Welcome home, Mr President!

TR's Birthplace at
28 E 20th Street

Theodore Roosevelt is the only US President to have been born in New York City.  The country’s 26^th President was born in 1858 and lived with his family in a townhouse on East 20^th Street in Manhattan until he was 15 years old.  

The President’s childhood home was demolished in 1916 but when Roosevelt died three years later, the Women’s Roosevelt Memorial Association commissioned the impressively-named Ms Theodate Pope Riddle to rebuild it.   Ms Riddle was one of America’s first female architects and she drew upon historical records to faithfully reconstruct the property.  

The final design featured five period rooms (family bedrooms, a dining room, the sitting room, and the library), and also provided for two exhibition galleries, and an auditorium.  The completed building was then carefully decorated with many original furnishings donated by the late President’s sisters and his widow.  The top two floors of the brownstone, which originally would have housed the children's rooms, the bedrooms for servants, and the attic space, were not restored to their former glory.  They are now just used for office space, and are off-limits to the public.

A pennant flag from the
Presidential campaign 1904

The restored building opened as a museum in 1923 and was privately run for several years before being placed under the stewardship of the US National Park Service.   I was in the neighbourhood this morning and stopped by for a visit.  The downstairs area has a bit of a viewing gallery, with trinkets and black-and-white photographs of the President's career - right back to his early days as a cattle rancher in the Dakotas, the President of the NYC Board of Police Commissioners; Assistant Secretary of the US Navy; and Governor of New York State.

Bullet holes in Roosevelt's glasses
case & speech - reminders of an
assassination attempt in 1912

You start the tour by watching a 25-minute dramatisation of the President's early life.  I think it must have been filmed in the 1970s or 1980s, so you can just imagine.  But downstairs, you get a really good picture of how motivated the young President was to improve his physical and mental health, particularly to overcome childhood asthma and poor eyesight.  Once you take in all the memorabilia there, a representative of the National Parks guides you upstairs for a free tour of the "period rooms" so you can see how the Roosevelt family would have lived back in the day (the answer is very well, indeed).

I loved that the President kept a 4pm appointment every day so that he could play with his children, and he even invited senior White House officials to bring their kids along and join in.  But when he wasn't doing that - or running the country - the President was indulging in his favourite hobbies: hunting, jujitsu, and swimming naked in the Potomac.  I think I would have liked him.