"Greenbelt Project Berwin, [sic] MD Elevations
of Underpasses"
By G.L.S. for the Division of Suburban Resettlement, Resettlement Administration,
1936
Pencil on tracing paper
15" x 18"
National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the Public Housing
Administration
New Deal Planned Communities: Greenbelt,
Berwin [sic], Maryland
As part of the effort to assist some of those
unemployed by the Great Depression, several federal agencies under President
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal built experimental, planned communities,
known as new towns. "In addition to building communities in rural areas,
the Resettlement Administration constructed three "green towns" outside
Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Washington, DC. Unlike the
"subsistence homesteads," those who planned the green towns wanted workers
and their families to exchange rural poverty for Government-planned suburbs
complete with shops, schools, theaters, parks, playgrounds, and swimming
pools. The towns received their names from the 1/2-mile-wide "greenbelts"
of forest that surrounded them. Because the enclaves were conceived as
"bedroom" towns from which workers would commute into the city, bridges
and underpasses, like the ones shown here, were crucial transportation
design features.