New @ Living New Deal

The New Deal did a great deal of good in overcoming the exclusion of neglected, oppressed and marginalized people in American life. The New Dealers were faced with a daunting task of overcoming long-established patterns of discrimination and social hierarchy, and they could only do so much; yet, the accomplishments of the era’s progressive policies were substantial.  Because both friends and critics of the New Deal have often noted its failures with regard to race, gender, and religion in American life, we felt the need to rise to the defense; so we created a new section on our website, called “New Deal Inclusion,” to document the many ways the Roosevelt Administration aided the elderly, women and people of color, as well as the disabled and refugees. For more information and photographs, see our new New Deal Inclusion page.

This week the University of California, Berkeley is hosting the Living New Deal’s  “Women and the Spirit of the New Deal” conference. The 2-day event will feature leading authors, scholars, activists, and public figures discussing women’s role in the New Deal and in political change today.  John Roosevelt Boettiger, grandson of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, will speak at the conference opening. Former Secretary of Labor, Professor Robert Reich will receive the Frances Perkins Award for public service Friday evening. On Saturday, a ceremony will be held at the Berkeley Rose Garden, where the Kathryn Flynn Preservation Award will recognize outstanding efforts in education and activism for the preservation of the New Deal legacy. For further details, see the conference program and registration page here.

Traces of the New Deal’s lasting impact on our communities can be difficult to find. Fortunately, in some parts of the country projects undertaken by New Deal agencies were specifically “marked” by the agency that completed it. Such is the case in Colfax, California, a small mountain city on I-80 east of Sacramento. Evan stopped to photograph its striking WPA-built community center (formerly Colfax Grammar School) last summer. While the building itself bore no visible indication of New Deal involvement, Evan was stunned to find no fewer than five imprint “stamps” on the retaining walls and sidewalks surrounding the grounds, each attributing the work to the WPA. The “stamps” included one shield-shaped imprint that has been heavily damaged and painted over. Thanks to Evan, each of these “stamps” was photographed, documented with precise geographic coordinates, and posted to the Living New Deal map for the historical record. See them all here.

Living New Deal National Associate Andrew Laverdiere has been an invaluable member of our team for several years. A political activist and history buff, Andrew became a Living New Deal contributor while working as a taxi driver in Los Angeles. He has traveled far and wide through California and his native Maine, interviewing locals, librarians, and Historical Society staffs. Today he lives near Yosemite and gives New Deal tours of the park. Andrew has added hundreds of New Deal sites to our New Deal map. His research always starts with primary sources. At local archives, he has uncovered hundreds of written records on New Deal projects, which he has digitized for the Living New Deal. With his help, we have made available to educators and the general public data as sweeping as WPA project expenditure records and details as small as menus of school lunches funded by the CWA. Thank you, Andrew, for helping us grow our New Deal national database.

Professor, author, and public figure Dr. Robert Reich will be honored on Friday, October 5, at 6:30-8pm, at the Women’s Faculty Club at UC Berkeley as part of the “Women and the Spirit of the New Deal” conference. The former U.S. Secretary of Labor will receive the Intelligence and Courage Award from the Frances Perkins Center, named for Frances Perkins, whom FDR appointed as the first female cabinet member. It was Perkins who said, “[…] a government should aim to give all of the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.” The award and Reich’s remarks are a highlight of the 2-day conference, which features leading authors, scholars, historians, activists, and those in public life. The public is invited to attend for a donation to the Living New Deal. See more information and register here.

The LND’s Researcher-at-Large, Evan Kalish, was traveling across Ohio looking for New Deal public works when he came across the beautiful Toledo Main Library. The Public Works Administration (PWA) and Work Projects Administration (WPA) were involved in the construction of this magnificent 1939-40 library, which features a breathtaking frieze around the entire atrium. The six-foot-tall artwork was created by inlaying hand-cut glass pieces on panels of colored Vitrolite. This spectacular mural was designed by New York-based artist John Benson. Artist Frank Sohn designed the “Philosophy” panel. The PWA supplied the funding for the project, while the WPA supplied the labor. The building was dedicated in 1940 and is still in service today as the city’s public library.

