Any music fan out there has heard of the legendary Red Rocks Amphitheater located in Red Rocks Park in Morrison, Colorado. It is the type of place people will "trek" to. Almost a "holy" experience for some of us. I've seen The Dead (with this guy named Jerry), Blue Traveler, and Widespread. And each time it took a lot of effort to get there, but it didn't matter cause it is maybe the most stunning music venue in the nation, if not the world.
So I am just clicking around the intertubes the other day and I couldn't believe what I learned. The park and Amphitheater was built under FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Work Projects Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression.
In 1927 the City of Denver purchased the entire area of Red Rocks for $54,133. The site was originally known as the "Garden of the Angels." It sat for a few years and then the Great Depression hit.
Here is the site of the current Amphitheater, sometime in the early 1930s.
George Cranmer (who got the purcahse done in the first place), the Manager of Denver Parks, talked then Mayor of Denver Ben Stapleton into requesting Federal help to expand and built on the site. Stapleton enlisted the help of the federally funded Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Work Projects Administration (WPA) to start what would eventually morph into what we have today.
From 1936 to 1941 CCC and WPA workers put in long hours at the Red Rocks project in Morrison. Enduring what had to be pretty hot, dry, windy, and rainy conditions. Best I can tell the men earned about $35 a month. The work I am guessing was not glamorous but it was work.
Upon the full construction of the amphitheatre to its present form, the venue was formally dedicated on June 15, 1941. It has held regular concert seasons every year since 1947. We have this stunning place cause of the New Deal.
Before reading about this my understanding of projects via FDR was mostly limited to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which is still paying off in spades to this very day. It was mostly my understanding FDR was just "making work" for people, no real value, but I think there was some value with this project.
I just had no idea that we built this grand place during the Depression. Do any of us think with some foresight and thinking we couldn't find a few dozen, even hundreds of similar projects Obama could fund today that decades, even almost a century later we'd still use?
We need to start thinking "big picture" and not just about tomorrow or next week.