Still working: 75 years later, New Deal projects continue to matter

As a teenager growing up in Silverton, Ore., Dan Snyder often left the dinner table still feeling hungry. He and his 11 brothers and sisters didn’t have much food to go around in their family farmhouse during the Great Depression.

When Snyder graduated from Silverton High School in 1936, he spent a month at home waiting to turn 17, the minimum age for applying to the Civilian Conservation Corps. The corps, a first-term accomplishment of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, put unemployed young men across the country to work building roads, structures and trails in city parks and national forests.

Snyder entered the corps July 14, 1936, and was sent off to Oregon's Mount Hood National Forest. When he first heard the iron triangle ring from the camp's canteen, he finally felt the weight of the Depression begin to lift.

“They had meat and potatoes and gravy and bread and butter and water and coffee and milk to drink, desserts of canned peaches and canned pineapples,” recalled Snyder, who turns 89 in June. “Nobody went away hungry.”

On May 31, Snyder and others will gather in the Mount Hood forest to celebrate the 75th anniversary of FDR's New Deal and the work programs it created. It is just one of many events organized by the National New Deal Preservation Association to mark the anniversary of Roosevelt's employment programs. Like many New Deal projects, the trails Snyder helped create in Mount Hood National Forest--as well as the Timberline Lodge built there through Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA)--have retained a hold on the community long since the Depression ended.

Besides giving Snyder employment--and a $25 check to send home every month during his four years in the corps--the work programs provided ways for Americans to explore their national forests and parks.

“It opened up all these campgrounds and recreation areas where there really hadn’t been much before,” said Sarah Munro, a historian for the Timberline Lodge.

From a balcony during the lodge’s 1937 dedication ceremony, Roosevelt touted the building as a success of the government’s programs. Constructing it gave the unemployed workers jobs and also taught them valuable trades.

“A lot of them were skilled, and a lot of them were unskilled, but by the time they finished working in timber, they were master craftsmen,” said Linny Adamson, the lodge's curator.

Since its dedication, many of the lodge’s original tapestries and wrought iron workings have been replaced by lodge employees who have kept alive the hotel’s traditions.

“We’re on the restoration of restoration of restorations,” Adamson said.

Those restorations keep attracting visitors to the lodge. Last year the lodge served two million guests, Adamson said. Still owned by the U.S. Forest Service, the lodge attracts nature and movie lovers alike. Exterior shots of the building were used to represent the isolated Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror classic, “The Shining.”

“We still show it on Halloween,” said Adamson. “That’s what a lot of people come for.’

While the Mount Hood lodge thrives, some other projects developed and built by the WPA have struggled. For a while, the Santa Barbara Bowl, an outdoor amphitheater built in 1936 in California, had to turn away big-name musical acts because the venue had become too outdated to accommodate them, said Sam Scranton, executive director of the Santa Barbara Bowl Foundation.

The Bowl’s roof was particularly problematic because the amount of weight it could hold was limited.

“Two years ago Tom Petty could not play because he had 29 tons of equipment,” said Scranton. “We felt comfortable with only 20 tons.”

Now, after a $22 million renovation that began in 1995, the roof can hold 100 tons of equipment, Scranton said. The amphitheater has also been updated with permanent restrooms, improved areas for food vendors and a deep storm drain to prevent water from running over the stage. (In 1936, the Bowl was built in the middle of what was then a dry creek bed.) This spring, the venue will host such musical artists as Avril Lavigne, Sheryl Crow and The Cure.

Similar upgrades are taking place in New Orleans's French Market neighborhood. There, an open-air farmers market has provided shoppers with their regular ration of navel oranges, okra and watermelons since the Depression. With such landmarks as a statue of Andrew Jackson and a cannon memorializing a unit of the Louisiana National Guard nearby, the farmers market--one of the country's oldest--represents part of the city's history.

While the economy isn’t as desperate as it was during the Depression, the market is remodeling its pitched-roof metal sheds to keep up with the times.

“Originally the sheds were built to accommodate truck farmers,” said Ken Ferdinand, whose French Market Corporation oversees development in the area. “Truck farmers are not as plentiful as they used to be.”

Soon produce shoppers at the market will be able to choose from a variety of vendors selling hot food from the remodeled sheds. Ferdinand expects the $7 million remodeling project to be completed by the beginning of the annual Creole Tomato Festival in June.

With the city’s economy still recovering from Hurricane Katrina, the farmers market has become a larger part of the city’s economic engine, Ferdinand said.

“We are the retail commercial anchor for the city,” said Ferdinand. “Many of the shopping centers are gone, and we remain.” Just as FDR would have wanted it.

E-mail: ajs2170@columbia.edu