A prominent artist who made contributions to the California Scene Painting movement and had his work displayed at the White House, Milford Zornes worked on several commissions funded through the New Deal. Under the auspices of the Treasury Relief Art Project and the Public Works of Art Project, Zornes created works such as the Claremont Post Office Mural and the Chaffey College Library Paintings. The artist’s daughter, Maria (Zornes) Baker, and his biographer, Hal Baker, have donated some of his notes and documents to the Living New Deal. The materials are part of a larger collection, the Zornes Papers that the trust is donating to the Zornes Archive at Pomona College. The papers include commentary on fellow artists Maynard and Edith Dixon; notes on their house and studio in Utah; and details about collaborating with Dixon and Buck Weaver on the Palomino Horses mural at the Canoga Park Post Office.

The Living New Deal has published photographs showing artist Jo Mora at work on architectural ornaments at the Monterey Courthouse and theKing City High School Auditorium. The WPA commissioned Mora to create bas-relief panels for the two structures designed by architect Robert A. Stanton. Donated by the Jo Mora Trust Collection and curated by Peter Hiller, the photographs show the artist in his studio along with Stanton, posing with one of the Monterey Courthouse column capitals. The collection includes images of the artist at work on the courthouse fountains, the Monterey Courthouse under construction, work in progress on the bas-relief panels, and blueprints of the architectural ornaments. Some of these images have never been published and will be part of a forthcoming Jo Mora biography by Peter Hiller to be published by the Book Club of California. Find more details on Mora here and here.

This month, LND’s Researcher-at-Large Evan Kalish highlights New Deal efforts at a unique site in Georgia—the Ocmulgee National Monument outside Macon. This monument protects a pre-Columbian native settlement dating back millennia. Many New Deal agencies had an impact on the development of this site, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Civil Works Administration, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and the Works Progress Administration. One legacy of their work is the only Art Moderne visitors’ building in the national park system. The site is centered around the 1,000-year-old Earthlodge, which was renovated by the CCC. Ocmulgee was established as a National Monument by FDR.

Unfortunately, there is no single, systematic source of data on what New Deal public works agencies accomplished. The long-term goal of the Living New Deal is to fill that gap.  In the meantime, our Project Historian, Brent McKee, has compiled a list of what the various agencies left behind in terms of self-documentation. Some did final reports, others did not; some of the reporting was very good, some was sketchy. Poor reporting is understandable given that most New Deal agencies were closed down quickly with the onset of the Second World War – or due to hostility from conservative members of Congress.  We will continue to expand the list as more archival sources come to light.

Although they contributed significantly to the social welfare of the nation, the women who guided the New Deal’s far-reaching programs are largely overlooked. This fall, the Living New Deal, in collaboration with the Frances Perkins Center and the National New Deal Preservation Association, will host a conference at UC Berkeley to recognize the women who shaped the New Deal and those carrying on the spirit of the New Deal today. Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor Robert Reich will receive the Intelligence and Courage Award from the Perkins Center for his efforts to illuminate the causes of and answers to growing economic inequality. Find more information and register for the conference here: https://lndconference.eventbrite.com.

Part of a New Deal mural installation at the DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx was recently covered with paint during building renovations. The mural, entitled “Constellations,” decorated the ceiling of the school’s third floor and depicted the night sky. It was painted in 1936 by Alfred Floegel, under the Federal Art Project, along with his immense “History of the World,” on the walls below.  LND’s Gray Brechin, Frank da Cruz, and Harvey Smith spoke to the Associated Press and CNN about the significance of the mural. The media attention was a valuable reminder to the American public that public art was a vital New Deal program to help struggling artists and beautiful public spaces. The New York Department of Education said that it is considering restoring the mural.

This month, LND Researcher-at-Large Evan Kalish brings us a unique memorial from the high desert of Nevada. The Rock Creek Fire Monument was erected to honor five members of Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Company 1212, Paradise Camp F-5, who gave their lives “for the conservation of Nevada’s natural resources.” The men were fighting fires in the hills outside the community of Orovada on July 28, 1939, when weather conditions turned against them.

