There are some gems along the St Joseph River that were built by the WPA, and we're going to learn about them with Gary Harrington hearing, as long as I've known you, you've loved the connection of parks and history.

And this is a great example.

Tell us where we are and what this structure is.

This is so we are in Kernan Park in South Bend.

And this is an old amphitheater that was built by the WPA between 1935 and 1940.

OK. And at some point people probably sat here and I don't know, maybe listen to music or we don't know.

You know, the back story is that they sat here and they would actually watch boat races on the river from this vantage point.

Perfect.

OK.

So this beautiful stonework that we see all around us is indicative of WPA work.

Yes, it is.

OK, so what was the WPA?

The WPA was a branch actually of the new deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was president in the 1930s.

And the idea was to get America's Americans working again after being unemployed because of the Great Depression.

Right?

So the idea was to come up with different kinds of tasks and different kinds of projects they could work on to get America growing again.

And there were different aspects of it.

I know there were arts and culture, but one aspect was parks and doing development for parks.

Yes.

And so here along the St Joseph's River, there's several of these features that are still in existence, which I think are really gives the river and the river walk along here, character.

So can we explore?

Is there more close by then?

We could take out.

There's several cool structures along this area so we can take a look at it.

I encourage people to take a look themselves.

OK, well, let's go for a little walk and see what we can find next.

Let's do it.

Well, here's another beautiful little stairway, Gary.

And this is really cool.

It leads to actually nowhere at the moment, but it probably did at one point.

It did.

It probably went down there and maybe it was there for fishermen to take advantage of or people just to look at the water.

And one thing that strikes me on all of these features, there's a lot of stone.

What do we know about the stone and how they collect it or where it came from?

This is native field stone from this area, and it was collected in large quantities for the project that they were working on.

As a matter of fact, in 1935 in the Tribune, they said that they were running out of stone like this just because they were collecting it so much for so many projects in Saint Joseph County.

Wow, that's a lot of rock.

That's a lot of rock to move.

OK, let's walk down a little bit farther and see what we can see that way.

All right.

All right.

I love this feature as well, another stairway where the South Bend and use parks and arts as integrated some new construction.

Yes, with some old construction.

Yes.

This is a great little bench over here.

Let's have a seat because I love this bench.

I do, too.

We can take a look at the river.

Let's talk a little bit more about the workers ride the bike, how many there were and what do we know about them?

Yeah.

By 1935, there were 4500 workers working in Saint Joseph County and all different kinds of projects restoration.

So a significant number of people, and especially in that era, working on park improvements, right?

Exactly.

How about the impact that the WPA had on Parks and Recreation in our society?

What was that?

What was that like?

Well, besides these wonderful structures that are all over the place in St Joseph County, I put a lot of people to work and it kind of gave opportunities for the first time ever to people, for people to recreate without cost.

And basically before that, maybe people were members of tennis clubs or polo clubs or what have you right?

So to recreate, they might have had to pay to recreate.

Right, right.

You can.

You can have different forms of recreation for a price.

You had to be a member of a country club if you want to play tennis or if you want to swim or if you wanted to golf.

So they said that after the WPA projects in parks, it kind of revolutionized the way people can have recreation without cost, without the kind of quote unquote and democratize that.

I like that term.

I like that, too.

So after that, any man, woman and child could go into a park and play basketball and swim and play tennis, et cetera.

Before that, you did for a price only if they let you in right now, didn't was it the playing field level right off the bat?

No, we know that it took a while for things to evened out, but that set into place.

The free recreation opportunities we have in all of our parks in this area and the WPA was not, we should clarify, wasn't restricted to Indiana or Central County, right?

This was a national program.

No, thank goodness.

It was a national program that put millions of people to work right.

And I love this special little feature.

Tell me what you found here.

This is great.

Yes.

So evidently they did a little carving here and they put in the words WPA and I only discovered this a few days ago.

So it's pretty fascinating.

I think we need to redo this and put WPA in bigger letters here or just emphasize it, restore it would be the good word and just maybe get that, get the growth off there.

There are differences in show.

Yeah.

So the feature, it's a great thing.

Well, people can certainly explore all along this Kern and river trail, all even in Mishawaka.

There's features like this that were constructed by the WPA.

The East Bank trail, I think, has a feature, a wall feature that's really beautiful.

Little Park in Mishawaka has a wonderful yeah.

Oh yeah, that's right.

So lots of stonework throughout Saint Joseph County, and we have the WPA to thank for that.

Gary, thank you for an enlightening story of the day here in South Bend and Saint Joseph County.

Thank you.

My pleasure.