One focus of the proposed renovation is the restoration of the murals in our existing building lobbies, in which Hugo Gellert depicted famous people and events from American history.

Almost everybody today is in favor of keeping the murals, but that wasn’t always the case. Most recently in 2003, when there was mounting talk of a lobby renovation that never happened, a shareholder vote on whether or not to preserve the murals was covered by The Forward and The New York Times.

Around that time, the New Deal Network (a pioneering web-based educational resource on American history) of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute (now known as the Roosevelt Institute) posted a basic but nice site about the murals, including a lesson plan that could be used to teach about them. The New Deal Network website no longer exists, but the mini-site regarding the murals was captured by Archive.org’s Wayback Machine, and we have reproduced the site.