cities were quick to claim their share of public improvements. Built by FDR: How the WPA Changed the Lay of the Land

Map of Berkeley parks

A New Book Recognizes the Women of the New Deal

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Ellen Woodward, 1938

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Ellen Woodward, 1938
During the New Deal Woodward served as the director of the Women’s Division of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA); director of the Women’s and Professional Projects of the WPA; and as a member of the Social Security Board, She was considered “the second highest ranking woman appointee in the Roosevelt Administration, after Frances Perkins.
Photo Credit: Courtesy, National Archives

When millions of Americans lost their jobs, homes, and life savings in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt promised them a new deal. A new book, “Women and the Spirit of the New Deal,” reveals the extensive role women played in shaping government’s all-out response to the Great Depression.

Inspired by a conference in 2018 at UC Berkeley, the book is a collaboration of the Living New Deal, the National New Deal Preservation Association, and the Frances Perkins Center to recognize the oft-overlooked female forces behind the New Deal. In brief biographies, it describes one hundred women who shaped the policies and programs that led to America’s economic recovery and protected its most vulnerable.

At a time when society held that “a woman’s place was in the home,” these women expanded the aspirations of the New Deal. They included politicians, administrators, lawyers, social workers, authors, journalists, painters, sculptors, musicians, and scientists. Some are well known like First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, and educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. Some have been largely overlooked, like political activist Molly Dewson and Clara Beyer, an administrator in the Bureau of Labor Statistics who played an important role shaping legislation to provide worker safety, a minimum wage, and Social Security.

Frances Perkins and Clara Beyer

Frances Perkins and Clara Beyer
Secretary of Labor Perkins was the first woman ever appointed to a presidential cabinet. Beyer was an attorney and associate director in the Division of Labor Standards. She was part of a so-called “Ladies’ Brain Trust,” that advised Perkins during the 1930s and 40s.
Photo Credit: Courtesy Mt Holyoke College

The book is just a beginning. If you know of women who had a part in the New Deal, please share their stories with us so that we may pass on the spirit they brought to the New Deal to inspire a new generation.

 

Green New Dealers Turn Up the Heat

Organizers are mobilizing youth to put pressure on Congress

Green New Dealers
Organizers are mobilizing youth to put pressure on Congress  Source

In a radical departure from business as usual, talk of a “New Deal” has lately been reverberating through the halls of the nation’s Capitol. Newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass) have introduced a resolution for a Green New Deal that is making headlines and rapidly gaining public support.

The Green New Deal resolution, introduced in early February, cites catastrophic repercussions for the economy, the environment, humans, and wildlife as a result of climate change. The Green New Deal is a package of federal programs and investments to transition the nation from fossil fuels to 100 percent clean, renewable energy over 10 years, creating millions of high-wage jobs in the process. The details are still to come.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Announces the Green New Deal resolution on Feb 7

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Announcing the Green New Deal resolution on Feb 7
Photo Credit: OaklandNews

The original New Deal offers a blueprint. Like its proposed green offspring, the New Deal was a massive response to an unprecedented national emergency. The government took multiple and experimental approaches to the economic, social and environmental crises of the Great Depression.

One of the first and most popular programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), begun in 1933, deployed millions of men over ten years to improve the environment. The “first responders” of their day, the CCC men fought wildfires and epic floods, planted billions of trees, stabilized soils in the Dust Bowl and elsewhere, and developed a system of national refuges to sustain diminishing wildlife.

Millions found work through federal programs to modernize America’s “commons,” building roads, bridges, dams, housing, schools, hospitals, parks, and playgrounds.

CCC at work, Installing phone lines at Logan Pass, Montana, 1938

CCC at work
Installing phone lines at Logan Pass, Montana, 1938
Photo Credit: National Park Service

While the New Deal brought jobs and enhancements to cities, towns and rural nationwide, many minority communities were left behind. African Americans, domestic, and agricultural workers were often excluded in exchange for the support of Republicans and Dixiecrats in Congress who held the purse strings.

Recognizing this failure, the Green New Deal resolution is explicitly inclusive in its aim “to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous communities, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.”

More than sixty progressive House members and several 2020 presidential candidates have already declared their support for a Green New Deal, as have several labor unions and environmental organizations. The trillion-dollar question is how to pay for it. A carbon tax, raising taxes on the ultra wealthy, and redirecting subsidies away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, are among the ideas.