Nevada was among the later states to reach 100 projects posted to The Living New Deal; Evan first learned of the monument as part of a personal research effort to reach that milestone. Evan writes: “I originally read a story about the monument and posted it in Jan. 2015. At the time there was only one tiny image of the memorial online, and location details were limited. So it was fortuitous that last summer [2017], during a 1,600-mile drive visiting remote post offices across northern Nevada, I spotted this stone structure at a rest stop, thought ‘something about this feels familiar,’ pulled over… and there it was! I was ridiculously excited to have rediscovered this piece of history. The project is now precisely mapped on LND.”

Dozens of the 121 New Deal projects in Nevada presently posted to our website document the conservation and development activities undertaken by the men of the CCC across the lonely landscapes of the Silver State.

The Park Slope Gallery in Brooklyn and the Leon Bibel Trust have generously provided the Living New Deal with images of previously unpublished artworks by Works Progress Administration (WPA) artist Leon Bibel.  Bibel was a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enrollee in 1933 and the materials published on the LND website include Bibel’s 1933 pen and ink drawings of daily life in his CCC camp.  They also include his CCC Certificate of Discharge from Fort Winfield Scott in San Francisco.  After serving in the CCC, Bibel went on to become a Federal Arts Project muralist and a WPA Arts Project administrator.  A later drawing of Bibel depicts mural artist Bernard Zakhim at work on his famous Coit Tower mural “Library.”

The Living New Deal welcomes new National Associate Ernest Everett Blevins, MFA, to its research team.  He is a structural historian working in Review & Compliance for the West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office.  Ernest has recorded and updated more than 80 LND sites in West Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina.  He has developed useful research strategies for locating sites.  Using old airport listings from Google Books, he located the abandoned Jellico Airport in Tennessee.  He also discovered that CCC camps were often listed on the enumeration maps prepared for the 1940 census.  His largest submission was based on an old newspaper article listing 48 WPA projects.  In recognition of his LND work, Ernest joined the 2018 class of West Virginia History Heroes.

On Thursday, April 26 at 6:00 pm, LND’s Gray Brechin will speak at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Together with Abad Ocubillo, a senior planner from the SF Planning Department, Gray will discuss what the landscape tells us about urban history, how planning initiatives reveal the city’s power structure, and in what ways the face of the city is changing today. He will also mention the exciting news that an enormous WPA scale model of San Francisco, long gathering dust in storage, will be cleaned and reassembled as an SFMOMA public art project. The event is in the Koret Education Center on the museum’s second floor. Admission is free. Click here for more information.

Evan Kalish recently returned from New York, where the Living New Deal has catalogued more than 100 school buildings financed in part by the Public Works Administration. LND identified most of these buildings using PWA documents, newspaper articles, and other materials from the era. There are historical photos of more than 30 of these projects, including many scanned at the National Archives. These often-Colonial Revival-style schools are plentiful throughout the northeast, and Evan has photographed nearly two dozen of them in Upstate New York. Fortunately, Evan found that most of these buildings confirm their pedigree with a cornerstone or PWA plaque. Visit the site for more information about these projects.

The Living New Deal recently added a new Texas National Associate to its team . Eveline Evans is a native of Nebraska but has lived in Central Texas for over 45 years. She became interested in the New Deal when she first stumbled upon a WPA mural in a post office. She started researching and found many other types of New Deal projects that interested her. When she travels, she checks the Living New Deal website to see if there are any sites she can visit. If she finds one that has not yet been listed, she documents it so that others can enjoy the New Deal legacy. The Living New Deal now has forty-seven National Associates, all of whom are volunteers willing to help us document the New Deal in their region. Eveline, thank you for your efforts and welcome to the team!

The Living New Deal website has now surpassed 15,000 distinct, mapped sites across the United States and its territories. Several states and cities also recently hit milestones:
New York State: 1,600 sites
New York City: 800 sites
Texas: 700 sites
Pennsylvania: 500 sites
New Jersey: 500 sites
Ohio: 300 sites
Maine: 250 sites
Washington State: 250 sites
West Virginia: 225 sites
Vermont: 150 sites
New Hampshire: 150 sites
Thank you to all our contributors.
Onward to 16,000!

