The Public Works From public spaces to public goods like social security, these stories reveal how the New Deal transformed life in the Bay Area more than 90 years ago, and how the tangible and intangible things it built continue to live on all around us.

Sheryl Kaskowitz

This story aired in the October 6, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.

Some of San Francisco’s most famous murals — like the ones at Coit Tower or the Beach Chalet — came from the New Deal era in the 1930s.

That’s when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration created all kinds of programs to help people who lost everything during the Great Depression.

But there’s an artist from that same period who is less well known: the Black sculptor Sargent Johnson, a Harlem Renaissance artist working in

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