The New York City chapter of the Living New Deal (LND-NYC) aims to remedy the loss of knowledge about the New Deal’s accomplishments by restoring the public’s awareness of more than 1,000 sites in the city, including many that are encountered on a daily basis. The LND (livingnewdeal.org) was founded in Berkeley in 2010 to document New Deal sites around the country and now has almost 19,000 sites on a searchable map — drawing on professional and crowd-sourced research — and an extraordinary database of projects, New Deal programs, educational and scholarly resources, webinars, and public programs. It has published maps of New Deal sites in New York City, Washington, and San Francisco.
Inspired by this approach, LND-NYC was founded in 2018 and has sponsored walking tours, webinars, and sought to improve historical signage crediting the New Deal. The Chapter persuaded the city’s Parks Department to install new historical marker signs at the 11 New Deal public swimming pools opened in the summer 1936 and still in use today. The signs provide historical information about the Great Depression and the WPA’s role in the pools’ construction.
The group has also organized webinars comparing New Deal policy with current proposals on topics like housing, conservation, and health. The chapter has sponsored walking tours of New Deal sites in Harlem, Central Park, and Red Hook, Brooklyn, that have been well attended by New Yorkers and by visitors to the city. The next major initiative of the chapter will be promoting the use of the LND’s resources by social studies and history teachers at all levels, but especially in grades 8 and 11 where study of the New Deal is a New York State curriculum requirement.
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