While President Barack Obama is barnstorming the country to promote his new New Deal, an $800 billion-plus economic stimulus package, the New York Times reports the old New Deal is in trouble. The historic legacy of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) is increasingly threatened by the bulldozer:

Hundreds of buildings commissioned by the Works Progress Administration and [Franklin] Roosevelt’s other "alphabet" agencies are being demolished or threatened with destruction, mourned or fought over by small groups of citizens in a new national movement to save the architecture of the New Deal....

"It's ironic to be tearing them down just when America is going through tough times again," said the biographer Robert A. Caro, who wrote about the WPA in The Power Broker, his book about the builder Robert Moses. "We should be preserving them and honoring them. They serve as monuments to the fact that it is possible to combine infrastructure with beauty...."

In Depression days, New Deal programs planted three billion trees, constructed 46,000 bridges, and restored 360 Civil War battlefields. Photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange recorded what suffering looked like; artists created idealistic murals and sculptures. More than 65,000 buildings — stone monuments in the South, green towns in the Midwest, white clapboard meeting houses in New England — rose from the hands of previously unemployed Americans.

The Pacific Northwest is not immune from the trend, where preservationists have also let it be known that some of this history is in trouble. On Bainbridge Island residents have been raising funds to save the National Historic Register Yeomalt Cabin, built by the WPA. It was once on Washington's most endangered heritage list. Civilian Conservation Corps structures in Northwest National Forests such as the Upper Sandy Guard Station on Mount Hood are also at risk.

Other Northwest WPA legacies have gained publicity because of the revival of the New Deal debate. The Wall Street Journal ran a column extolling the virtues of the fabulous Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood (dedicated by FDR in 1937), but pointing out that the lodge it still reliant on taxpayer funds (between $1.2-1.5 million per year) to keep it going:

Few visitors to Timberline think about such things as they enjoy its seductive pleasures. When you're soaking in an outdoor hot tub after a day of skiing on fresh snow, or playing a family game of dominoes by the fireside, it's easy to believe the propaganda. Yet as America prepares to "stimulate" the economy with a whole new generation of even more expensive projects, it's worth totting up the real costs of this experiment on the side of a mountain in Oregon.

Don't get me wrong: Timberline today is probably one of my favorite places in the world. But it thrives in spite of, not because of, the ideas it was built on.

The building of public infrastructure is not always, or even usually, intended to create things that are economically self-sustaining. It's often about government providing what the market cannot or will not provide for the public good. The on-going benefits of that are felt in King County, where Historic Seattle's Larry Kreisman has written about the WPA's legacy of field houses in county parks. And then there's the 1936 King County land survey, a WPA gift that keeps on giving. The feds spend millions to take a complete inventory of property in King County, which included an incredibly useful historic archive of photos of the manmade environment here, still in use today. The results of the survey were numerous, including fairer tax assessments:

About 500 square miles of land in the county previously thought to be owned by the government was found to be privately owned and was added to the tax rolls. The Survey identified 218,608 buildings and photographed about 200,000 of them. The buildings not photographed were garages, sheds, and other buildings of lesser value. Of the 218,608 buildings, 66,600 had mistakenly been left off previous tax rolls. The Land Use Survey timber crews added more than one billion board feet of lumber to the King County tax rolls.

As the WPA and other Depression-era projects age, what's really remarkable about many of them is their quality and the lasting value they have. Historic preservationists realize this and bulldozer threats are a chance to remind folks of the WPA's legacy but also that in many cases, these projects are still having an impact. Heritage is merely one more plus that is accruing.