Tag Archives: New Deal Galley

A “New Deal” Driving Tour

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Sometimes as you travel around you like to have a theme to guide, or at least punctuate, your wandering. Churches – town halls – parks. How many can you spot? What can you learn about them?
“New Deal” construction, designed to put the unemployed to work during the Great Depression, was vital not just to turning the tide in the 1930s, but to boosting the economic boom of the 1950s. You may pass some of these every day, but not realize that they ARE from the New Deal. So here’s a little local cheat sheet.
School construction boomed in those years. We are still using New Deal schools in Avoca, Arkport, Dryden, Ovid, Interlaken, Canisteo, and Troupsburg, not to mention the Cuba, Jasper and Prattsburgh schools, which all got major expansions or renovations. Cohocton school has an octagonal tower, hinting at Cohocton’s Orson Squire Fowler, who popularized the octagon house. These schools are now almost 90 years old, so it’s both amazing and delightful that they’re still plugging away, doing their jobs! Bear in mind, though, that all of these schools have been expanded and altered since the 1930s – we’re not seeing them now as they were when new.
Howard school (now used for business) is in private hands, and so is Curtiss Memorial School, with its stunning Art Deco front, in Hammondsport.
Modern bridges seem to have been a New Deal priority – we weren’t in horse and buggy days any more! Clinton Street Bridge in Binghamton has an Art Deco design. Corning’s Chemung River Bridge (on Bridge Street) was the biggest New Deal project in the city. Bath V.A. got a sorely-needed new bridge too, plus a hospital and a nursing facility, all of them replacing predecessors from back as far as the 1870s, and all of them still in use.
Bath proper also got a new wing to join separate buildings at the old Bath Memorial Hospital (now Pro Action) on Steuben Street. (Republican U.S. Representative Sterling Cole made sure his district got good projects from the Democratic president!)
Like the V.A., post offices were federal facilities, so post office projects could be arranged pretty quickly. Remember how much of the nation’s business used to be carried on by mail? Modern post offices sped things up, and they appeared in Painted Post, Honeoye Falls, Waverly, and Watkins Glen. Geneva, Newark, Canandaigua and Cortland* post offices all got significant additions. The 1939 Horseheads post office is now home for Community Foundation of Elmira-Corning and the Finger Lakes.
Folks who thought that the government should not be spending money on such projects got REALLY riled up about paying for artwork! But artists had to eat too, so several of these post offices got murals. Painted Post has “Recording the Victory,” in which Native Americans celebrate having captured Revolutionary War soldiers. This painting was damaged in the 1972 flood, and afterward restored. Honeoye Falls has a more peaceful agricultural scene, “The Life of the Seneca.” Waverly’s mural is about the early days of White inhabitation. Geneva’s post office has a mural inside, and a set of five bas reliefs outside! Cortland has a striking and unusual wooden relief artwork, “The Valley of the Seven Hills.”
If you like the art side of things, you MUST visit the world’s largest collection of New Deal art, at Livingston County New Deal Gallery in Mount Morris. About 10% of the collection is on exhibit at any time.
There’s plenty more stuff around, as you can see by www.livingnewdeal.org. Much of the work was in tree planting, storm sewers, guard rails, and such, but what we’ve listed here are all easily findable, and visually interesting.
Two words of warning! First, folks get understandably antsy when they see people hanging around the school. Take a look, check it off on your list, and move on – if you want to take photos, go on Sunday.
Second, as far as I can tell it’s not permitted to photograph the post office murals. This is supposed to be a “homeland security” thing, which I suppose is actually not about the murals, but about photographing the interiors of federal buildings. If you want a picture ask, but be prepared to be turned down. Apart from those caveats, hit the road! And have a good time! “Happy days are here again!”

Justice, Compassion, the New Deal, and Art

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Livingston Arts has two exhibits that are definitely worth seeing.

*Their gallery space is on the Livingston County campus in Mount Morris, which started off as a state tuberculosis hospital back when Franklin D. Roosevelt was governor. Eleanor came for the opening ceremonies, reading a statement from her husband saying that one reason the site had been chosen was that it had good trolley connections from Rochester.

