SANTA CRUZ (April 2009) -- Most of the drivers rushing over the Valencia Bridge in Aptos never even see the sign. It’s set low in the mossy concrete railing on one end of the span -- a tarnished plaque that marks the history of hard times.
The plaque, which someone had recently graffitied with chalk, commemorates the 1935 construction of the narrow, tree-shadowed bridge. The span was built with funds from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, his program to restart the economy with a flood of stimulus money for social and public works projects.
That money -- distributed for half a decade through acronym-heavy agencies like the WPA, PWA and TRAP -- changed the face of Santa Cruz, although most people might not realize it now.
New Deal monies helped build the Civic Auditorium and Santa Cruz City Hall. They put art into the Santa Cruz Post Office and expanded the Department of Forestry headquarters in Felton.
They provided money for things like cataloging the Watsonville Library, for free nursery schools and to hire women “to provide free home assistance in housework and care of children in the homes of the needy, where the housewife is totally or partially incapacitated because of ill health or confinement or similar reasons.”
The Valencia Bridge in Aptos was built in 1935
The funds paid for matrons for girls’ restrooms in public schools, helped construct a gym at Watsonville High and built a backstop at Santa Cruz High’s baseball field. And like the millions of dollars scheduled to flow into Santa Cruz as part of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress, the money also resurfaced and repaired roads throughout the county.
“Santa Cruz wasn’t hit as hard by the Depression as other places in California,” said Geoffrey Dunn, local historian and author. Agriculture, fishing and tourism, which were central here, weren’t as vulnerable to the Depression as other industries were. In fact, tight times brought a steady stream of penny-pinching tourists over the hill by train to play at the beach and the Boardwalk. They were greeted each Sunday by a brass band.
Still, money was tight and the influx of federal money into the county allowed dozens of projects to move forward. The largest of these was the construction of the Civic Auditorium on Church Street which has seen luminaries from Ray Charles and Sheryl Crowe to the Dalai Lama step onto its stage and has played host to hundreds of high school sporting events over the years.
“It was seen as a loss-leader,” said local historian Ross Eric Gibson of the sometimes controversial plan to build an auditorium in the 1930s. The idea was that even though the auditorium might lose money, it would lure tourists into town. “Business people wanted to bring in the type of conventions and shows that would fill up local hotels,” Gibson said.
Debated for its location, its usefulness and its cost, the auditorium plan stalled and nearly died. But low interest rates and money available from the New Deal -- 80 percent funding if it was built by “legitimately unemployed” workers and 45 percent funding if professional builders were used -- allowed construction to begin. The Civic Auditorium was dedicated in 1939 to much fanfare (although the city had to ask for more federal funds after the builder, trying to shave costs, narrowed the stage from 29 to 20 feet -- not even big enough for the Santa Cruz High Band to perform, the band director noted at the time).
“All the basketball that has been played there, all the concerts and everything else,” said Dunn, “the Civic has had a big impact on the community.”
The city of Santa Cruz has the New Deal to thank for its city hall and firehouse too. It also got money to “sort, transcribe and file police case histories” for a police department that was so underfunded, it sometimes hired officers based on the fact they could provide their own car for patrolling, Gibson said.
In all, about 50 New Deal projects were completed in Santa Cruz, although evidence of them is scattered and sometimes hard to find.
A folder of New Deal projects buried deep in the archives of the Santa Cruz Public Library listed projects like:
* Construction of sewer systems in Soquel, Capitola and Watsonville.
* Building privies “in rural areas and suburban territories where sewer systems are impractical.”
* Landscaping, building equestrian trails and installing sprinkler systems in Santa Cruz parks.
* Providing public health nurses for needy families.
* Organizing and cataloging school libraries.
* Sewing and renovating clothes to be given free to the poor.
* Improving Larkin Valley, Zayante, Soquel-San Jose, Empire Grade and Lockhart Gulch roads, along with Escalona Drive, Church Street and roads in the vicinity of Natural Bridges State Park.
The smudged, typewritten list includes a notation for construction of “a school building” at what is now Scotts Valley Middle School. The school project was one of the last funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), historian Marion Pokriots said.
Some $33,000 was spent to construct the utilitarian-looking building which fronts Bean Creek Road. The only sign of its origin is a humble inscription in a walkway around the corner from the principal’s office.
“WPA 1941,” it reads.
"Cabbage Culture," in the Santa Cruz Main Post Office, painted by Henrietta Shore
One of the more conspicuous New Deal projects is in the lobby of Santa Cruz’s Main Post Office. Here Carmel artist Henrietta Shore installed four colorful paintings depicting Santa Cruz’s industry. The artwork was funded with money from the Treasury Relief Art Project, or TRAP.
The vivid paintings show limestone quarry workers, men picking artichokes and fishermen at the water’s edge. One painting, titled “Cabbage Culture,” shows three farm workers, one of them bent over as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders.
Shore, who was a major figure among women modernist painters and was often compared to Georgia O’Keefe, won the Post Office commission in 1936.
She died penniless in Carmel in 1963.
Another New Deal art project apparently had a different fate. In 1937, Chicago-born sculptor David Slivka was hired with TRAP funds to create a bas relief that was titled “Man with Lettuce” for the old Watsonville Post Office building, according to the New Deal Art Registry. But no longtime postal workers remember ever seeing the bas relief at the Post Office building, according to Alex Reed, supervisor of customer services for the Watsonville Post Office.
Its location, at this point, is unknown,
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