![]() WPA filing cards are not very informative, and they were preserved on some of the worst microfilm I’ve ever encountered. A few trips to the nation’s capital were sufficient to convince me that I was wrong. I assumed that the New Deal was centralized in Washington, D.C., so surely I would find the records of its accomplishments neatly filed and accessible at the Library of Congress or the National Archives. ![]() But in 2004, the Columbia Foundation gave photographer Robert Dawson and me a grant to kick off the project, so we got to work. And I knew nothing of agencies like the PWA, CWA, FERA, REA, or the RA, but I knew that the Three Cs, Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), had built rustic structures and trails in the East Bay Regional Parks. The markers left by the WPA on sidewalks, public restrooms, and Berkeley’s beloved Municipal Rose Garden had long intrigued me, but I had never gone out of my way to hunt them down. What was I thinking? It helped that I didn’t really know what I was in for. All of it-every plaque, school, fountain, tennis court, park, and ranger station built by the WPA as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal for America. ![]() Hubris doesn’t begin to describe what we proposed to do: document every last physical trace of the Depression-era federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) in California. Recovering a history hidden in plain sight ![]()
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