Theodore Roosevelt's Birthplace

On our final morning in New York City, my husband Tim and I paid a vist to Theodore Roosevelt's Birthplace, the best endowed site in the entire U.S. National Park Service.  Little did I suspect that our call at this historic Victorian townhome at 28 East 20th Street in midtown Manhattan would so enthrall me that I'd almost miss the 12:35 p.m. departure of our train back to Washington, D.C. 

Theodore Roosevelt's Birthplace
(Creative Commons photo found on Wikipedia 26 April 2012.)

The brownstone we saw is not the home where Roosevelt was born on October 27, 1858.  That home was demolished in 1916 following decades of use as a storefront and office building.  Roosevelt's father, concerned about the increasing commercialization of the neighborhood, had sold that home in 1872 and moved the family to a more fashionable address near Central Park. 

Instead, what we toured was a five-story replica built on the same city lot by the Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association which was founded soon after T.R.'s death on January 6, 1919.  The W.R.M.A. solicited donations to reconstruct the rowhouse, filling it with gifts of letters, furniture, household goods, books and other personal effects donated to the association by Roosevelt's family, friends and contemporaries before opening its doors to the public in 1923. 

Forty years later in 1962, the W.R.M.A., which meantime had joined forces with the Theodore Roosevelt Association, donated the birthplace, along with its sizeable endowment, to the National Park Service. 

Is it any wonder that park rangers now assigned to this post check all bags and do not permit tourists to roam its rooms apart from the company of a park ranger tour guide?  I willingly surrendered my bag into their care in exchange for an intimate glimpse of Theodore Roosevelt's childhood.

Teddy Roosevelt, age 11, while visiting Paris where this photo was taken in 1870.
(Public domain photo found on Wikipedia 27 April 2012.)

"I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph."

~ Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. in a April 10, 1899 speech given in Chicago

In my opinion, no one embodies the American 'can do' spirit so much as our 26th President of the United State, Theodore Roosevelt. Teddy, a sickly, asthmatic, nearsighted child, embraced the advice given him by his father to live a strenuous life, and not only overcame his own physical frailities as he pursued his lifelong adventures, but simultaneously pulled America along with him onto the world's stage.

A portrait of Teddy's father, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., hangs in the basement trophy room

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. was nicknamed Teedie (pronounced to rhyme with T. D.) by the family to distinguish him from the father he adored, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., a glass importer-turned-banker. 

His grandfather, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, called CVS by the family, was one of the wealthiest businessmen in New York City. He gave each of his five sons, including his youngest, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., a luxurious home as a wedding gift. Theodore Sr.'s home at 28 E. 20th Street was right next door to that of his lawyer brother, Robert B. Roosevelt, CVS's fourth son. The extended Roosevelt family was a close-knit clan; the homes of all of CVS's sons were within blocks of the patriarch's Union Square mansion.

Our free walk-in tour was scheduled at 10 a.m.  While we waited, we talked with the two park rangers on duty in the National Park Service basement reception room, an area that once housed the kitchen and service rooms of the mansion.  We asked which books about T.R. on display in the facility's small bookstore they would recommend.   Their endorsements were Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York by Richard Zacks and River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard which I had enthusiasically read last fall.

"Establishing the Dead Line," a political cartoon depicting
New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt

We also examined the hallway, hung with more than a dozen framed political cartoons, a visible resume of T.R.'s public service career which included:

*  a stint on the U. S. Civil Service Commission,
*  weeding out corruption as New York City Police Commissioner,
*  an appointment as the Assistant Secretary to the Navy,
*  service as Lieutenant-Colonel of the Rough Riders, the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry in the Spanish American War,
*  his election as Governor of the State of New York,
*  his election as Vice-President of the United States,
*  his succession to the Presidency upon the 1901 assassination of Pres. William McKinley,
*  establishing 4 national parks and 18 national monuments,
*  trust-busting the monopolies of Gilded Age titans,
*  the suspension of the Coal Miners' Strike of 1902,
*  securing U.S. rights to the Panama Canal in 1903,
*  his election as a full-term President in 1904,
*  mediating the end of the Russo-Japanese War and earning the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize,
*  his retirement as one of America's most popular presidents in 1901, and
*  his failed campaign as the Bull Moose Party candidate to win an unprecedented third presidential term in 1912.

At 10 a.m., National Park Service Ranger Michael Amato led the way up the stairs to the first floor where he treated us to an incredible tour of the home. 

On the right side of this landing is a connecting door into research library
maintained by the NPS in the brownstone next door.

Typical for brownstones of the era, the home's stairs ascend inside the building's west wall from the basement all the way up to the servants' quarters in the attic which is not open to the public. What is not so typical is how doorways have been cut on the basement and first floor levels into the neighboring brownstone next door which was once owned by T.R.'s uncle Robert.

Ranger Amato favored us with a quick visit to the site's T.R.  research collection.

Our official tour began in the central family parlor on the first floor of Theodore Roosevelt's Birthplace.

Family Parlor

From this cozy family parlor, we could see the Victorian version of an 'open concept' design as we looked north through a wide doorway to peer into the formal front parlor or south to see the elegant dining room that fills the rear of the first floor.