WPA sewer project, Men laying pipes for the city of San Diego, California, 1935

WPA sewer project
Men laying pipes for the city of San Diego, California, 1935  Source

Not surprisingly, Republicans dismiss the Green New Deal, branding it “socialist,” “reckless,” “expensive,” and “unattainable.” Oklahoma Rep. Markwayne Mullin pronounced: “The Green New Deal, like Medicare- for-All and tuition-free college, is nothing but an empty promise that leaves American taxpayers on the hook.”

But climate activists point out that a Green New Deal would be far less costly than the climate disasters, pollution, and health problems that come from fossil fuels. Polls show growing public support for a Green New Deal. A December 2018 poll by Yale University’s Program on Climate Change Communication, found more than 90 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of self-identified “conservative Republicans” support a Green New Deal.

WPA emblem, Posted at work sites nationwide during the Great Depression

WPA emblem
Posted at work sites nationwide during the Great Depression

Organizers want to make the resolution a litmus test for those running for office in 2020. The Sunrise Movement is one of a growing number of grassroots groups mobilizing support among the nation’s youth. Its stated goal, “To build the movement for a Green New Deal.” Their social media campaign enjoins supporters to “turn up the heat” on Congress.

Sign the petition for a Green New Deal

The Living New Deal website’s new page on the Green New Deal describes ten
principles that led to the success of the original New Deal.

Victory for Berkeley’s Historic Post Office

Berkeley’s historic Post Office

Berkeley’s historic Post Office
The 1915 Renaissance-revival building anchors a five block area listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Preservation activists in Berkeley, California, worked for years to protect their city’s historic core. In 1998, they achieved National Register of Historic Places status for a 5-block area encompassing the New Deal-era Civic Center Park and 13 buildings—the Beaux Arts-style Old City Hall, Veterans Building, Berkeley High School, Community Theater, and the Main Post Office, a Berkeley Landmark.

In 2014, amidst a downtown development boom, the City created a “defined district”—the Civic Center Historic District Zoning Overlay— restricting uses within it to civic and cultural purposes. The year before, the U.S. Postal Service announced it planned to sell the historic Post Office, potentially to local developers, who planned to develop it for a Target store.

Since legislation Congress passed in 2006 placed onerous financial obligations on the U.S. Postal Service, hundreds of post offices nationwide—many historic—have been listed for sale or sold to developers.

Rally

Rally
Campaigners hoping to halt the sale of the downtown Berkeley Post Office protest outside Senator Feinstein’s office in San Francisco in 2012.
Photo Credit: Harvey Smith

Designed by architect Oscar Wenderoth, Berkeley’s century-old Renaissance Revival post office, like many civic buildings of the time, was embellished with artworks during the New Deal under the Treasury Relief Art Project.

Suzanne Scheuer, one of 23 New Deal artists whose work can be seen at San Francisco’s landmark Coit Tower, painted the mural in the lobby of the Berkeley Post Office. “Incidents in California History,” depicts Native Americans, Spanish explorers, Californios, and other early residents of the Bay Area. Sculptor David Slivka, who later exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair on San Francisco’s Treasure Island, carved the bas relief of postal workers on the post office’s exterior. Carved in stone are the sculptor’s initials and the words: “From D.S., To: All Mankind, Truth Abode on Freedom Road.”

Bas Relief

Bas Relief
Sculptor David Slivka carved the relief on the post office’s exterior.
Photo Credit: Susan Ives

The USPS sued the City, claiming its Civic Center District Zoning Overlap frustrated efforts to sell the post office.  Last month, after nearly two years in federal court, the City prevailed. U.S. District Court Judge Donald Alsup rejected the Justice Department’s claim that the special zoning had deprived the Postal Service of the ability to sell the property.

Save the Berkeley Post Office and the National Trust for Historic Preservation view the ruling as a victory for cities that, like Berkeley, seek to use zoning as a tool for historic preservation.

“Incidents in California History"

“Incidents in California History"
New Deal artist Suzanne Scheuer painted the mural in the lobby of the Berkeley Post Office.
Photo Credit: Harvey Smith

A New Deal Town Fights for Its Future

Greenbelt sign, 1937

Greenbelt sign, 1937
The Greenbelt housing project was seen as a social experiment
Photo Credit: Library of Congress

The first of three greenbelt towns built and owned by the federal government during the Great Depression, Greenbelt, Maryland, ten miles north of Washington, D.C. was considered “utopian” when it opened in 1937.

Greenbelt’s residents had to overcome many obstacles from the start, and today a new threat is bearing down on the New Deal town.

Maryland’s Governor Larry Hogan, state legislators, and the private company Northeast MAGLEV, are hawking a public-private partnership to build a high-speed train,  between D.C and New York that could impact this historic community.