*Tuberculosis was conquered and the trolley was superceded, and of course F.D.R. went on to be president. But the connection with Roosevelt remains, thanks to the Federal Art Project (under the Works Progress Administration). The New Deal found ways to put artists to work during the Great Depression, and no doubt many of us have seen the marvelous posters and the impressive murals that came from this period – the Painted Post post office has an Art Project mural.

*But the artists also created “easel art” to grace public buildings throughout the land. Many of these hung in New York state locations, as befitting the then most-populous state in the union. But over 80 years buildings were closed or renovated, and canvas after canvas was shipped to the Mount Morris hospital for storage. Fast-forward to the 21st century, and Mount Morris has what’s described as the second-largest collection of W.P.A. art in the world… something like 230 pieces. (Some of them sadly damaged.)

*Maybe two-dozen of the collection are on exhibit an any time. Just now the focus seems to be on landscapes, and most of them made me sad. (Which is O.K. – sometimes art does that.) The Great Depression hammered small farmers hard, and several of the paintings seemed to show tired, worn-out farms.

*But this was NOT the case with “Long Island Farm” by Philip Cheney. Here two men are hard at work together in a broad farm that spans the whole canvas, with the New York City skyline as a backdrop. It’s fun to see the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building when they were new. But it also suggests a benevolent mutuality between the city that buys the produce and the farm that feeds the city.

*I got a warm winter feeling (it makes sense to me) from “The Mountain,” by E. N. Carroll, and I also enjoyed Joseph Sabalauskas’s 1937 painting “The Spring Tree,” with its tall tree, its wide-open spaces, and its contented cow.

*“House on the Hill” also fell into the category of might-be-sad, but I was curious as to what became of the artist, Kikuta Nakagawa. All I was able to learn quickly was that he was born in Japan (1888) attended the Art Students League, and worked in Greenwich Village… so if he was resident in New York, and IF he had U.S. Citizenship, he may have been spared the World War II internment.

*Interesting as the New Deal Gallery is (and exhibits rotate, so keep checking back), my wife and I were especially engaged by a special exhibit, “Jerry Alonzo: Works in Wood.” We even made a second trip from Bath after seeing the exhibit, this time to attend a reception, and to meet and hear from the artist himself.

*The pieces themselves are fine works of art… carefully shaped from wood and other materials, and each intriguing in its own right. Two or three of them were inspired by Vermont’s “Northeast Kingdom,” with rolling landscape, small wooden homes and barns that look like Monopoly items, and plastic cows. Since we used to live in Vermont, and since Joyce’s father spent his first 25 years in the Northeast Kingdom, we had a lot of fun with this.

*Also… many of the pieces are interactive. Three tall figures and a single short one form a piece called “Judgment.” Jerry envisioned this as one small figure surrounded by three towering judges. But guests have been known to rearrange it with a single judge, and two of the tall figures protectively flanking the little one.

*”Three Birds” is magnetized, giving visitors the chance to arrange the three birds (of two types) and the single group of cherries according to whatever story they like.

*Twelve abstract figures, each utterly different, form a group entitled “The Jury” (Jerry’s also a judge).

*But what really drew us back were two exhibits-within-the-exhibit. “The Art of Compassion” collects numerous answers to the question, “What is compassion?,” and builds them all into a set of towers.

*Similarly “Justice Is” solicited opinions, which came from judges, lawyers, fifth-grade classes, and more. Eleven mixed-media (but mostly wood) pieces bring forth the various (and sometimes contradictory) definitions, incorporating such artifacts as levels, rules, plumb lines and bobs, balances, locks, keys, a ladder, and a gavel.

*It all makes a very interesting art show, but it’s also thought-provoking and discussion-starting. You might like to see it. Admission is by donation, the entrance is in the rear, and you may need to hunt a little for the right building. There are several other exhibits up just now, and “Works in Wood” runs through July 22. By the way, we made both of these trips in early July, and each time we saw a dappled fawn on the county campus.