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The WPA in New Orleans
Sally K. Reeves
Abstract of a Lecture for the Louisiana Historical Society
April 8, 1997
The Works Progress Administration was neither the first nor the only Depression-era relief program in America, but it is the most well known and remembered. New Deal relief projects also came to New Orleans and Louisiana through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, and the Public Works Administration. But it was not until after the assassination of Huey Long in September, 1935 that the federal spigot flowed freely in Louisiana.
The WPA was created in 1935, and included both blue collar and white collar projects. City Park was well positioned to take advantage of relief programs as they were created. A combination of federal agencies eventually paid for nearly $13 million of improvements to City Park that transformed and modernized it. Today people do not realize how much of the "natural environment" of City Park was actually added to it during the Depression.
Although white collar relief projects were controversial at first, the WPA's Four Arts and other Professional Division Programs ended up creating some of the best work of the Depression. Public Art in the Art Deco style, architectural projects in the Louisiana Colonial style, archival surveying, indexing and transcriptions, personal histories, photography projects, and the Black History Project at Dillard are still paying cultural and social dividends.
The PWA rather than the WPA helped to fund a radical rebuilding of the French Market. This renovation changed the character of the market, but ironically today the only part of the French Market that still purveys food is the part built by the PWA.
The regulatory and economic reforms of the New Deal have kept the nation prosperous for over half a century. The Depression was the occasion of a great challenge to Americans and America provided a great response.
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