FDR and Wallace Richards, 1936

FDR and Wallace Richards, 1936
Richards, coordinator for the Greenbelt project, shows plans to President Roosevelt
Photo Credit: Library of Congress

Home to 23,000 residents, Greenbelt is the legacy of Rexford Tugwell, a friend and advisor whom FDR appointed to head the short-lived Resettlement Administration (RA). Tugwell, inspired by England’s Garden City movement—a turning point in urban planning—envisioned hundreds of “greenbelt towns” around the country. Surrounded by greenbelts of forests and farms, they were meant to provide affordable homes with easy access to jobs in nearby cities.

The affordable houses, landscaping, parks, playgrounds, schools, and civic buildings were designed to nurture a sense of community. Applicants for residency were screened based on income, occupation, and a willingness to become involved in community activities. Much of the towns’ business was conducted through cooperatives, to the dismay of conservatives in Congress who nicknamed Tugwell “Rex the Red.”

Postcard, 1938

Postcard, 1938
Greenbelt, Town Center

Congress soon pared plans for the greenbelt towns and delayed funding. Lacking the heavy construction equipment they needed to break ground, WPA workers used picks and shovels.

Ultimately just three towns, Greenhills, Ohio; Greendale, Wisconsin; and Greenbelt, Maryland were completed. A fourth town, planned for New Jersey, was summarily cancelled.

House and Garden, 1938

House and Garden, 1938
Greenbelt offers apartments and single-family homes like these English-style row houses with pitched slate roofs.
Photo Credit: Library of Congress

Over the years, Greenbelt, Maryland has suffered fewer alterations than its sister towns, but “progress” has taken a toll. Despite residents’ opposition to the Baltimore–Washington Parkway it was built through the greenbelt in 1954. The Capital Beltway also pushed through the middle of the greenbelt in the 1960s. Thanks to the Committee to Save the Green Belt and other advocates, the city reacquired 230 acres of the original greenbelt that had been sold to developers in the 1950s and established the Greenbelt Forest Preserve to permanently protect the land. In 1997 Greenbelt was designated a National Historic Landmark. 

In 2017, plans emerged for a high-speed MAGLEV (magnetic-levitation) train. Two routes are under consideration. One is east of town and would tunnel under Eleanor Roosevelt High School and several neighborhoods. The other, on the west side of town, would mostly follow the Parkway, tunneling below the town to emerge in the Greenbelt Forest Preserve or possibly north of the town.

The proposed train would cut the 32-minute Amtrak ride from Baltimore to D.C by 17 minutes.

Greenbelt Pool, 1939

Greenbelt Pool, 1939
Parks, playgrounds and recreation facilities have been part of the community from the start.
Photo Credit: Marian Wolcott Post, Library of Congress

Opponents up and down the proposed corridor point to the project’s $10 billion price tag and the cost overruns that have plagued other high-speed rail projects, leaving taxpayers on the hook.

The federal government has provided $27.8 million for an Environmental Impact Study, scheduled for completion in January 2019.

Meanwhile, Northeast Maglev has acquired the ability to use eminent domain to build the track. 

What you can do: Take Action.

The City also posted information on how to oppose.

 

“Mother and Child” by Lenore Thomas, 1938

“Mother and Child” by Lenore Thomas, 1938
WPA artists adorned the Commons and public buildings.
Photo Credit: Library of Congress

Greenbelt Elementary School, 1937

Greenbelt Elementary School, 1937
The art deco building became the community center after a new school was built in the 1990s.
Photo Credit: Library of Congress

 

Greenhills Named a National Historic Landmark

New Deal Housing

New Deal Housing
A New Deal neighborhood
Photo Credit: John Vashon

Near Cincinnati, Ohio, the Village of Greenhills is one of only three New Deal “greenbelt” towns in the country. On January 11, it was designated a National Historic Landmark by the Department of the Interior.

Greenhills was a demonstration project of the Resettlement Administration (RA) a short-lived New Deal agency that relocated displaced and struggling urban and rural families to planned communities built by the federal government.

The concept for greenbelt towns began in the late 19th century. A “Garden-City Movement,” often dismissed as utopian, promoted self-contained, satellite communities surrounded by “belts” of farms and forests as the answer to the overcrowded cities of post-industrial England.

School children at Greenhills, OH

School Children
Greenhills, OH
Photo Credit: John Vaschon

The idea resonated with Rexford Guy Tugwell, an agricultural economist who was part of FDR’s “Brain Trust.” He persuaded the president that greenbelt towns could house thousands of people displaced during the Great Depression. Roosevelt made Tugwell the director of his Resettlement Administration (RA).

