Some of the many gems from a great era of public works Whether you know it or not, there?s a good chance that a New Deal program helped shape your community.
During the ?30s and ?40s, the public works and employment programs instituted by the Roosevelt administration, part of the government?s response to the Great Depression, put millions to work and created thousands of new buildings, infrastructure projects, and public artworks across the country.
The Living New Deal website, an atlas and resource compiling all the New Deal sites across the country, has chronicled more than 12,000 different examples, many of which are still serving the community nearly a century after they were constructed, including huge, landscape shifting projects, such as the Colorado River project, which dammed the waterway and helped electrify Las Vegas, and irrigation that helped the Imperial Valley in California bloom. ?It was really a quantum leap forward for the entire United States,? says Gray Brechin, an author who helps run the Living New Deal. ?By building this vast physical and cultural infrastructure, the New Deal brought the country into the mid 20th century.?
Between the Works Project Administration (WPA), which focused on employment, and the Public Works Administration (PWA), which took on big infrastructure projects, the ?30s was a boom time for building (and a constant reference for contemporary infrastructure projects).
Here are some of the most impressive examples of buil...