The Works Progress Administration built Emerson’s Borough Hall in 1938-39. The Federal Art Project employed two artists, including Albert C. Haring and one unknown artist, to create murals in Borough Hall. The building has seven murals in its basement. Emerson is considering renovating, or outright replacing, Borough Hall. While the Borough Council acknowledges the importance of potentially preserving the murals, it is not committed to preserving the front of the building, despite its historical significance. Emerson’s mayor stated that “As far as the front of the building, again, we will listen to the architect’s recommendation and decide accordingly.” Read more about the battle to save the building and its murals. You can also contact Jill McGuire of the Emerson Historic Preservation Committee at [email protected].

Evan Kalish recently traveled to New Mexico where he documented dozens of New Deal projects. Here is his summary – I love exploring New Mexico: the sunsets are beautiful, the spaces are wide-open, and the New Deal is everywhere. Melrose, N.M., population 650, has several stone WPA structures in town, and fortunately most of them are identified as New Deal. The school in Melrose bears a 1942 WPA plaque and the wall surrounding the grounds is imprinted with a WPA stamp. These are great, though when it comes to identifying its maker another Melrose project takes the cake: look closely at this wall surrounding a park and former senior center in Melrose, and you’ll find giant stone patterns spelling out “WPA” in lettering around two feet tall. He’d
almost completely missed this; fortunately the current owner was available to point it out to him! Evan also explored northeast New Mexico towns of Tucumcari, Clovis, Portales , Clayton , Raton.

In 1936, the town of Lawrence, on Long Island in New York, undertook a $825,000 project to build a high school. The town completed the project thanks to funds from the Public Works Administration. The town recently restored the building’s cupola and clock tower. The structures had been in decline for decades. With the advent of smart phones, many cities and school districts discard clock towers because of the diminished need but to Lawrence officials, the structures are important to restore – “part of combating the Depression, to put people to work.” The building is now a middle school and its new cupola and clock tower are powered by LED and smartphone technology. Read more about the project here.

The Living New Deal has now surpassed 14,000 mapped sites on its website (https://livingnewdeal.org/map/) and is rapidly approaching the 15,000 benchmark, with almost 14,500 sites mapped. We have also reached impressive milestones in a number of individual states: Massachusetts now has 800 sites, New Mexico has 300, Connecticut has 250, and Montana and Utah each have 200. We are grateful to our entire team – including the “Core Team,” our National Associates , and every individual who has taken the time to contribute sites, add information to existing sites, and spread the word about our project. Thank you for your interest and for making the Living New Deal a success. Please continue to contribute sites and information to help build on our accomplishments.

We set up an Instagram feed to share some of our trove of photographs of New Deal public works and public art. It will feature black and white photos from the archives alongside current color photos taken by Living New Deal volunteers. The idea is to share the beauty of New Deal art, architecture and landscapes, as well as showing their ubiquity around the country and provide insight into the many New Deal service programs almost completely forgotten today. Please follow us @livingnewdealproject and stay tuned for more developments. You can visit our Instagram page here but you will need to join Instagram, which is easy to do here.

Evan Kalish, The Living New Deal’s Researcher at Large, is often traveling the nation in pursuit of uncovering New Deal treasures. Just in the last year, Evan has motored around New England, the Upper Midwest and the Southeast. A new, recurring eBlast feature will update us on Evan’s adventures. He recently traveled to Mackinac Island in Michigan, where WPA engravers hand-carved detailed, two-sided oak signs showing scenes of the island’s heritage. After decades of decay, a local carpenter rescued seven signs from disposal and undertook a multiyear effort to restore them. Each sign is about 3.5 feet tall, 2.5 feet wide, and weighs almost 300 pounds. Read the full story and see images here.

The Living New Deal website now features a new page: Find Your New Deal Ancestry. This page walks you through requisition information and records from the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in St. Lous, Missouri, part of the National Archives. While contacting the National Archives may seem daunting, this page makes the process easy and approachable. It’s an exciting way for people to discovery whether they have relatives who were employed in one or more of the various New Deal programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), or the National Youth Administration (NYA).

