A ground breaking 36 years in the making finally takes place – unofficially anyway.
The FDR memorial designed by architect Louis I. Kahn is finally underway. The ground breaking happened one month ago with the official ground breaking being planned for this summer.
FDR Memorial Wheelchair
The project was conceived 40 years ago when the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute (then known as the Four Freedoms Foundation) initiated the planning of a memorial in New York.
In 1973, Roosevelt Island was officially renamed (from Welfare Island) and plans for a memorial were disclosed. But the project encountered what William J. vanden Heuvel, who founded the Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, N.Y., to preserve the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and has been instrumental in raising money for the memorial, called “a perfect storm” of obstacles – most pertaining to funding.
In an ironic twist, the memorial is finally getting underway during what many have called the biggest recession since the great depression, which FDR shepherded this country through.
The memorial is being built on the southernmost part of Roosevelt Island, an area that currently houses another Roosevelt Island icon/curiosity – the ruins of the Small Pox hospitals.
Visitors to the memorial will enter past a stand of copper beech trees. They will ascend a monumental stair to allees of 150 linden trees flanking a sloped lawn and culminating in a granite-lined open-air plaza called the “room,” which will house a bust of the former president and will be engraved with the Four Freedoms (speech and religion and an absence of want and fear) he proclaimed in a 1941 speech.
People who donate a tree will have their names engraved on a granite parapet with relevant Roosevelt references.
Just north of the memorial, the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation is completing Southpoint Park, 10 acres of “green rooms” and “wild gardens” surrounding an abandoned smallpox hospital. Southpoint, a partnership with the Trust for Public Land, is scheduled to open next fall.
Now that ground has been broken for the memorial, Mr. vanden Heuvel was relatively sanguine about the long wait. He pointed out that the memorial in Washington to Abraham Lincoln, who died in 1865, wasn’t dedicated until 1922.
