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Photograph by Bob Zink
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Image of "Vision" sculpted by Walker Hancock
The line at the University City post office stretches out the door. Without my usual “queue” book (a must in the Washington, D.C., area, where I now live), I look around for something to read. That’s when I discover the World’s Fair fresco mural on the south wall of the lobby. In all the years I’ve stood in line here, I’ve never noticed the mural. Now I’m fascinated—yet nowhere can I find the artist’s name or any other information about the work.
I head to the St. Louis Bread Co. on Delmar, plug in my laptop and spend the next hour doing research online. It turns out that “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition” was painted in 1940 by Trew Hocker, who was born in Sedalia, Mo. His mural was one of more than 2,500 post-office murals funded by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts (a.k.a. the Section) between 1934 and 1943. The post-office commissions were open to all artists through regional and national competitions. A link to the Trust for Historic Preservation website confirms my suspicion that these murals are largely unknown. “Today, many mural classics lie hidden behind new drywall and lowered ceilings,” wrote Theresa Ducato in a 1983 issue of Historic Preservation. “But most remain in full view, merely ignored by postal patrons who can’t see past the stamp counter.”
The Treasury Department was one of two major federal agencies that funded the arts during the Great Depression and the early years of World War II. The department’s earlier, short-lived effort, the Public Works of Art Program, hired unemployed artists to decorate public buildings. The largest and best-known relief program for the arts, the Works Progress Administration (later renamed the Works Projects Administration and referred to as the WPA) hired indigent artists, writers, musicians and actors for temporary work in their fields. Unprecedented in scope, this New Deal funding marked the first and, to date, only time when the federal government underwrote American arts and culture on a massive scale.
I’ve always known that the WPA works programs had provided thousands of jobs for unemployed St. Louisans—clearing 40 square blocks of the riverfront; paving Lambert Field; constructing the Jewel Box, Homer G. Phillips Hospital and Kiel Auditorium and restoring the colonial-era Cahokia, Ill., courthouse. Now I’m wondering about the less well-known—and sometimes entirely forgotten—programs that kept the arts and culture alive through the Depression.
My search takes me next to the Wellston Station post office at 1409 Hamilton, just inside the St. Louis city limits. At midmorning, the Art Deco building is empty of customers. Its 1939 oil mural, “Old Levee on Market at St. Louis,” by Kansas muralist and sculptor Lumen Martin Winter, depicts a covered wagon and fashionably dressed Victorian-era St. Louisans strolling along the riverfront. Typical of many New Deal murals, it portrays a romantic, optimistic and Eurocentric view of local history.
Even in 1939, critics complained that the judges should have chosen a more contemporary and realistic entry. Realistic or not, though, Winter’s mural fit the program’s mission: to bring original art into America’s urban neighborhoods, small towns and rural communities. Often, panels of local citizens picked the winning artists from proposals sent in by artists with national reputations. “The local postmaster always had the last say,” says Elizabeth Kendall, owner and head conservator of Chicago-based Parma Conservation. Kendall, who has fond memories of the Pony Express mural in her Michigan hometown’s post office, has restored more than 100 post-office murals, including those in the Southern Illinois towns of Alton, Gillespie, Nashville and McLeansboro. “This was art for the people,” she tells me. “They didn’t have to travel to New York or Chicago to enjoy art.”
Kendall reminds me of the murals at the St. Louis post office on Market. On October 12, 1942, Life magazine ran a six-page illustrated spread on these new fresco murals by Chicago artists Edward Millman and Mitchell Siporin. They chronicle the first 100 years of the history of St. Louis, from “Discovery and Civilization” to “Postwar Period and Reconstruction.” The artists shared a $29,000 award for their work, the largest ever granted for a post-office mural.
It’s hard to miss these murals. The nine works each measure 9 by 29 feet; together, they fill 3,000 square feet of wall space in the east lobby. Each mural is accompanied by a brass-framed plaque bearing a description and credit line. Yet the plaques sit above eye level for anyone but a basketball player, and, on my visit, one was covered by an official post-office notice. In contrast, the tiny Maplewood post office at Marshall and Manchester features a simple wood-relief mural by Danish-born St. Louisan Carl C. Mose, designer of the 1927 decorative radio-cap ornament for the Studebaker. “Family Group” (1942) depicts a mother, father and child relaxing on the grass.
Wondering what else I’ve missed, I head back to my computer.
The WPA had four sections— the Federal Art Project (the largest), the Federal Writers’ Project, the Federal Music Project and the Federal Theater Project—and it hired unemployed professionals on the basis of need and talent. Between 1935 and 1943, the Federal Art Project funded thousands of sculptures, paintings, fine prints and posters, along with an “Index of American Design”—watercolor renderings of American folk art, some 40 of them by Missouri artists.
Holger Cahill, who headed the Federal Art Project during its entire nine-year life, is credited with supporting a number of artists across America’s cultural and racial landscape and with funding folk art, crafts and graphic arts in addition to fine arts. By 1938, the WPA was the nation’s largest employer of artists. Cahill “believed that art was not only for the wealthy and well-educated, but was everyone’s birthright,” writes Milton Meltzer in Violins and Shovels: The WPA Arts Projects.
A visit to the Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri–St. Louis leads me to the story of St. Louis’ own community art center. On April 17, 1942, the People’s Art Center opened in the three-story parish house of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion, at 2811 Washington. Spearheaded by art enthusiasts and teachers, local businesses and the St. Louis Urban League, the center offered free classes in sculpture, drawing, painting and jewelry making, along with lectures and gallery talks by City Art Museum (now the Saint Louis Art Museum) staff. The first-floor gallery showcased works by students and working artists, many of them from Chicago. In racially segregated St. Louis, the art center was open to people of all colors and played a central role in training and showcasing African-American artists.
