Image courtesy of Library Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, WPA Poster Collection

The Greenbelt Museum is pleased to partner with alight dance theater this spring to co-produce Hometown Heroes: 75 Years of Extraordinary Greenbelt Women. This series of site specific interactive dance performances will take place in and around the Museum’s historic house at 10B Crescent Road, and will celebrate the stories of the women who have made Greenbelt such a dynamic and inspiring place to live since 1937. Using oral histories, period props and costumes, the performances will explore the experiences of the women who lived in Greenbelt as young mothers and “homemakers” in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s to the present day.

Audience members will be led through the historic home by the dancers of alight dance theater. The performance tours are scheduled for June 3 and 24 and July 15 and 22, at 1pm, 1:30pm, 2pm, and 2:30pm. Because of the small size of the house, each performance tour can only accommodate 6-8 people, so reserving your tickets ahead of time is strongly recommended.  You can purchase tickets on Sundays beginning May 20 at the Museum House, 10B Crescent Road. Or you can reserve tickets by contacting Megan Searing Young, Director of the Greenbelt Museum at museum@greenbeltmd.gov or (301) 507-6582. Tickets can also be purchased at the door, depending on availability. Tickets are $3 for general admission, $1 for Museum members and seniors.

In addition to the performances at the Museum house, the Hometown Heroes project, as envisioned by Angella Foster, Artistic Director of alight dance theater, has many other components including an oral history/dance event at Springhill Lake Elementary, an exhibition which will open August 30 in the Community Gallery in the Community Center, and a film of the Museum performances. Says Foster, “I conceived of Hometown Heroes as a project that would reach across generations of Greenbelt women and celebrate all that women of all ages and experiences contribute to our beautiful community.  Like every project, this work is shaping me as the artist as much as I have shaped it. Working with the girls at Springhill Lake Elementary and listening to oral histories from the museum archives have given me a new sense of being part of the fabric of this community and encouraged me to keep finding ways to cultivate creative community where ever I go. I hope that everyone who experiences the Hometown Heroes project will walk away feeling more connected to not just the history of Greenbelt but to the promise of this place, that intentional community could be a transformational and enduring legacy.” For more information about alight dance theater, visit the alight website, find them on Facebook, or read about the project on kickstarter.org

Also this weekend, join the Museum for a free walking tour – part of a pilot program we are in the process of developing. The Museum has been experimenting with offering walking tours which leave from the historic house on Sundays as walking through the historic community is one of the best ways to experience Greenbelt’s unique history.  Space on the tour is very limited and will be on a first come, first served basis. If you are interested, please arrive at the Museum house by 2pm.

Apartment building in Greenbelt, Maryland, circa 1947. Greenbelt Museum Collection

Join FOGM for our next lecture, Housing in Greenbelt: Beyond the New Deal Legacy, April 17, 2012 at 7:3opm, to be given by Greenbelt scholars and University of Maryland professors, Mary Corbin Sies and Isabelle Gournay. The lecture will take place at the Greenbelt Community Center, 15 Crescent Road, Greenbelt, MD 20770.

At 75, Greenbelt’s original brick and block townhouses and garden apartments have withstood the test of time.   Expanding trom this crescent-shaped nucleus, the city ‘s residential landscape offers at present  a wide array of  desirable housing options.  Ranging in size from the compact Parkbelt homes on Forestway to the Charlestowne North’s “tower in the park” overlooking Greenbelt Lake, from the cluster of cooperatively built homes on Woodland Hills to Greenbelt West’s  Spring Hill Lake/Lenox Park complex,  these diverse residential  typologies have taken their cue from Greenbelt’s original housing cluster by offering greater planning and landscape amenities than is standard for suburban development.  This talk by two University of Maryland and Greenbelt Museum volunteers living in Old Greenbelt distills research published in the book Housing Washington: Two Centuries of Residential Development and Planning in the National Capital Area  and complements the upcoming 75th Anniversary Symposium: Sustaining Greenbelt’s Legacy.

Greenbelt apartments.

