New Deal Accomplishment: Over 357 new armories, many of them multi-use


Above: A gorgeous WPA-built armory, unknown location, constructed between 1935 and 1939. Photo from: Federal Works Agency, Work Projects Administration, Report on Progress of the WPA Program, June 30, 1939, p. 22.


Above: WPA workers putting the finishing touches on an armory in Santa Barbara, California, between 1935 and 1943. Photo from the National Archives.


Above: The description for this photograph--taken in Toledo, Ohio, on April 7, 1936--reads:
"Lucas County, Project # 12-48-178. Exterior view showing beautiful main entrance... WPA workers building one of the most beautiful public buildings in this state in the new $700,000 U.S.N. Armory under construction Bay View Park on west land of Maumee River. This project has given work to hundreds of men." Photo from the National Archives.


Above: Inside the armory in Toledo, Ohio (see previous photo). The description for this photograph reads: "... skilled WPA workers laying new parquet floor in Toledo's new $700,000 Naval [Reserve] Armory." Photo from the National Archives.


Above: A WPA-built armory in Culbertson, Montana, ca. 1939. Historian Carroll Van West writes: "One of the most interesting buildings in Culbertson is the Armory, part of the significant impact that New Deal agencies had on the built environment of Roosevelt County in the 1930s. Justified as part of the nation’s war preparedness efforts in the late 1930s, so many armories across the country have found second life as public buildings, serving local government and community events." Photo from the National Archives.


Above: WPA workers constructing an armory in Mobile, Alabama, 1936. Millions of African Americans received employment through the New Deal: in work-relief programs; via loans & grants that aided private sector employers; expanded hiring in regular federal agencies; and non-discrimination polices, for example, in defense industry work. This assistance to African American workers is often downplayed, or even completely overlooked by modern critics of FDR and the New Deal. Photo from the National Archives.


Above: The description for this photo shows why compiling New Deal statistics can be challenging - a single building (or any other type of project) can stretch across multiple agencies, and so there is a risk of over-counting (counting this single project as three armories). And though most New Deal work relief projects did not span across CWA, FERA, and WPA, some of the larger ones, like this armory, did. Photo from the National Archives.


Above: The New Deal's Public Works Administration (PWA) financed many armories, and they were often massive structures with eye-catching architecture. This armory was built with PWA financing in 1936. Photo from: C.W. Short and R. Stanley-Brown, Public Buildings: A Survey of Architecture of Projects Constructed by Federal and Other Governmental Bodies Between the Years 1933 and 1939 with the Assistance of the Public Works Administration, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939, p. 87.


Above: The PWA-financed Harrisburg Military Post armory, ca. 1936. Photo from the National Archives.

The Amazing Multi-Use Armory

Both today and at the time they were built, New Deal-constructed armories have served as multi-use facilities, e.g., National Guard buildings, civic centers, and community auditoriums and arenas. Though some are relatively plain, many others have domed roofs, vertical offsets, archways, sculptures, castle-like towers, turrets, and bastions, and so forth.

Some armories were constructed by multiple New Deal agencies, and some were statistically compiled with other types of buildings, for example, "Armories and other military buildings." This makes it difficult to calculate the total number of armories built by the New Deal. However, if we use WPA statistics alone, which single out "Armories," and then take into account the fact there were of course armories built by other New Deal agencies (without WPA assistance), we can say that the New Deal built over 357 new armories, and had over 553 other projects to expand, reconstruct, or improve existing armories.

(The "553" number may or may not mean 553 separate armories. One might imagine, for example, a single armory receiving an addition in 1936, and then a new roof in 1939.)

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