FDR's Legacy
Roosevelt’s‘New Deal’ had huge impact
on New Mexico, Gallup
Gallup's Old Post Office was built as a "New Deal" project in 1933 and served as a post office until 1961. [photo by Daniel Zollinger / Independent]

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — It’s been 70 years but anyone who goes downtown can still see the impact that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had on this community.

Thanks to the Works Progress Administration, Gallup received funding for three buildings that continue to be used today and dozens of paintings that grace government and school buildings. Hundreds of people, including a handful of Native Americans, got desperately needed jobs in the 1930s to counter the effects of a devastating depression that gripped not only Gallup but the whole country.

This whole era will be brought up again in a lecture that is being given at 7 p.m. Monday at UNM-G’s Calvin Hall auditorium. The speaker, Richard Marold, will be here on part of a six-city tour talking about Roosevelt’s influence not only nationwide but locally as well.

Thanks to the WPA, Gallup was able to build a new courthouse, which is still standing next to an even newer courthouse; an armory, which is now the Brian Mitchell Recreation Center; and a old post office, which is now the headquarters of Comcast Cable.

“All three of these buildings have been constructed to last a long, long time,” said local historian Martin Link who also pointed out that all of the buildings contain unique touches — such as carvings — which set them apart from many other WPA-constructed buildings in New Mexico and elsewhere around the country.

The people involved with the WPA really knew what they were doing, said Link. “I think that the old courthouse will outlast the new courthouse by a couple of generations,” he said.

The workers spent a lot of time on the details, which can be seen by going to any of the three buildings and looking at the carved wool or the designs at the courthouse.

The post office built by WPA workers wasn’t the first post office in Gallup but it did serve Gallup from 1933 to 1961.
Architecturally, the design of the building was a mixture of Mediterranean and Spanish Pueblo Revival styles, which not only fit in with the other buildings in downtown Gallup at the time but also provided some unique aspects that had not been seen in Gallup before.

What a lot of people have forgotten over the years is that Gallup was one of three cities in New Mexico — Albuquerque and Santa Fe being the other two — where the WPA set up a workshop hiring people to make the furniture and lamps that were put in these buildings. He said that records indicate that the workshop was located on the corner of First and Coal where Smith’s Cigar Store once operated and now houses a loan company.

Part of the workshop was also turned over to artists who were hired to paint landscapes and paintings appropriated to be used in government buildings.

Almost all of the artists were non-Indians and most were from out of this area, said Link. But a couple of Navajo, including Harrison Begay, did manage to land jobs. A couple of Pueblo artists, Joe Toledo and Pablito Velarde, who was honored by the Ceremonial Association a couple of years ago as a “Living Treasure” also became part of the WPA.

Almost all of these paintings are still around and for years they could be seen at the Gallup Public Library and at the Gallup-McKinley County School Board meeting room.

For most of the past 70 years, the paintings were just considered as decoration and many were just stored away gathering dust. But in the past two years, community members, headed by Carolyn Milligan, have been restoring the paintings with plans to put them in one place and to properly catalog them and provide a history of the artists who painted them.

The group is working on a Web site that will show off each of the paintings with a brief history of the artist.