The Great Depression brought unemployment and bread lines (85,000 lined up for food on one day in 1932), but low costs of labor and building materials also contributed to major construction projects. Mayor LaGuardia and Robert Moses, brilliant visionaries with a thorough understanding of how New Deal dollars could be spent, changed the cityscape during this era. In fact, almost all of the entries below can be extended with the phrase "under Robert Moses and Fiorello LaGuardia."
ALSO DURING THIS DECADE:
1930--Riverside Church, the San Remo, the New Yorker, and the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn are completed.
1931--The Empire State Building, the George Washington Bridge, the present-day Waldorf=Astoria, the El Dorado, the Bayonne Bridge, and Floyd Bennett Field all open.
1932--Corrupt Mayor Walker resigns following the Seabury Investigation.
1933--Fiorello LaGuardia begins his first of three consecutive terms as mayor.
1934--The new Bryant Park and the new Central Park Zoo both open.
1935--The original reservoir from 1842, which was surrounded by Central Park in the 1850's and had become a shantytown with the arrival of the Depression, completes its transformation into the Great Lawn and Turtle Pond.
1935--The first race riot in Harlem erupts over rumors of the killing of a teenage shoplifter. Order is restored by the end of the next day after three are killed and hundreds injured.
1935--The West Side Improvement is completed.
1936--The Triborough Bridge opens.
1937--The Henry Hudson Parkway is completed.
1937--Reginald Marsh paints the panels in the rotunda of the Custom House.
1938--The Cloisters opens in Fort Tryon Park as the only satellite museum for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
1938--Castle Village at the top of Manhattan is completed.
1939--MoMA opens on Fifty-third Street.
1939--North Beach Airport opens...it will soon be renamed LaGuardia airport.
1939--The World's Fair opens in Queens.
Sources: The Historical Atlas of New York City by Eric Homberger; New York: An Illustrated History by Ric Burns and James Sanders, with Lisa Ades; The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson; Blue Guide New York by Carol von Pressentin Wright, Stuart Miller, and Sharon Seitz; Inside the Apple by Michelle and James Nevius; New York 1930 by Robert A.M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, Thomas Mellins.
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