View from the front parlor through the family parlor into the rear dining room

Etched and stained glass pocket door

Victorians did not have central heating.  Instead, wealthy homes of that era had a fireplace in every room to keep the occupants warm.  The Roosevelts trapped heat in the family parlor by drawing the heavy curtains hung on either side of the wide doorways or by pulling the pocket doors closed. 

Dining Room

The Roosevelts could easily seat twelve people at their dining room table.

The door on the right conceals a dumbwaiter.

This dumbwaiter was a clever way to transport food,  warm from the basement's kitchen, 
to the dining room.

Ranger Amato & Tim in the front parlor

Turning our attention to the front portion of the home's first floor, we entered the formal front parlor.  It was here in this parlor that Teddy's father, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., along with several other influencial New York businessmen, signed the charter that established the American Museum of Natural History.

Front parlor's fireplace with a needlepoint cushion on its hearth.

Perhaps his father's involvement with the museum spurred Teddy's interest in natural history and taxidermy.  Later as an adult, Teddy Roosevelt donated many of his taxidermy specimens gained from his hunting trips in the western United States and his safaris in Africa to the museum. For a quick look at a few highlights from my December 2011 visit to the American Museum of Natural History, view my post, "Name Dropping In NYC."

Front Parlor

Teddy's father was known for his charitable works.  During the Civil War, he visited Union military camps and helped soldiers send their pay home to provide for the needs of their families.  

"My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew," Teddy would claim throughout his life as he strove to live up to his father's goodness. Yet, ironically, only the name of one Theodore Roosevelt would be remembered once his father's generation passed on.

Nursery

"You have the mind, but you haven't got the body," Teddy's father warned him.  "To do all you can with your mind, you must make your body match it."  Teddy listened and heeded his father's advice.  The rear bedroom on the second floor was removed and the space was renovated into a piazza, an open-air porch, that served as a playroom/gymnasium for the four Roosevelt children.  Anna, Teddy, Elliott and Corinne would daily climb through the nursery window to play and exercise outdoors on the piazza.  

Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt's portrait hangs in the front bedroom on the 2nd floor.

His mother, Mittie Bulloch, was a Southern belle from Savannah, Georgia and proud of her rebel family, despite the country's division during the Civil War. Definitely not intimidated in the least by the wealthy New York family into which she had married, Mittie delighted in telling her children swashbuckling stories of their southern kin's exploits. Undoubtedly, much of T.R.'s dash and bravado came from his mother, despite the fact that the marriage between puritanical Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. and his audaicious wife Mittie could not have been a easy fit, especially during the Civil War years. In his essay entitled "Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy," Gore Vidal wrote, "In later life, everyone agreed that Theodore was more Bulloch than Roosevelt..."

A bookish boy, Teddy loved nothing more than to lose himself in a good book.  He and his siblings were all schooled at home so when Theodore Jr. entered Harvard as a 5-foot 8-inch tall freshman weighing only 125 pounds, it was his first exposure to peers outside of his family.  His Harvard classmates hardly knew what to make of him, but even though Teddy made no lifelong friends during his time there, his lively, energetic personality carried him through this first experience of living apart from the Roosevelt clan. 

The Trophy Room

Another difficult experience in T. R.'s life happened on February 14, 1884, when his mother and his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, died.  In a manner that became a recurring pattern throughout his life, T. R.  found solace from his grief in nature, by fleeing to the Dakotas where he immersed himself in outdoor occupations of ranching, fishing, and hunting.  His knowledge of North American birds and large mammals grew and likely surpassed that of any other American living in his day.  He continued to ride, shoot, fish, and live the strenuous life almost up until his death at the age of sixty in 1919.

T.R.'s Western Saddle

In the following video, National Park Ranger Michael Amato describes how Teddy Roosevelt was shot at close range by a psychotic New York City saloonkeeper as Roosevelt greeted a crowd in Milwaukee during his presidential campaign in 1912.  T.R.'s doubled-over 50-page speech which he'd stashed in his overcoat's pocket was torn by the bullet hole and his dented steel eyeglass case deflected the assassin's bullet.  Those items, along with the shirt he wore that night, are part of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace collection. 



Astonishingly, the wounded Roosevelt insisted upon finishing his speech that evening, even with the bullet still lodged in his side.  However, this failed assassination attempt slowed the momentum of Roosevelt's campaign as T.R. spent the next eight days in a Chicago hospital. Roosevelt finished the 1912 presidential election in second place behind winner Woodrow Wilson but ahead of William Howard Taft, the incumbent President who was T.R.'s hand-picked successor in 1909.


Bully for you, Teddy!

Postscript:  Tim and I left Theodore Roosevelt's Birthplace so spellbound by our tour that I failed to claim my bag from the reception desk.  I remembered its loss when we entered our hotel room where we'd planned to grab our luggage, check out by noon and walk to NYC's Penn Station to catch our Amtrak train home to Washington, D.C.  Instead, Tim trundled our bags to the station while I made a mad dash back to T. R.'s birthplace.


I arrived in Penn Station with just 5 minutes to spare before our train departed.