When the New Deal Came to Highland Park

Editor’s Note: President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s jobs programs for the unemployed once put thousands to work improving the city’s infrastructure.

Depression-era Works Progress Administration plaque (Photo – Matt Hormann)

Old cement sidewalks in Highland Park present a tableau of signs and symbols: paw prints, lovers’ names, contractor stamps, earthquake cracks, and other marks.

By Matt Hormann

Look closely and you’ll catch one more interesting modern hieroglyphic: stamps from the Depression-era Works Progress Administration.

“WPA – 1940,” reads one stamp covering a storm drain at the corner of Ruby Street and Avenue 66. “WPA – 1941,” says another on Marmion Way. These small imprints are reminders of one of the largest mobilizations of workers in U.S. history.

From 1933 to 1943, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Public Works Administration (PWA), part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, put millions of Americans back to work after the Great Depression devastated job prospects.

Across Los Angeles, men — and, to a lesser extent, women — labored to build storm drains, repair curbs, erect fences, construct school gymnasiums, and remediate earthquake damage from the 1933 Long Beach Earthquake.

The New Deal projects in Highland Park included concreting 9.2 miles of the Arroyo Seco for flood control, rebuilding Garvanza Elementary School after earthquake damage, improving the Highland Park Recreation Center, installing numerous curbs and storm drains, and constructing nearly every bridge across the Arroyo between South Pasadena and Elysian Park. These included the Marmion Way Bridge, Pasadena Avenue Bridge, Via Marisol Bridge, San Pascual Avenue Bridge, and Avenue 52 Bridge.

Most notably, New Deal workers built the majority of the Pasadena Freeway.

“Many an old-timer around these parts will remember the sight back in the middle 1930s of hundreds of men, picks and shovels in hand, as they graded what we know now as the Pasadena Freeway road bed,” wrote the Highland Park News-Herald & Journal in September 1975.

Highland Park was not only the site of numerous New Deal projects but also had its own New Deal Democratic Club, one of many nationally, that met at the Highland Park Masonic Temple, according to the L.A. City Planning Department.

Today, many of the New Deal projects in Highland Park endure, including at least half a dozen concrete curbs and storm drain covers that have lasted more than 80 years. Dual plaques at both ends of the bridge that spans Arroyo Seco Parkway still read: “Federal Works Agency – Public Works Administration […] Marmion Way Bridge Over Arroyo Seco Parkway, 1940.”

These markers, found throughout the San Gabriel Valley and across the country, stand as a testament to what President Roosevelt himself once said: “No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. […] Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order.”

Cement stamps on sidewalks in Highland Park (Photos – Matt Hormann)