My first acquaintance with Teddy Roosevelt was at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site in Manhattan. Roosevelt (called "Teedie" as a kid) grew up wealthy and weak - he was a small and very unhealthy child, so he often sojourned to the country to help his lungs (he also drank gallons of coffee and smoked cigars when he was about 6 years old onward, but that's another story). As a result, he grew to love the outdoors and became the burly, strong and wilderness-obsessed 26th President that we know him as today.
I really enjoyed this historic site. It is tucked back on 18th Street and blends in seamlessly with the buildings around it - so much so that the rangers there said they have had visitors who tell them, "I've lived on 20th Street my whole life and never knew this was here."
The house had to be entirely reconstructed. Roosevelt lived there until age 14 (that's 1872, for anyone who's keeping track), but after the Roosevelts moved out, the building changed hands many times. It was completely unrecognizable when the Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association acquired it after Roosevelt's death in 1919. Over the years, the organization pieced the house back together by calling relatives and friends, painstakingly tracking down pieces of furniture, decorations and art, and somehow figuring out what wallpaper hung in each room and precisely how each room was laid out.
Now, about 90% of the furnishings are original to the family. The entry level is more like a museum exhibit about Teddy Roosevelt, including memorabilia and a collection of political cartoons, and when you take a tour upstairs you get to see the house itself.
Touring this site was awesome. Since the tour groups are small (there were only 5 people in our group), the site is set up so that you can walk right into the reconstructed rooms - they simply ask, "Don't lean on anything," because most of it is original and, if it's not original, it's probably a just-as-old period piece. There is no Plexiglas, no railings, no velvet ropes. I can understand this layout not working so well for larger tour groups and larger homes, but for this situation it was really great.
Without further ado, here are some images. We visited this site on June 17, 2010.
The outside of the building.
Downstairs - in what would have been the basement/kitchen/servants' area back in the day - is the museum-like exhibit of countless documents and artifacts.
21 more images below the jump...
Among the documents in the exhibit area were some pictures of how the house has looked over the years.
This is a coffee cup that Teddy Roosevelt drank out of, including a bit of residue in the bottom. And we thought it was weird when N*Sync sold uneaten waffles?
I love this!
I love this too. I want that pitcher real bad.
These buttons were made for the public when Roosevelt returned from a hunting expedition in Africa.
This is the shirt Roosevelt was wearing when he was shot in Milwaukee in 1912, as well as the papers in his pocket that helped slow the bullet. After being shot, he proceeded to deliver a 90-minute speech! Not to mention he winged it, since his speech had been shot clean through.
"Roosevelt was a many-sided man, and every side was like an electric battery." -John Burroughs
Entryway
That little velvet chair was made for Teedie because the horsehair furniture was too harsh for his sensitive skin. It is the same chair from this picture...
...Which was taken when TR was five years old. He was, by all accounts, a truly tiny child.
Our tour group in the dining room
A piece of the original china
Our tour guide in the front parlor
The story behind this wax fruit is particularly funny. It was made by TR's mother, Mittie, at a time when Victorian women were expected to be able to fashion nosegays, cross-stitch and wax fruit in their spare time. When it came time for the Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association to re-furbish the house, they sent notes to all their family members to bring them anything that had been in the original house - and they came up with this fruit. What that means, then, is basically that someone had saved this nasty-looking wax fruit for 75 years or so - and it was a family heirloom simply because Grandma or Auntie or whoever had made it. And now we all get to enjoy it.
Pat by the main staircase
The bed linens, also original, were away being dry-cleaned when we visited - but the great furniture is original.
Our tour guide
Roosevelt's desk and filing cabinet
"It has always seemed to me that in life there are two ways of achieving success or, for the matter of that, of achieving what is commonly called greatness. One is to do that which can only be done by the men of exceptional and extraordinary abilities. Of course this means that only this man can do it, and it is a very rare kind of success or greatness. The other is to do that which many men could do, but which, as a matter of fact, none of them actually does. This is the ordinary kind of success or kind of greatness... My own successes have come within this category." - TR
No comments:
Post a Comment