Did you know that Rock Creek Parkway was completed thanks to the New Deal? Or that the Public Works Administration, an agency created as part of the response to unemployment during the Great Depression, built National Zoo’s Small Mammal House? Indeed, even large parts of the National Arboretum come courtesy of the federal program.
D.C. has a total of 313 projects made thanks, in full or part, to the New Deal, according to a website called The Living New Deal, which catalogs the vast slew of federal programs created under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to boost the economy and create infrastructure ranging from schools to bridges to post offices, and more. A cursory glance of all the D.C.-based projects is staggering.
According to The Week, one of the agencies under the New Deal, the Public Works Administration, used half the country’s concrete and a third of its steel output at its zenith.
You can search the site by location, by project type, by artist, or just look at the interactive mapand click around on the many red dots, which denote something made under the New Deal, and make D.C. look like it has a very bad case of the chicken pox.