How is it that New Yorkers know so little about the most transformational decade in their own history? How is it that, until recently, the New Deal in New York remained almost entirely unmarked and unacknowledged—even though it altered both the capacity and the purpose of the city in unprecedented ways? Is this a history that has been deliberately obscured—and what can professional historians, teachers, and all those who care about the American past, do to recover that legacy?

New York City received more New Deal money than any other single, government entity, city or state. Yet this was not simply a matter of Washington funding construction projects. It was a profound partnership between federal and local government, one that rebuilt both the physical and human infrastructure of the world’s largest city. Even before the Great Depression shook New York to its core, it was, in the words of Thomas Kessner, “A city without the soul of a commonwealth”—or, as a contemporary observer called it, a municipality “corrupt and sluttish to the last degree.”

It was the promise of fundamentally changing how New York was run and for whom that attracted so much New Deal funding to the city in the first place. President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration was attracted by the seemingly incorruptible new mayor of the city, liberal Republican Fiorello La Guardia, and his “master builder,” Robert Moses. Their expectations were fulfilled, as New York became the model New Deal city. Unprecedented investments in both the physical structure of the city and human welfare were made with a minimum of waste and theft, in what was still a time of rampant municipal corruption.

Ironically, the very instrument of this success would lead to much of its story being obscured for decades. As our presenters outline, antagonism between FDR and Moses would leave numerous major New Deal sites in the city un-commemorated—as would general apathy, animosity toward the New Deal’s goals and accomplishments by conservative scholars and politicians, and mere ignorance. Our speakers will trace how this happened, and how collectively the New Deal in New York was brought back into the public realm.

This is a story of grassroots historical preservation, of how ordinary citizens with almost no funding brought the past alive again, through a multimedia approach that has included the creation of databases, maps and guides, educative and critical webinars available to all, and live tours and meetings. The session will be of interest to scholars and public historians of the New Deal and New York, as well as secondary school teachers, and all those who care about our nation’s past, and what lessons it holds for us today.