• Bear Mountain State Park: Historical Museum at Trailside Museums and Zoo - Bear Mountain NY
    The Works Progress Administration (WPA) completed the Historical Museum at the Trailside Museums and Zoo, Bear Mountain State Park, Bear Mountain, NY. The Trailside Museums and Zoo, built during the years 1932-35, expanded an earlier Trailside Museum in the park that dated to the 1920s. The naturalistic style of the building, which ties the structure to the landscape around the building, recalls the "Park Service Rustic" design of Herbert Maier, who designed a building for the Trailside Museums completed in 1927. Maier went on to work in both Grand Canyon and Yellowstone national parks.
  • The Palisades Interstate Park in New York - Bear Mountain NY
    The Palisades Interstate Park system, a major beneficiary of New Deal public works projects, spans New York and New Jersey and stretches from The Palisades--cliffs overlooking the Hudson River in sight of Manhattan--to forested hills dotted with lakes in the western Hudson Highlands. The park system was founded in 1900 through the activism of women’s clubs that fought to protect the Palisades
from quarrying. They were aided by some of the richest men in America, among them J.P. Morgan, the Rockefellers and the Harriman family. Mixing civic idealism and the desire to preserve the beauty of their own region, they purchased or...