Bethesda Sites

"This senior high school has been built on a plot of ground not only large enough for athletic fields and tennis courts but of sufficient size to allow for future buildings when the school needs to expand. The main building contains 13 classrooms, English classrooms with stages, laboratories for science and biology, rooms for music and domestic science, a library, and a cafeteria. The construction is steel and concrete, with exterior walls of brick trimmed with stone and wood. It was completed in September 1935 at a construction cost of $218,440 and a project cost of $287,419."

Robert F. Gates painted the mural, "Montgomery County Farm Women's Market," in 1939 for the Bethesda post office, which was closed in 2012. It shows a woman feeding animals next to women selling produce at the Farm Women’s Market, which opened on Wisconsin Avenue in 1932.   The mural was commissioned by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts. Robert Gates later became head of the Art Department at American University. In 1938, Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Procurement Division of the Treasury Department to look at the sketches of the Gates mural. She later wrote in her diary the sketch was “charming,” and “I think...

In 1935 the WPA improved and installed water main systems on various streets in Bethesda.

The modern campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was established at Bethesda MD during the New Deal.  It included the first laboratory of the newly-created National Cancer Institute, as well (the NCI came under the NIH in 1944). The NIH is the leading medical science agency of the United States, performing its own research and funding research at universities and hospitals around the country. The NIH was launched in 1930 as a reorganization and enhancement of government-funded medical research efforts that date back to 1887. NIH’s original location (1930-1938) was at 25th and E streets NW, Washington DC.   In...

The Carderock Division of the NSWC us a center for research, development and testing of Navy ships and technology. Newspaper clippings in the National Archives report that in 1938-39, new construction on the site in the amount of $3,500,000 was done with a mix of "New Deal spending" and "private construction." The funds appear to have been largely spent on the large new headquarters building which can be viewed hear:

The historic New Deal post office building in Bethesda MD – sometimes misattributed to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) – was constructed with Treasury Department funds in 1937. The Neo-Georgian building was constructed out of native stone trucked in from Stoneyhurst Quarries on River Road... (www.bethesdamagazine.com) The post office remained in use until 2012, when "faced with mounting financial difficulties, the USPS  closed it in 2012 and sold it for $4 million to the Donohoe Companies." The New Deal mural from the post office has been restored and was relocated to Bethesda-Chevy Chase Regional Services Center in 2013.

In 1933, the Public Works Administration allotted $15,000 for the construction of an Upper Potomac Interceptor extension. The Evening Star described this project in its September 3rd (Sunday Star) edition: “This will complete the last link of a sewer located along the north shore of the Potomac between Rock Creek and the District line to intercept sewage discharging directly into the Upper Potomac. The section to be built is in the line of Newark street between the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal and Conduit road .” In 1934, the District awarded a contract for the work to the Peter D’Amato Construction Company,...

The Walter Reed National Military Medical Center began life as the National Naval Medical Center under the New Deal. Congress appropriated the funds in 1937 and President Franklin D. Roosevelt selected the site in Bethesda, Maryland.   Architect Paul Cret designed a magnificent Moderne building with a tower that still delights (though much obscured by subsequent additions to the complex).  Construction began in 1939.  FDR laid the cornerstone of the famous tower on Armistice Day 1940, and the center opened soon thereafter (probably some time in 1941, not 1940 as most sources say). According to the official Center website, "The President’s vision was to...

"According to a Maryland Historical Trust report, "Westbrook Elementary School (1939) is an important architectural landmark in the history of Montgomery County and its public school. It is the only Federal Public Works school in the county. A plaque in the school's main hall identifies the building as a project of the Federal Works Agency, Public Works Administration and includes the names John M. Carmody, Federal Works Agency and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States." Also, according to the school's history page (https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/schools/westbrookes/about/westbrookhistory.aspx) Westbrook was built with the assistance of WPA labor."