A New Deal for Los Angeles

In less than a decade, President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal agencies radically transformed Los Angeles as they did other American cities in a successful, but largely forgotten, effort to extricate the nation from the Great Depression. In addition to building the region's cultural infrastructure of schools, libraries, and museums, the Federal Writers Project left us a vivid freeze frame description of what Southern California was like just before World War II. Author David Kipen discusses the recently republished Los Angeles in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the City of Angels and geographer Gray Brechin shows the public works that revolutionized the lives of millions 75 years ago.