“Living New Deal Project”

The Living New Deal Project is an unprecedented and growing collaborative effort to identify, map, and interpret the vast public works legacy of the New Deal in California. The California Historical Society, in partnership with U.C. Berkeley's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Library and the California Studies Center, is engaging people throughout California in a collective project of rediscovery and documentation of the physical remains of the New Deal and of the timeless issues of civics in a healthy democracy.

With generous funding from the Columbia Foundation, the Living New Deal Project will feature an interactive website with searchable New Deal project locator maps, testimonials, and other historical information; a database documenting WPA, CCC, PWA, CWA, and other New Deal program sites; a large-format book; a state-wide traveling exhibition and public program series; news articles and other events. 

It's all around you, but you don't see it. You use it every day, but don't know it. And it very well may have saved your own family seventy years ago when your grandparents' hands and minds joined millions of others to build it; you may be here because they did so. 

It's the public landscape of the New Deal — an invisible matrix of public schools, hospitals, parks, roads, sewers, airports, amphitheaters, bridges, golf courses, aqueducts, power stations, city halls, art works and more, constructed by a half dozen federal agencies. They were created by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to lift the country out of Depression, and we have been enjoying and prospering from that mighty legacy ever since without knowing it.