Other Amenities
The Bridgeport Transportation Center will be a Gateway to New England – a world-class, people-friendly facility geared toward welcoming and helping travelers from all over the region. Part of its appeal will be the art it contains.
WPA Murals
Do you remember learning about the Works Progress Administration in school? It was a program started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression to help put people back to work. What most people know about the WPA, is that most of the things that were done through it were public works projects, like highways and dams, that brought a lot of modern convenience to many areas of the country. Many people don’t realize, though, that the WPA also had an art component that put many artists from different disciplines to work all over the country.
On May 6, 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was created to help provide economic relief to the citizens of the United States who were suffering through the Great Depression. The artistic community had already become inspired during the 1920s and '30s by the revitalization of the Italian Renaissance fresco style by the inspired creations of Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueriros. Certain visionary U.S. politicians decided to combine the creativity of the new art movements with the values of the American people. The Federal Art Project was one of the divisions of the WPA created under Federal Project One. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had made several attempts prior to the FAP to provide employment for artists on relief, namely the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) which operated from 1933 to 1934 and the Treasury Department Section of Painting and Sculpture which was created in 1934 after the demise of the PWAP. However, it was the FAP which provided the widest reach, creating over 5,000 jobs for artists and producing over 225,000 works of art for the American people.
It is this legacy of the thousands of workers who labored at their craft for little money, but great pride, which we have to inspire us today. Although many of these works of art have been destroyed or stolen, those that remain stand as a reminder of a time in our country’s history when dreams were not allowed to be destroyed by economic disaster.
Several of the murals created during this time by local artists, depicting local scenes from the period, will be displayed throughout the Bridgeport Transportation Center for everyone to admire and enjoy. Some of them can be seen today at the Barnum Museum on Main Street in Bridgeport, just a short walk from the Station.
Artistic Windscreens
The Bus Station part of the Bridgeport Transportation Center will have sheltered areas in the bus bays. Part of that sheltering will be large glass windscreens to block the wind and rain. Measuring 6’ high x 12’ wide, they will have silhouetted images on them of local transportation scenes which will light up when the sun goes down. Incorporated into the images will be excerpts from classic literary works like Homer’s “Odyssey” and Jules Verne’s “Around the World in 80 Days”, among others. Excerpts were selected with the assistance of the reference staff of the Bridgeport Public Library.
www.bridgeportpubliclibrary.org