Tugwell immediately purchased some 6,000 acres in southern Ohio, including dozens of struggling dairy farms he hoped could be sustained by the soon-to-be-built greenbelt town of Greenhills.

WPA workers broke ground for the new town in 1935. Over the next two years some 5,000 men and women transformed more than a square mile of what had been cornfields into a village for 676 low-income families.

The WPA relied on mules instead of machines in order to maximize the number of workers and hours spent to develop the town. It directed them to add extra layers of plaster and paint to the buildings to keep people employed.

WPA workers building Greenhills

WPA workers
Building Greenhills
Photo Credit: John Vaschon

Greenhills’ planners provided what were seen as extravagances for low-income housing. Curved streets and cul de sacs separated homes from busy thoroughfares; walkways, pocket parks, and playgrounds were incorporated into pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods; a co-op shopping district (the first strip mall in Ohio), community center with a K-12 school, town library, and public swimming pool were constructed.

A variety of multi-family housing—duplexes, townhouses, and apartments—employed Colonial, Modern, and International-style architecture. Homes were built facing backward to provide views of  common areas and open spaces rather than the street. Utilities were installed underground.

To the consternation of some in Congress, the cost of the project came in at $11.5 million.

Tugwell had envisioned 20 greenbelt towns but managed to build only three—Greenhills, Ohio; Greendale, Wisconsin; and Greenbelt, Maryland– before the Supreme Court ruled the RA unconstitutional. The RA was dissolved in 1937. The Farm Securities Administration (FSA) assumed some of its functions.

Apartment Houses at Greenhills, 1939

Apartment Houses
Greenhills, 1939
Photo Credit: John Vaschon

Greenhills is a living example of a time when government fully dedicated itself to improving the lives of working-class Americans. Yet, Greenhills has struggled to preserve its New Deal legacy.

Parts of Greenhills are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and preservation groups have long called for a plan to protect historic properties. Over residents’ objections, the Village Council voted to raze many WPA-era buildings. Fifty-two of the original townhouses and apartments have been demolished, replaced with new, stand-alone single-family houses. In 2011, Greenhill was listed among Ohio’s Most Endangered Historic Sites.

Greenhills’ newly awarded status as a National Historic Landmark, administered by the National Park Service, may help. Property owners will now be eligible for federal grants to rehabilitate Greenhills remaining New Deal-era structures.

CCC Totem Pole Inventory Needed

Totem poles located to a park in Hydaburg in 1941

Totem Park
Poles located to a park in Hydaburg in 1941

During the New Deal, the federal government took an unprecedented step toward preserving Native American art: It funded an effort to repair and replicate scores of totem poles in southeast Alaska.

Alaska, then a U.S. territory, was suffering from chronic unemployment during the Great Depression. Between 1938 and 1942, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) employed Native Alaskans to identify, locate, and restore deteriorating totem poles. The poles were sometimes relocated to “totem parks” the CCC built to draw tourism to towns and villages.

CCC men restore a totem pole in Saxman, 1939

Totem Carvers
CCC men restore a totem pole in Saxman, 1939
Photo Credit: US Forest Service

The red cedar poles are carved and sometimes painted with family crests and images of animals. Traditionally placed along waterfronts, the totems mark family houses, clan gathering sites, and gravesites. Some “storytelling” poles serve to pass on clan knowledge and customs from generation to generation.

According to the U.S. Forest Service, “By the end of the Depression, 48 poles had been restored, 54 duplicated, and 19 new totems carved” by CCC workers. Unfortunately, no one has a conducted a definitive inventory of the CCC-era totem poles, believed to total 121.

Living New Deal researcher, Brent McKee managed to cobble together a list from various books and online sources. He has identified 63 poles, with names such as “The Spirit of Hazy Island Pole,” “The Giant Clam Pole,” “Sitting Bear Grave Marker,” and “The Lincoln Totem Pole,” carved in honor of Abraham Lincoln.

Trader Legend Pole: This replica of a pole in Sukkwan was carved during the 1938-1942 CCC project

Trader Legend Pole
This replica of a pole in Sukkwan was carved during the 1938-1942 CCC project.
Photo Credit: National Park Service

Brent says he thinks a few of the original CCC poles are probably still standing. Others have been taken down due to poor condition, or left to deteriorate on the ground and replaced with new poles, according to Native tradition. Still others are in warehouses and work sheds undergoing restoration or being replicated onto new poles. No active inventory exists, so their names, locations, and current status are largely unknown,

“But research builds on top of previous research,” says Brent. “It is my hope that the Living New Deal can map most or all of the totem poles I have found—even with imprecise geographical coordinates—and thereby (hopefully) spark more research into these historic and fascinating artworks.”