In keeping with its “art for the people” theme, the WPA also funded outdoor sculptures at civic centers, courthouses and other public buildings. I find two groups by St. Louis–born sculptors in and around Memorial Plaza. Both sets were funded by the city of St. Louis and the New Deal’s PWA (the major public-works program) and WPA. None of the works is identified.
“Law and Order” and “Equal Justice” (1935), the two 18-foot-high limestone figures at the Market Street entrance to the United States Court and Customs House, are the work of Benjamin Hawkins, who studied art at Washington University. Walker Hancock created the four allegorical equestrian figures—“Courage,” “Vision,” “Sacrifice” and “Loyalty”—that frame the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial (1939) to the west. The only sign I see warns visitors to “keep off the statues.”
Next stop: the Old Courthouse, where I check out a reference to “WPA dioramas” on the National Park Service website. According to the website, the Old Court house has six dioramas depicting the history of St. Louis: The first three made up a WPA project that was completed in 1940, and the last three were crafted in the 1950s. I have to hunt to find them, but, once I do, I toss out all preconceived notions of dioramas as corny school projects. These are more like miniature movie sets, crafted with Pixarlike details. Nowhere can I find any credit to the artist (or artists).
WPA posters also brought art directly into the public arena, with the added advantage of portability. Posted outside buildings and on telephone poles, they promoted home health and safety, state tourism and WPA-funded art exhibits, concerts and theatrical productions. In the early 1940s, the poster artists provided a visual medium for the war effort, their images encouraging patriotism, rationing, silence, victory gardens and support of American troops.
The WPA printed more than 35,000 original poster designs, yet when the project ended in 1943, no central repository was in place. By the time the U.S. General Services Administration inherited the administrative mantel in the late 1940s, most of the posters had been lost or scattered across the country. Fortunately for St. Louisans, the GSA distributed what it had—2,000 original posters—to educational institutions and museums. One was the Saint Louis Art Museum, where I learn more from Andrew Walker, assistant director for curatorial affairs and American art. The collection includes 250 works, a third of them—including “The Card Players” by the late Chicago artist Charles White—by African-American artists. “It allowed the museum to have a representation of work by African-American artists for the first time in its history,” says Walker. “Of the 13 paintings in the collection, 10 are by African-American artists. It was a moment of discovery for both the museum and our audiences.”
At least the New Deal projects for visual artists are, well, visual. Uncovering evidence of WPA projects for St. Louis and Missouri writers, musicians and actors proves much more difficult.
Back in the D.C. area, I spend a good part of a day digging through the WPA records at the National Archives in College Park, Md. In one of those voila! moments, I find evidence of St. Louis’ Federal Music Project: concerts by the St. Louis Brass Sextet and “White and Colored Dance Bands”; music teachers’ education institutes; school demos and free park concerts by the St. Louis Concert Orchestra. St. Louis’ Federal Theatre Project seems to have been less successful. In 1936, the Federal Theater Project cut funding to St. Louis’ traveling vaudeville units for not charging even a “nominal” admission and because the shows were “of mediocre quality.”
At least St. Louis and Missouri writers fared well. The Missouri Historical Society’s Library and Research Center has several copies of Missouri: A Guide to the “Show Me” State, published in 1941 by the state highway department. One of 48 WPA-funded state guides, this 500-page upbeat tome on Missouri history, natural resources, folklore, geography, cities and economy supported some 200 writers and researchers. (The book was reprinted as a paperback by the Missouri Historical Society Press in 1998 as the WPA Guide to Missouri.)
“You have to check out the WPA shelters in Tilles Park,” says Esley Hamilton, preservation historian for St. Louis County Parks and Recreation, when I tell him that I’m trying to locate hidden WPA and New Deal treasures. “And while you’re poking around the county, don’t miss the ruins of the Grand Staircase at Fort Belle Fontaine Park,” he adds.
Tilles, a popular old-fashioned park at McKnight and Litzsinger (not to be confused with its sister park at Hampton and Fyler in the city) was developed in 1937 with funding from the WPA. The WPA shelters have picnic tables inside and out, huge stone fireplaces, tongue-and-groove ceilings and barbecue grills. Signs provide reservation information for family reunions—but no mention of the WPA.
Intrigued by Hamilton’s mention of the Grand Staircase, I head to Fort Belle Fontaine Park, near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Once I manage to find it—by following signs to the adjacent Missouri Hills Home—I park the car and start walking to the right, along the Missouri River bluffs. The path leads to the top of the stone ruins of the Grand Staircase, overlooking the river. Built by the WPA in 1936, the staircase (I count 100 steps on the way down) leads to the riverbank below, where I find more ruins: fragments of a stone barbecue pit, comfort station, fireplace and patio. A weather-worn sign gives a history of the site and shows a 1940 photograph of folks relaxing by the river.
I learn about my last stop, Sylvan Spring Park on the Meramec River, from one of Jerry Berger’s old “St. Louis Q & A” columns. Built with WPA funds in 1939, this park once drew huge summertime crowds to its amusement rides, swimming pool (the former Kirkwood municipal pool), baseball field, picnic grounds, cabins and even a restaurant. Today the Missouri Department of Conservation runs the park, which draws few visitors, except for an occasional dog-walker. As I make my way across the ruins of the old ballfield, I imagine what it must have been like to picnic here on a hot, muggy day during the Depression years, before the drone of interstate traffic intruded on dreams of better days to come.
With additional research by Ann and Bob Zink.
