The Model City

San Francisco sat there for years, broken up and packaged into 17 wooden crates, hardly labeled and nearly forgotten. But when the warehouse that held those crates was sold in 2009, the city was rediscovered. All of its streets and neighborhoods and homes were there, delicately and intricately replicated in a relief model of the entire city measuring 37 by 41 feet and dating back to the New Deal era.

No one is exactly sure how it ended up in that UC Berkeley warehouse. But for Gray Brechin, a New Deal researcher and historian at the university, the rediscovery of the model was an incredibly lucky find. He says it’s likely this model was just one of many built by the Works Progress Administration in the years following the Great Depression, but it’s uncertain how many of them remain. The models were built for planning purposes, but also as a form of what is now called economic stimulus. “It employed an awful lot of people,” says Brechin, who estimates that construction of this one model probably took thousands of people-hours.