Community Center, Greenbelt

Recently, when I wrote about the New Deal town of Greenbelt, Maryland, I mentioned that besides the Mother and Child statue in the centre of town there were other works by Lenore Thomas at what is now the Community Center.

The building, designed by Douglas D Ellington and Reginald Wadsworth, started life as the Greenbelt Elementary School in 1937 as residents started moving into their new Greenbelt homes. It served the community as a school until 1993 when it relocated to a new facility outside the town center.

Rather than demolishing the old three-storey school, it was renovated and reopened in 1996 as a dedicated Community Center providing space for artists and community groups in the former classrooms and offices and maintaining the gymnasium for public use.

Along the outside of the building, Lenore Thomas executed a series of bas-relief panels depicting the Preamble to the US Constitution.

The works commence above the main entrance with ...

We the people

and continues at child height along the front of the building.

to form a more perfect union

establish justice

insure domestic tranquility

provide for the common defense

promote the general welfare

Reference:
Interpretive Panel at the Greenbelt Community Center prepared by the Greenbelt Museum

Greenbelt, Maryland

In the middle of the Great Depression, US President, Franklin D Roosevelt created the Resettlement Administration to look at issues such as unemployment, affordable housing and the overcrowding of US cities. An economics professor, Rexford Guy Tugwell, from Columbia University was put in charge of the agency allowing him to put into action his dream of building communities that would create construction jobs and provide well-designed homes for low-income people along the principles of the garden cities movement in England.

In 1936, Greenbelt, the first of such communities was built in Maryland between Washington DC and Baltimore. It was a bold experiment in co-operative living with all the town's businesses and even the newspaper co-operatively owned by the residents. The homogeneous houses and flats where built around a city centre that included shops, a theatre and an Elementary School.

The Roosevledt Center as the business district is now known includes a supermarket, cafe, theatre and a few restaurants.

Two other New Deal 'greenbelt towns' were established soon after at Greenhills, Ohio, near Cincinnati and Greendale, Wisconsin, near Milwaukee.

In 1952 the US Federal Government decided to sell the towns. Greenbelt residents formed a co-op to buy the houses while the other two towns were sold privately.

Greenbelt Home, Inc stills owns those original Greenbelt homes and the supermarket is still a co-op and the cooperative newspaper, the News Review, is still published weekly.

A public swimming pool was opened in 1939 and it forms a major part of the Aquatic and Fitness Center.

The town also boasted a significant series of works by sculptor Lenore Thomas. The statue of a Mother and Child still stands in the Rooseveldt Center.

Other works adorned the façade of the Elementary School which has now become the Community Center, but more on that another time.

References:
The City of Greenbelt website
Historic Greenbelt Walking Tour Trail Guide, created by the Greenbelt Museum, reprinted 2011