The Symposium, to be held in the Greenbelt Community Center April 27 and April 28, will offer a fascinating look back at Greenbelt’s past, but most importantly will capture where Greenbelt is today and where it might be headed. Academics from several universities, city staff and Greenbelt residents examine the city’s enduring legacies in terms of  community  planning, recreation, cooperative ventures and citizen activism. Thursday, April 26, 6pm-8pm, the Greenbelt Museum will host an open house at 10B Crescent where signed copies of the new book, Images of America: Greenbelt will be available for sale. Dr. Mervyn Miller, an English planning historian, delivers a keynote address, “From The British Garden City to Greenbelt and  Back to the English New Towns. ” at 1:00 pm, Saturday, April 28. For additional information, visit www.greenbeltmd.gov/75 . To register, please print and fill out this form. The symposium will take place at the Greenbelt Community Center, 15 Crescent Road, Greenbelt, MD 20770.

Greenbelt Museum historic house at 10B Crescent, open Sundays 1-5pm

But it’s not enough, so this year, which marks our 25th Anniversary (!) we’re trying some new things – and one of them couldn’t be easier!  Simply print out this flyer (or pick one up from the Museum), dine at Joe’s Crab Shack right here in Greenbelt on Saturday, March 10, between 12noon and 8pm, hand the flyer to your server, and the Greenbelt Museum will receive 10% of your bill.  If you can’t make it to our event, but still want to support FOGM and the Museum, click here to make a donation! We thank you very much for helping us to keep Greenbelt history alive! Stay tuned for more details about our 25th year and Greenbelt’s 75th Anniversary!

African Americans employed at Greenbelt at work in front of Center School. Lenore Thomas' bas relief is visible in the background. Greenbelt Museum Collection

Greenbelt, Maryland is a planned community built in 1937 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. One of three Green Towns built during the Great Depression, the project put struggling Americans to work, provided much needed low-income housing in the Washington, D.C. region and was a bold experiment in town planning and cooperative living. Its first residents enjoyed modern homes, schools, a pool, a library and a town center complete with cooperative businesses and a movie theater all within walking distance of the homes in a utopian park-like setting.

Those first residents of Greenbelt, however, were exclusively white. Although Greenbelt was integrated in terms of religion, which was unusual for a New Deal Community, it was racially segregated. African American workers such as the ones pictured here importantly helped to build the town, but they were not able to apply for residency here as Greenbelt, Prince Georges County, and the state of Maryland were all racially segregated at the time. Early town plans called for an area to be set aside and called the Rossville Rural Development which was purportedly to be used by African American families, (see The New Deal in the Suburbs: A History of the Greenbelt Town Program 1935-1954, by Joseph Arnold) but the plans were dropped early on as they were too controversial. 

Residents move into Aberdeen Gardens (formerly called Newport News Homesteads), Arthur Rothstein, November 1937. Library of Congress

The federal government did build two other New Deal era communities in the Mid-Atlantic region for African Americans, Langston Terrace  in Washington, D. C. and Aberdeen Gardens outside of Newport News, Virginia.

Greenbelt turns 75 this year and in preparation for an upcoming timeline exhibition, the Greenbelt Museum is actively researching both the African American workers who helped to build Greenbelt and the first families of color who moved into Greenbelt, probably in the late 1960s. If you or anyone you know has any information, recollections, or photographs of African Americans in Greenbelt from the late 1930s on, please contact us at greenbeltmuseum@gmail.com. For more information about 75th Anniversary events, including an anniversary  symposium which will explore diversity in one of its sessions, please visit the City of Greenbelt’s website. Or download the Symposium registration form here.

Typical Greenbelt homes c 1936, by FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein. Courtesy Library of Congress.

As you may have heard recently on WAMU 88.5′s program, Metro Connection, Greenbelt, Maryland, established in 1937 and built by the federal government as an experiment in modern town planning , turns 75 in 2012! A year-long series of events and activities are already underway.  A kick-off event was held  January 8, a lecture about the new Arcadia Images of America book on Greenbelt,  was held on Tuesday, January 17, and next up are a screening of Three Brave Men, and a program co-sponsored by the Greenbelt Astronomy Club entitled, “75 Years of Stars.” A walk around Greenbelt’s three lakes is planned for April, as well as a symposium, “Sustaining Greenbelt’s Legacy.” Other signature events include cutting edge dance performances inside the Museum’s historic house at 10B Crescent by Alight Dance Theater in June,  an address by James Roosevelt, Jr. in September and a gala dinner dance in October. For more information about these and other events, please visit the 75th Anniversary website.

To plan your visit to the Greenbelt Museum, which turns 25 years old in 2012, visit here. The Museum’s historic house is open by appointment only in January but will resume its regular Sunday hours beginning February 5, 2012. To support the preservation of this unique New Deal Community, join the Friends of the Greenbelt Museum, a non-profit dedicated to celebrating and sharing the history of Greenbelt, Maryland.

