W.P.A. Projects Left Their Stamp on the NY Region
WHEN the world’s finest male golfers find themselves struggling to break par at this year’s United States Open at Bethpage State Park in June, chances are they won’t blame their plight on stimulus spending. But perhaps they should. After all, the rolling hills of the Bethpage Black golf course in Nassau County are a legacy of government efforts to create jobs and public works projects during the Great Depression.
And when young professionals in search of housing tour a lovely Art Deco apartment complex in Jersey City with a magnificent view of lower Manhattan, they probably won’t reflect on the vision of the city’s fabled mayor, Frank Hague. But they ought to, because Hague put up the buildings in the 1930s, albeit for use as a medical center, not as a condominium project.
Bethpage State Park and the old Jersey City Medical Center were expanded with labor provided by the Works Progress Administration, one of the vaunted New Deal programs that put millions of people to work around the country during the Great Depression. They make up what the historian Nick Taylor called the “invisible legacy” of Depression-era public works projects in the New York region. “That legacy is all around us,” said Mr. Taylor, author of “American-Made: The Enduring History of the W.P.A.” “We just don’t see it because we take it for granted.”
Suddenly, however, the work of the W.P.A. and other New Deal agencies has re-emerged as a model for the Obama administration’s massive economic stimulus program, with its hundreds of billions devoted to rebuilding and modernizing the nation’s infrastructure. Efforts like the W.P.A.’s flood-relief work in Hartford and the agency’s expansion of Bear Mountain State Park in Orange County were typical labor-intensive jobs programs that left a physical stamp of Depression-era federal intervention.
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And when young professionals in search of housing tour a lovely Art Deco apartment complex in Jersey City with a magnificent view of lower Manhattan, they probably won’t reflect on the vision of the city’s fabled mayor, Frank Hague. But they ought to, because Hague put up the buildings in the 1930s, albeit for use as a medical center, not as a condominium project.
Bethpage State Park and the old Jersey City Medical Center were expanded with labor provided by the Works Progress Administration, one of the vaunted New Deal programs that put millions of people to work around the country during the Great Depression. They make up what the historian Nick Taylor called the “invisible legacy” of Depression-era public works projects in the New York region. “That legacy is all around us,” said Mr. Taylor, author of “American-Made: The Enduring History of the W.P.A.” “We just don’t see it because we take it for granted.”
Suddenly, however, the work of the W.P.A. and other New Deal agencies has re-emerged as a model for the Obama administration’s massive economic stimulus program, with its hundreds of billions devoted to rebuilding and modernizing the nation’s infrastructure. Efforts like the W.P.A.’s flood-relief work in Hartford and the agency’s expansion of Bear Mountain State Park in Orange County were typical labor-intensive jobs programs that left a physical stamp of Depression-era federal intervention.