Description
Berkeley’s 1930s and 1940s New Deal structures and projects left a lasting legacy of utilitarian and beautiful infrastructure. These public buildings, schools, parks, and artworks helped shape the city and thus the lives of its residents; it is hard to imagine Berkeley without them. The artists and architects of these projects mention several
themes: working for the community, responsibility, the importance of government support, collaboration, and creating a cultural renaissance. These New Deal projects, however, can be called “hidden history” because their legacies have been mostly ignored and forgotten.
Harvey L. Smith has been researching this part of Berkeley’s history for more than two decades. The images in this volume have been selected from local and national archives and from the author’s contemporary photographs of the living legacy of the New Deal.