Choosing the maps, photographs, and advertising images that comprise the book and distilling seventy-five years of historical information into captions was not an easy process for the authors. See some of the images from each of the seven chapters that the authors chose notto include and hear why or why not certain images made the cut. 

Co-authors Jill Parsons St. John and Megan Searing Young pored over hundreds of Greenbelt photographs in writing Images of America: Greenbelt.

Chapters include: Planning a Greenbelt Town, Building Greenbelt, Greenbelt “Pioneers” Settle In, World War II and the 1940s, A Cooperative Buys the Town, Greenbelt Expands in the 1960s and 1970s, and the 1980s and Beyond. Books will be for sale at the event. For more information, contact Megan Searing Young, Greenbelt Museum Director at 301-507-6582 or greenbeltmuseum@gmail.com.  Save the date for our next lecture scheduled for April 17, 2012, Greenbelt Maryland: Beyond the Iconic Legacy when we welcome Greenbelt scholars Isabelle Gournay and Mary Corbin Sies.

FOGM lectures are free and open to the public and take place in Room 201 of the Greenbelt Community Center, 15 Crescent Road, Greenbelt, MD 20770.

New Greenbelt book to be released November 21, 2011

 Arcadia Images of America: Greenbelt, co-authored by former Greenbelt Museum curator, Jill Parsons St. John, and current curator, Megan Searing Young is scheduled to be released the week of November 21. Produced as a project of the 75th Anniversary of Greenbelt, Maryland, the book is comprised of over 200 captioned photographs, many of which have never before beeen published.  The project provided an excellent opportunity to showcase the Greenbelt Museum’s extensive photo archive.  Seven chapters cover Greenbelt’s history from its planning in the late 1930s right up to the present day. Chapters include: Planning a Greenbelt Town, Building Greenbelt, Greenbelt “Pioneers” Settle In, World War II and the 1940s, A Cooperative Buys the Town, Greenbelt Expands in the 1960s and 1970s, and the 1980s and Beyond. All proceeds benefit the Friends of the Greenbelt Museum.

The book can be pre-ordered from the Arcadia Publishing website, from Amazon.com or from the Greenbelt Museum shop in the visitor center at 10B Crescent Road, which is open Sundays from 1pm to 5pm.  For holiday schedule click here http://greenbeltmuseum.org/tours/  Pick up your copy at the Greenbelt Museum’s Holiday Open House, 10B Crescent Road, Friday evening, December 2, from 6pm to 8pm following the City’s tree lighting.

The book will also be for sale at the Greenbelt Festival of Lights  juried art and craft fair to be held December 3 and 4 in the Greenbelt Community Center, 15 Crescent Road, Greenbelt, MD. For more information about the book, please call 301-507-6582 or send an email to greenbeltmuseum@gmail.com

Greenbelt pioneer Bob Sommers (fifth from the right) and others celebrate at Waldrup's at the end of World War II. Greenbelt Museum Collection.

Do you love history? The New Deal? FDR & Eleanor? Modernist architecture? Wednesday, October 12, from 5pm to 7pm come by the New Deal Cafe in historic Greenbelt to mix and mingle with the Friends of the Greenbelt Museum. Come have some food, listen to some great music and enjoy specially priced beverages.  Get to know a little bit more about what we do and see if you’d like to help us share our unique New Deal history! For more information, call 240-542-2064, or email greenbeltmuseumedu@gmail.com.  The New Deal Café is located in Roosevelt Center, in historic Greenbelt, MD. 

On October 18, 7:30pm, plan to attend the next Greenbelt Museum lecture when we give the floor to members of the 75th Anniversary Committee who’ll share what’s being planned for 2012—Greenbelt’s 75th anniversary year.  Hear about the exciting events and activities which include the release of a new souvenir photograph book about Greenbelt, a symposium entitled Sustaining Greenbelt’s Legacy, a new exhibition on Greenbelt history, art exhibitions, a cutting edge dance performance, a three-lake walk, an address by James Roosevelt, a glamorous dinner dance  gala in October, & more!  75th merchandise will also be for sale. For more information about the 75th Committee, visit  www.greenbeltmd.gov/75. This event is free and will take place at the Greenbelt Community Center, Room 201, 15 Crescent Road, Greenbelt Maryland 20770.