New Deal's legacy: The face of New Mexico

No state benefited more from the public works program than New Mexico

Tom Sharpe | The New Mexican

4/6/2008 - 3/18/08

Seventy-five years ago, Democrats controlling the White House and in Congress launched a series of public-works programs unprecedented in U.S. history.

From 1933 to 1942, millions of Americans worked for an alphabet soup of federal agencies created to boost the country out of the Great Depression.

They built dams, roads, schools, courthouses, armories, stadiums and recreational buildings, improved parks, cut trails, planted trees, poisoned rodents, straightened streams, built furniture, sewed garments, composed music, published books, painted murals and created other works of art.

No state benefited more from these government-funded programs than New Mexico whose Democratic governor, Clyde Tingley, was a political supporter and friend of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Today, you can still see the legacy of the New Deal's emphasis on regional architecture in the area of downtown Santa Fe where Don Gaspar Avenue crosses the Rio Santa Fe:

• La Puente de los Conquistadores (the bridge of the conquerors), designed by architect Thomas Trent, is a modern elliptical arch in a Pueblo Revival style. Its $37,000 cost came from the National Industrial Recovery Act. The bridge opened in 1934.

• The New Mexico Supreme Court Building, on the south bank of the river, is a Y-shaped, three-story building designed by architect Gordon Street in a Territorial Revival style. Its $306,000 cost was paid by the Public Works Administration. It was constructed between 1935 and 1937.

•  The Santa Fe River Park includes flagstone walkways, a stone-lined acequia channel, picnic tables, limestone-block walls lining the banks and thousands of trees. The park was developed in several phases, at undetermined costs, by the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1935 and 1940.

David Kammer, an Albuquerque historian, said Stephen DeBoer, a landscape architect who designed Denver's park system, originally envisioned the park stretching some 20 miles, all the way to La Bajada. The New Deal made money available for state parks, but initially New Mexico had no state parks, so a system had to be created, beginning with the Santa Fe River Park and Hyde Memorial State Park.

The first major task was straightening the river's meandering path through downtown Santa Fe. "It's hard for people to believe today, except during the spring melt off, but on occasions, historically, that could be a torrential river," Kammer said. "In terms of what we know today environmentally, ... you might not want to make a straight channel."

Like many other New Deal projects, the Santa Fe River Park work used locally quarried limestone and other native materials. "A quarter-mile east of the Delgado (Street) Bridge, there's a wonderful natural-looking stone weir there that creates a waterfall and a small pool below it," Kammer said. "That's an example of that kind of naturalistic landscaping that the CCC did. ... Someday in the future, people will look at New Mexico and the history of masonry, and they'll identify two great periods — the period of Chaco Canyon and the period of the New Deal."

Other New Deal projects in Santa Fe include the National Park Service building on Old Santa Fe Trail, the old armory now used for the Bataan Memorial Military Museum on Old Pecos Trail, the Santa Fe County Courthouse on Grant Avenue, the Villagra Building (originally called the Public Welfare Building) on Galisteo Street and many of the buildings at the New Mexico School for the Deaf and the Santa Fe Indian School.

Regional projects include the stone lodge at Hyde Memorial State Park, most of the buildings at Bandelier National Monument and the road that winds from N.M. 4 down into Frijoles Canyon at Bandelier. Previously, visitors parked along N.M. 4 and walked down into the canyon.

In addition to the public-works projects, Santa Fe also had more than its share of New Deal-financed art and craft projects designed to train young men and women in traditional skills while producing works of art for public buildings. Perhaps the best known of the New Deal art in Santa Fe are the six murals — landscapes on canvas affixed to the walls — by William Penhallow Henderson in the U.S. District Court building on Federal Place. The old courthouse, built between 1853 and 1889, recently got three more New Deal artworks — scenes of Navajo life painted by Warren Rollins for a post office in Gallup but now hanging in the Santa Fe building.

Kathy Flynn, who has studied New Deal art projects as executive director of the National New Deal Preservation Association, said many works of art donated to schools, including etchings by Gene Kloss, have disappeared. Of nine Kloss etchings donated to the Santa Fe schools, Flynn said, "I only know of three at Capshaw (Middle School). We don't know what happened to the rest of them."

Flynn said many people think the paintings in the building that houses the Main Post Office on Federal Place were a New Deal project. The artist, Gerald Cassidy, worked on New Deal projects, but he created those works for a privately owned theater on the Plaza, Flynn said. After the theater closed, she said, the large-scale paintings were taken to Acapulco, Mexico, then to Hobbs, then back to Santa Fe, where they were installed at their current location.

Cassidy also began the murals inside St. Francis Auditorium on a Works Progress Administration commission. "He rented a warehouse in order to work on it and he kept getting sick because he was sitting up high, working on scaffolding," Flynn said. "He would go home, he would get well, then he would go back. He'd start working on it, then he would get sick again. The bottom line is he ended up dying of carbon-monoxide poisoning, and someone else finished up those particular pieces there in St. Francis Auditorium. His wife (Ina Sizer Cassidy), who was the head of the Federal Writers Project in New Mexico, made the comment that her husband gave his life for the WPA."

The best-known project of the New Mexico Federal Writers Project, which was later directed by Alice Corbin Henderson, wife of the painter Henderson, was the New Mexico State Guidebook.

"They hired people — most of them were writers, but some people they hired had never written before," Flynn said. "This was a way of giving them employment, and they traveled around the state and wrote about things they found in every quadrant of the state. So you can take that book today and go and look and see what is there today."

There were, of course, some complaints about the government programs. Museum of New Mexico employee David Rohr, who is finishing a master's degree at The University of New Mexico, has found letters to Tingley from a Belen man demanding work for his son and from a Hillsboro woman complaining that most of the workers on New Deal projects in her area were from the El Paso area and that they even brought groceries in from Texas.

The president of the New Mexico Press Association, Carey Holbrook, wrote to object that the mimeographed newsletters at Civilian Conservation Corps camps were soliciting advertising. This amounted to the government "stepping into the commercial field" and "taking away from the legitimate business of the newspaper," he wrote.

Stan Rosen, a retired professor of industrial relations active in New Deal anniversary celebrations, said the era elicits a feeling of déjà vu. "All the things that were problems when Roosevelt was in are now becoming problems in our modern day society," he said.

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.