Survival: No Longer Extant

The CWA painted inside and outside of Emerson School. Emerson Park has replaced Emerson School. The palm trees in the park show where the entrance to the school once was.

Gordon Grant painted three tempera murals at the post office in Alhambra, CA. The murals—"El Paysano," "El Gringo," and "El Indio"—were funded by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts (TSFA). All three were subsequently painted over.

The Public Works Administration (PWA) paid for a municipal hospital for Visalia CA in 1936.  The 68 bed facility served the community of Visalia until 1969, when it was demolished to make way for the new Kaweah Delta Medical center (pictured).

Destroyed in Cedar Fire.

The Roosevelt pool in Susanville was built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1939.   It began as a community pool – a project long sought by the people of Susanville – and then was attached to Roosevelt School next door.  After a half-century of excellent service, the pool had to be closed in 2004 due to structural failure brought on by neglect (it began to leak).  It was demolished in 2015. Fortunately, a visitor to site in the late 1990s and took photographs of the pool.  The Susanville Historical Society also has photographs of the pool in its prime (unfortunately,...

Artist Lorser Feitelson painted two murals, "Henrick Hudson" and "Daniel Boone," flanking the auditorium stage at Hooper Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles, CA. The murals—now missing—were likely funded by the WPA Federal Art Project (FAP), as Stanton Macdonald-Wright's mosaic above the doors to the school auditorium was in 1936-37.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) constructed a central clinic building in the Highland Hospital in Oakland in 1935 or 1936.  The exact location and design of that building are unknown. There is no evidence that the WPA clinic building is still standing; it was undoubtedly demolished during recent construction of a large new hospital building behind the original hospital of 1927. The photo here shows the entrance to the 1920s hospital, which was built in florid Spanish Revival style.

From 1933 to 1937, Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) workers developed Castle Crags State Park for public use.  CCC enrollees from a camp at Castella built "the park’s roads, trails, infrastructure and buildings in the 'park rustic' style of native wood and stone." (State Parks brochure).  Evidently, some of the CCC workers at Castle Crags were African American (see photo below). The state purchased the land in 1933 from a bankrupt private resort with a mineral springs, "Castle Rock Spring", which had fallen into disrepair.  The CCC workers built a trail down to the river, a new suspension bridge to replace an old, unsafe bridge for...

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) set up five camps in the East Bay hills, starting in 1933-34 and carrying on until 1942.  From those camps, the "CCC boys" set out into the newly-created East Bay regional parks to do a wide range of improvements, such as clearing brush, planting trees, building roads and trails, and laying out picnic areas. The first camp was set up at Wildcat Canyon at the present site of the Tilden Environmental Education (Nature) Center.  About 3,500 young men rotated through Camp Wildcat Canyon.  As Eugene Swartling, who supervised the camp, recalls, "these young men were not being...

As part of extensive improvements throughout Golden Gate Park, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) carried out modest improvement work at the Police Training Academy – now the Golden Gate Park Senior Center.   The work involved alterations to the main office and grading and paving a drill ground behind the building – now a parking lot.  (Healy, pp 70-71). It is likely that the work was done in 1938-39, when the WPA was most active in the park, but we have not been able to verify that.