Gray A. Brechin (born September 2, 1947) is an American geographer, architectural historian, and author. He is the founder and Project Scholar of The Living New Deal based at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography. Brechin is a frequent and popular speaker, especially on subjects related to the history and legacy of the New Deal and the history of San Francisco [1] .
Brechin is known for his early work on the Mono Lake Committee to stop the destruction of Mono Lake by sending its water to Los Angeles. [2] Brechin joined in 1978 as the first director, and lobbied in Sacramento with ecologist David Gaines and other committee members to save the lake. Brechin traveled California giving talks to publicize the lake's plight. [3]
In 1992, Brechin and photographer Robert Dawson were awarded the Lange-Taylor Prize by Duke University, funding their collaboration on a five-year project that was published in March 1999 as Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream. [2] The San Diego Historical Society reviewed the book as a necessary reference "to all California environmentalists and policymakers", though its photographs and text focused largely on Northern California rather than the whole state. [4]
Dawson and Brechin decided in 2002 to write a book documenting the many construction and beautification efforts of the 1930s sponsored by the New Deal programs of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 2003, they realized the scope was too large for two people, and in 2006 Brechin created the collaborative project California Living New Deal so that many people could participate as volunteers. [5] Retired software engineer Jay McCauley programmed a database-driven dynamically interactive map for the group. In 2011, the project was enlarged to include all of the United States, dropping the word "California" to become The Living New Deal. The database application was expanded by software engineers from UC Berkeley's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. [6] By 2020, the website had catalogued some 16,000 sites of New Deal construction and beautification. [7]
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Los Altos is a city in Santa Clara County, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The population was 31,625 according to the 2020 census.
The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. Headquartered in Oakland, the system is composed of its ten campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz, along with numerous research centers and academic abroad centers. The system is the state's land-grant university. Major publications generally rank most UC campuses as being among the best universities in the world. In 1900, UC was one of the founders of the Association of American Universities and since the 1970s seven of its campuses, in addition to Berkeley, have been admitted to the association. Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz, Irvine, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego are considered Public Ivies, making California the state with the most universities in the nation to hold the title. UC campuses have large numbers of distinguished faculty in almost every academic discipline, with UC faculty and researchers having won 71 Nobel Prizes as of 2021.
The University of California, San Diego is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is the southernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California, and offers over 200 undergraduate and graduate degree programs, enrolling 33,096 undergraduate and 9,872 graduate students. The university occupies 2,178 acres (881 ha) near the coast of the Pacific Ocean, with the main campus resting on approximately 1,152 acres (466 ha).
The California State University is a public university system in California, and the largest public university system in the United States. It consists of 23 campuses and seven off-campus centers, which together enroll 457,992 students and employ 56,256 faculty and staff members. In California, it is one of the three public higher education systems, along with the University of California and the California Community Colleges systems. The CSU system is officially incorporated as The Trustees of the California State University, and is headquartered in Long Beach, California.
Coit Tower is a 210-foot (64 m) tower in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California, overlooking the city and San Francisco Bay. The tower, in the city's Pioneer Park, was built between 1932 and 1933 using Lillie Hitchcock Coit's bequest to beautify the city of San Francisco. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 29, 2008.
The Regents of the University of California is the governing board of the University of California (UC), a state university system in the U.S. state of California. The Board of Regents has 26 voting members, the majority of whom are appointed by the Governor of California to serve 12-year terms.
Arthur Brown Jr. (1874–1957) was an American architect, based in San Francisco and designer of many of its landmarks. He is known for his work with John Bakewell Jr. as Bakewell and Brown, along with later works after the partnership dissolved in 1927.
Bernard Ralph Maybeck was an American architect in the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early 20th century. He was an instructor at University of California, Berkeley. Most of his major buildings were in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Harold Gilliam was a San Francisco–based writer, newspaperman and environmentalist, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner newspapers. The Harold Gilliam Award for Excellence in Environmental Reporting, given by The Bay Institute, is named in his honor.
California has 21 major professional sports franchises, far more than any other US state. The San Francisco Bay Area has six major league teams spread amongst three cities: San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. The Greater Los Angeles Area has ten major league teams. San Diego and Sacramento each have one major league team.
Downtown Oakland is the central business district of Oakland, California, United States. It is located roughly bounded by both the Oakland Estuary and Interstate 880 on the southwest, Interstate 980 on the northwest, Grand Avenue on the northeast, and Lake Merritt on the east.
John Francis Neylan was an American lawyer, journalist, political and educational figure.
Mark Cavagnero Associates is a San Francisco, California-based architecture firm, founded by Mark Cavagnero, FAIA in 1988. The Firm's portfolio is of various public-serving projects for public, non-profit and institutional clients.
Hale Creek is a short stream originating in the foothills of Los Altos Hills, California in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Its source is in the Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve, west of Neary Quarry. The creek flows northeasterly 4.6 miles (7.4 km) through the cities of Los Altos Hills, Los Altos, and Mountain View before joining Permanente Creek.
The Water Resources Collections and Archives (WRCA), formerly known as the Water Resources Center Archives, is an archive with unpublished manuscript collections and a library with published materials. It was established to collect unique, hard-to-find, technical report materials pertaining to all aspects of water resources and supply in California and the American West. Located on the campus of the University of California Riverside (UCR), it is jointly administered by the UCR College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences (CNAS) and the UCR Libraries. WRCA was part of the University of California Center for Water Resources (WRC) that was established and funded in 1957 by a special act of the California State Legislature and was designated the California Water Research Institute by a federal act in 1964.
Victor Mikhail Arnautoff was a Russian-American painter and professor of art. He worked in San Francisco and the Bay Area from 1925 to 1963, including two decades as a teacher at Stanford University, and was particularly prolific as a muralist during the 1930s. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but returned to the Soviet Union after the death of his wife, continuing his career there before his death.
Ray Boynton (1883–1951) also known as Raymond Boynton, was an American artist and arts educator, most famous for his mural work in California during the Great Depression where he earned commissions under the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) and the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP).
The Living New Deal is a research project and online public archive documenting the scope and impact of the New Deal on American lives and the national landscape. The project focuses on public works programs, which put millions of unemployed to work, saved families from destitution, and renovated the infrastructure of the United States.
Helen Katharine Forbes was a Californian artist and arts educator specializing in etching, murals and painting. She is best known for western landscapes, portrait paintings, and her murals with the Treasury Section of Fine Arts and Work Progress Administration (WPA). Forbes was skilled in painting in oil, watercolor, and egg tempera. She painted landscapes of Mexico, Mono Lake and the Sierras in the 1920s, desert scenes of Death Valley in the 1930s, and portraits and still-lifes.
Raymond Puccinelli, also known as Raimondo Puccinelli (1904–1986), he was an American sculptor and educator. He was active in his work in San Francisco, Baltimore, and Florence, Italy.
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