New Deal public works projects get a second look

The 100-year anniversary of the National Park Service is igniting new interest in the majestic Spanish-pueblo themed building that Lopez and other “CCC boys” built, along with other remote cabins, furniture and artwork of the 1930s that transformed and popularized national and state parks while putting millions of impoverished Americans back to work.

The Old Santa Fe Trail Building, nicknamed after its address alongside the former frontier migration and supply route, was stocked with hand-carved furniture and American Indian pottery and paintings commissioned under the Work Projects Administration from local artists.

In June, preservationists of the New Deal era brought together Lopez with descendants of Roosevelt and several Cabinet secretaries that had helped ramp up government employment and infrastructure projects in the midst of the Great Depression.