Brent McKee, The Living New Deal’s Project Historian, recently reviewed John W. Jeffries’ A Third Term For FDR: The Election Of 1940 (University Press of Kansas, 2017). The book is particularly relevant because the bitterness of the recent 2016 election echoed the tension of the 1940 election between Roosevelt and Wendell Wilkie. McKee notes that the book “has the right mix of interesting, often humorous stories, and academic & statistical analysis.” According to McKee, Jeffries found that “voter satisfaction with the New Deal was still high enough in 1940 to have a significant impact on the election and help secure a third victory for FDR.” McKee’s full review is on The Living New Deal website.

The Living New Deal now has at least 100 sites for every state and territory. With over 13,000 sites in total, some states have far more than 100 sites. However, it has long been our goal to cross the “100” threshold in every state and territory. The milestone represents a lot of hard work by our team – promotion and gathering of resources for the organization; detective skills in locating, researching and mapping sites; and dissecting obscure state-level government reports and publications. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, we are indebted to our contributors across the country who submit sites and information to our website. Thank you and congratulations!

Gray Brechin, founder and Project Scholar of the Living New Deal, is giving two talks in the Bay Area in early December. First, on December 5 from 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm, he will be the featured speaker at the Exhibition Program for the Victor Arnautoff exhibit at San Francisco State’s J. Paul Leonard Library. Arnautoff was a leading artist in San Francisco in the 1930s, whose best known work is the mural “City Life” located at Coit Tower. Then, on December 6 at 12:00 pm, Brechin will speak at the San Jose Museum of Art. He will discuss how the New Deal left behind an enormous legacy of art because of Roosevelt’s belief that the arts were fundamental to any civilization worthy of the name.

The Postal Service announced plans to close and sell the College Station Post Office in Harlem. The College Station Post Office was funded by the Public Works Administration and built by the Treasury Department in 1937. The Postal Service is looking to relocate to a new facility on Striver’s Row on 138th Street. The Postal Service has attempted to sell the College Station location since 2009 but the community successfully blocked the attempts. Community members and the New York Metro Area Postal Union are fighting the most recent effort. The Postal Service has closed post offices nationwide due to insufficient funding from Congress, excluding the public from many fine New Deal buildings and murals. Public comment period is open until November 10, 2017. Email [email protected] for details.

Gray Brechin, the Living New Deal’s founder and Project Scholar, will be speaking in New York City at a public program hosted by the National Jobs for All Coalition: “A New ‘New Deal’ for NYC and the USA.” He will join other New Deal scholars and speakers at The New School (Theresa Lang Auditorium) on Friday, October 27, 5-8 pm. On Saturday, October 28, Columbia Law School will host a strategic planning session for a new New Deal from 10 am to 4 pm. Visit NJFAC.eventbrite.com for more details. Gray will also be speaking at the Gotham Center at CUNY on Thursday, October 26 from 6:30 pm-8:00 pm. He will discuss how federal spending on public works transformed New York City during the Great Depression and how it could again. Visit the Gotham Center for more detail.

Brent McKee, the Living New Deal’s Project Historian, recently undertook a massive research effort at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington DC, resulting in a trove of New Deal discoveries. He scanned over 8,000 photographs, which will result in approximately 1,200 new sites being added to our online map. Brent also estimates that he found over 2,000 new photographs to add to existing sites on our website that either had no photograph or would benefit from supplemental images. The images have also been used for our recently created New Deal Smiles and Working Together pages and will be useful for future projects such as news stories, presentations, and museum exhibits. We are grateful to Brent for his diligence in uncovering these invaluable resources.

We have been hard at work upgrading The LivingNew Deal website to make it more comprehensive and user-friendly. To that end, you can now use your computer or phone’s location settings to connect to our online map to view New Deal sites near you. To use this feature, go to the map and click on the “Nearby” button on the right side of the screen.  This feature will enable users to discover New Dealsites on-the-go, in your backyard and when traveling to new destinations. Similarly, the website can now generate a list of New Dealsites for particular cities as well as states. The site catalogs approximately 14,000 sites with newsites added daily through our submissions page. Check-out the new features and enjoy the website’s expanded access to New Deal history.  

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