The historic New Deal mural Constellations, painted by Alfred Floegelat the DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, was recently covered by construction crews with a layer of paint, and possibly damaged. The mural is featured on the Living New Deal’s printed map and pocket guide to the highlights of the New Deal in New York. The Associated Press covered the incident and interviewed Gray Brechin, founder of the Living New Deal, and National Associate Frank da Cruz. For more details, see the stories published by the The New York Times, CNN, and NBC New York.
On January 16, National Public Radio’s “Here & Now” featured Gray Brechin, The Living New Deal’s Project Scholar, for a segment on how the WPA changed U.S. infrastructure. In the interview, Gray gave examples of structures built by the WPA, explained the current-day impact of WPA-built infrastructure, and elaborated on the WPA’s ability to employ approximately 8.5 million people. He also discussed the cost of the WPA and compared it to the costs and effects of Obama’s stimulus package. NPR’s “Here & Now” program reaches an estimated 5 million weekly listeners on over 450 stations across the country. You can hear Gray’s complete interview here.
In his article about Rosie the Riveters, Samuel Redman cited the Living New Deal for its explanation and analysis of the WPA. Rodman’s article discusses the journeys of Rosie the Riveters to California for wartime opportunities. Read the full article here.
On December 14, Evan Kalish was a featured guest on The Colin McEnroe Show, on Connecticut’s WNPR. The show was about the Postal Service, Evan’s area of expertise. Evan created Postlandia: a Photo Journal of Post Offices and Places and also manages the world’s largest curated collection of post office building photographs. Evan has visited over 8,000 post offices. Listen to the entire show here.
The Point Reyes Light published an article authored by Gray Brechin, the Living New Deal’s Project Scholar. In the article, Gray discuses reviving the Civilian Conservation Corps in light of recent wildfires in California. He notes that, “[D]uring its decade-long run, the corps employed three and a half million young men to plant over three billion trees.” Read the full article here.
Evan Kalish has been featured in Michigan’s St. Ignace News. The paper recognized Evan for his incredible work visiting and documenting post offices across the country. Evan has visited 8,450 post offices in nine years, in all 50 states. He chronicles his journeys on his blog, Postlandia. The paper specifically featured Evan’s work in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, including St. Ignace and Mackinac Island. Click here for the complete story.
The Living New Deal was featured in The Herald Journal of Logan, Utah. An article written by John Zsiray highlighted the Living New Deal as a source identifying many New Deal sites in northern Utah’s Cache Valley. Read the full article here.
In an article authored by Trudy Goldberg, the annual labor issue of Dollars & Sense highlighted the Living New Deal and the New York City map. Read the article here at pages 6-7.
The BBC interviewed Gray Brechin and Brent McKee for a documentary it is producing on the New Deal. The piece will be broadcast in November. Stay tuned!
The Week featured the Living New Deal by recognizing “The astounding provenance of New Deal projects, in 1 eye-popping map.”
Read the article by Ryan Cooper
The Week, August 30, 2017
“Curator Harvey Smith said on Thursday that he would like to show immigrants to the United States through a different [lens]. ‘This exhibition is about immigration, pluralism and internationalism, and I hope that the contributions of these immigrants can be recorded rather than forgotten in history.'” Read the World Journal‘s full coverage of the “Building Bridges, Not Walls” exhibition, curated by Living New Deal Project Advisor Harvey Smith, in its English translation (and in the original).
“Norwood was once home to mainly those of Jewish, Irish, and Italian descent. Today it’s one of the city’s most diverse neighborhoods. All nationalities, races, ages, cultures, and religions come to Oval Park. To play, to socialize, to exercise, to relax; for romance, for picnics, and for special events. I believe that it’s one of the best utilized spaces in the whole city, every nook and cranny is used… except the bocce court! Everybody gets along, everybody watches out for everybody else.” New York-based Research Associate Frank da Cruz calls upon us to properly commemorate Oval Park, a WPA project in the Bronx that turns 80 this summer. Read more about the park’s history, the role it continues to hold in the community, and the importance of marking this site for posterity in his opinion piece for the Norwood News.
“From schools to murals and zoos, many of the projects created by the New Deal still exist today. According to Living New Deal, a team dedicated to keeping the legacy of the New Deal alive, New York received the most New Deal public works in the country and was the beneficiary of prominent projects such as the Triborough Bridge, LaGuardia Airport, and Riverside Park. And now, you can see some of the locations of these projects with Living New Deal’s New Deal New York map! They’ve mapped about one thousand locations (and there are still more being discovered).” In Untapped Cities’ “Mapping the New Deal in Each NYC Borough,” Stephanie Geier provides a detailed breakdown of our New Deal New York map.
“Scanning the horizon of New York and beyond, New Deal sites number in the hundreds of thousands, most of them still in use today and almost none of them marked. There is the equivalent of a Lost Civilization out there waiting to be discovered. No one had ever documented everything the New Deal built or improved, until the Living New Deal was founded a decade ago to uncover the hundreds of thousands of public works across the country and map them, so that all Americans could see for themselves what was accomplished by their grandparents.” Read Richard A Walker’s entire Brooklyn Rail essay about how “The New Deal Lives On in the City” and our new pocket map honoring this legacy.
“The New Deal embodied an approach whose starting point was to make attacking poverty – not the people who live in it – a first principle. This makes it especially salient today… The writer and scholar Gray Brechin, a driving force behind the Living New Deal project, argues that at a time when Republicans in America and Tories in Britain behave as if there were no alternative to shrinking welfare states, and when ‘the dominant meme is that government just wastes money’, it is important that this ideology is exposed for the fiction that it is.” Read Mary O’Hara’s article, examining “lunch-shaming,” the “deeply flawed narrative that we can’t afford” the poor, and The Living New Deal’s attempt to commemorate a different vision of society.