New Deal Activist Kathy Flynn Honored As “Living Treasure”

New Deal activist Kathy Flynn

Kathy Flynn
New Deal activist Kathy Flynn
Photo Credit: Clyde Mueller Courtesy of Santa Fe New Mexican

Kathy Flynn, founder of the National New Deal Preservation Association (NNDPA), was recently named a “Living Treasure” for her work documenting and preserving New Deal history, sites, and artworks.

Kathy, a long-time New Mexico resident, grew up in Texas amidst the Dust Bowl. Her public service career included working as a reporter, a hospital administrator, and civil servant. Her job as Deputy Secretary of State sparked her interest in the New Deal. She later founded the NNDPA in order to document and preserve the New Deal’s legacy.

New Mexico is exceptionally rich in New Deal history. Courthouses, post offices, libraries, hospitals, theaters, schools, and more, were built in cities and small towns throughout the state. During the Great Depression, more than 50,000 New Mexicans got work with the Civilian Conservation Corps. Kathy tracked down and interviewed all the New Mexico CCC members she could find. She also set out to recover New Deal murals and other artworks that had gone missing or been painted over. She authored three books about the state’s New Deal history, art, and architecture.

Kathy has raised awareness of the New Deal through advocacy, education programs, commemorative events, and tours. She recently hosted a public forum that brought several descendents of the original New Dealers to Santa Fe to share memories of their famous families and their achievements—Nina Roosevelt Gibson, the granddaughter of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt; David Giffen, the great grandson of Harry Hopkins who was head of the Works Progress Administration; Tomlin Coggeshall, the grandson of FDR’s Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet; T.J. Walker, the grandson of Frank Walker, an FDR confidante who coordinated the New Deal agencies; and David Douglas, the grandson of Vice President Henry Wallace, who also served as FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture.

Last fall, the NNDPA’s archive of articles, books, and ephemera of the New Deal that Kathy had assembled over decades became part of the permanent collection at the John Gaw Meem Library at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Last spring, Kathy was named “One of Ten Who Made A Difference,” an annual award presented by the Santa Fe New Mexican, and was honored by Santa Fe Living Treasures, a nonprofit organization that recognizes elders who have generously served their communities. Kathy’s oral history will be soon be available to the public at the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library in Santa Fe.

A National Monument to the CCC

The Old Santa Fe Trail Building, 1937

National Park Service Southwest Hdq 1937
The Old Santa Fe Trail Building, 1937
Photo Credit: National Park Service

The Old Santa Fe Trail Building is considered a hallmark of the Civilian Conservation Corps’ many contributions to the national parks.

Built between 1937 and 1939, and designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1987, the building on Museum Hill is the work of the young men who served in the CCC in New Mexico during the Great Depression. The Spanish/Pueblo Revival-style adobe building is a testament to their work and, in particular, to the Native American and Latino New Mexicans whose commitment and craft are manifest in this beautiful building.

The building was constructed largely by hand using local materials. Logs for the vigas and corbels came from the CCC camp in nearby Hyde Memorial State Park; the highly polished flagstone in the lobby, conference rooms, and portal came from a large ranch near Glorieta; posts supporting the roofs above the portales are peeled ponderosa pine logs. The CCC boys also produced many of the building’s furnishings.

Old Santa Fe Trail Building

Old Santa Fe Trail Building
National Park logo in the portico.  Source

The historic building served as the Southwest headquarters for the National Park Service from 1939 to 1995, when the NPS relocated its regional office to Denver. In tribute to the region’s history and multicultural heritage, the building had been managed as though it were a unit of the National Park System. Due to budget cuts it now has only limited public use.

There is no National Park dedicated to telling the story of the millions of people who got jobs and gained skills while carrying out projects of lasting public benefit through New Deal programs like the CCC and the Works Projects Administration.  A formidable coalition has mounted an effort to designate the Old Santa Fe Trail Building a National Monument—the National Trust for Historic Preservation, National Parks Conservation Association, National New Deal Preservation Association, Historic Santa Fe Foundation, the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, and the Living New Deal among them. We are asking President Obama to use his authority to designate this historic building a national monument.

Old Santa Fe Trail Building Anniversary Poster

Old Santa Fe Trail Building Anniversary Poster
Poster commemorating the historic CCC-constructed building

We are seeking letters of support. Please email the President  and contact your elected representatives asking them to preserve the Old Santa Fe Trail Building as a national monument in honor of those whose labors during the hardest of hard times still inspire us today.