FDR left mark on nation — and area's buildings

President's claim angered some

By William B. Rhoads
For the Poughkeepsie Journal

George Washington had designed his home, Mount Vernon, and Thomas Jefferson took infinite care in planning his residence, Monticello, while also designing Virginia’s Capitol in Richmond and the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

Roosevelt was a great admirer of Jefferson the statesman and the architect. When FDR was attacked by professional architects for practicing architecture without a license, he called upon Jefferson’s example as a distinguished precedent.

But it was pride in his family’s long and honorable association with the Hudson Valley that was at the root of his love of the region’s history and architecture.

The Dutchman Claes Martenszen Van Rosenvelt arrived in New Amsterdam about 1650, and in 1910 FDR joined the Holland Society whose members were required to be descendants in the direct male line of a Dutchman residing in the Colonies before 1675. He became a member of the Dutchess County Historical Society in 1914, the year of its founding.

That same year, he and his mother Sara prepared to enlarge and remodel Springwood, their Hyde Park country house. FDR persuaded his mother to accept the added cost of wings built of native fieldstone, the stone obtained from old walls that ran through the Roosevelt lands.

After being struck by polio in August 1921, FDR had more time to devote to his historical and architectural interests. He encouraged the Holland Society to publish ‘‘Dutch Houses in the Hudson Valley Before 1776,’’ a still-valuable book by his friend and Dutchess County’s foremost historian, Helen Wilkinson Reynolds.

In the book’s introduction, Roosevelt grieved over the destruction of so many old Dutch houses and explained that the book would, through its text and photos, preserve a record of “the manners and customs of the settlers,” remarkable as being “extremely simple.”

18th-century model followed

Such simplicity marked Val-Kill cottage, FDR’s first effort at a distinct revival of the Dutch colonial house, built in 1925 in Hyde Park for his wife, Eleanor, and her friends Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman.

FDR was insistent that the design follow local 18th century precedent (such as the William Stoutenburgh house in Hyde Park), and objected strenuously and successfully to a round-arched window proposed by Henry Toombs, a professional architect originally from Georgia who, until educated by FDR, was unaware that such “Italian” features were not used by the Dutch in the Hudson Valley.

In 1926, the James Roosevelt Memorial Library in the hamlet of Hyde Park was donated by Sara Roosevelt, designed by Toombs, and constructed with fieldstone walls at FDR’s insistence.

However, it was not until the 1930s and the coming of the New Deal that Roosevelt was able to command the resources required to build four Dutchess County post offices and three Hyde Park schools in his favorite material. First came the Poughkeepsie Post Office (1936-37), where the president took a keen interest in selecting the site, determined the historical model (the destroyed county courthouse of 1809) and battled with the architect, Eric Kebbon, over the character of the stonework.

Kebbon wanted finely cut stone to accord with the formal, classical design of the old courthouse; FDR irritably demanded something more rustic. Murals within the post office also were planned under close presidential supervision. He was particularly concerned that artist Gerald Foster include a panel depicting the Ratification Convention of 1788, because his ancestor, Isaac Roosevelt, had played a part in New York’s ratification of the federal Constitution — a fact FDR could use to bolster his claim to be a firm supporter of the Constitution, a point disputed by Republicans in the 1930s.

In the fall of 1937, the president took up the question of how to design the Rhinebeck Post Office. At its dedication on May 1, 1939, he proudly stated that because of his Beekman and Roosevelt ancestry, “I have a claim to kinship with this town that is second only to the Town of Hyde Park.”

Old stones recycled

He ordered that the post office be modeled after the Henry Beekman house, begun in 1700 by Hendrick Kip and destroyed by fire in 1900. Stones from the ruin were, at presidential command, employed in constructing the new walls, although some stone from weathered outcroppings on Beekman land also was allowed.

The architect of the Rhinebeck Post Office, R. Stanley Brown, was adept at handling the finicky president, and so collaborated with him on the post offices in Wappingers Falls (1938-40) and Hyde Park (1939-40). For the former, Roosevelt requested a fieldstone version of the 18th-century Brouwer-Mesier house in Wappingers Falls.

With advice from Helen Reynolds, FDR decided to base the Hyde Park Post Office on the house built of clapboards about 1772 for Dr. John Bard and destroyed a century later. The post office was, of course, built of stone, and appropriately from stone walls on land once owned by Bard’s son, Samuel.

A lover of old books and papers, FDR found great pleasure in planning his own library in Hyde Park. On April 12, 1937, he made rough sketches of a 11¼2-story fieldstone building — what would become the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library — a much-enlarged, steel-framed version of typical Dutch colonial houses. No modern or elaborate classical design could meet FDR’s requirement that the building “come to be an integral part of a country scene which the hand of man has not greatly changed since the days of the Indians.”

Schools sought advice

FDR’s presidential authority did not extend to control of the Hyde Park school board, but he did consult with its members, and they did respect his architectural taste. Between 1938 and 1940, three schools were designed and constructed: an elementary school in the hamlet of Hyde Park, another elementary school on Violet Avenue and a high school. Again, FDR’s main contribution was the urging of local fieldstone upon the board and its architects. At the dedication of the high school (originally Franklin D. Roosevelt High School, today the Haviland Middle School), the president emphasized that the solidly built schools looked back to the Colonial past but would “still be used and busy 100 years from now.”

FDR’s own Hyde Park retreat, Top Cottage, was completed in 1939 and received widespread publicity. The Dutch Colonial fieldstone design was published in Life magazine with FDR designated as the architect and Henry Toombs his associate. Some professional architects, especially Republican ones, were incensed (but not surprised) that FDR, untrained and unlicensed, dared to assume the title of architect. It was here that Roosevelt called up the Jeffersonian example of statesman-architect to justify his own adoption of the multiple roles.

His architectural enthusiasms influenced the design of the Poughkeepsie Newspaper Building (today the home of the Poughkeepsie Journal) as well as buildings beyond Dutchess County. Citizens of Ellenville in Ulster County asked the president for a post office built with local stone. He granted their wish. At Warm Springs, Ga., Roosevelt designed cottages for himself in the regional historical style, and oversaw the design and construction there of a polio treatment center. In Washington, he directed alterations to the White House and personally oversaw the design of numerous federal buildings, while sponsoring John Russell Pope’s proposal for the Jefferson Memorial.

FDR believed in continuity — no radical disruption of American democracy in the New Deal, and no overthrow of monumental classicism in Washington’s government buildings. In Dutchess County, continuity meant resurrecting the local Colonial tradition of simple, sturdy construction in fieldstone, whenever possible using stones from old stone walls. The plain shapes of the post offices and other buildings he sponsored might even teach non-architectural lessons: in 1936, he stated that “the spirit of simplicity of the homes of our ancestors is a good influence on a civilization which seems to be reverting to the more humble and honest ideals.”

William B. Rhoads is professor of art history and interim director of the Hudson Valley Study Center at the State University of New York at New Paltz.