Residence 1
📍Springwood, 4097 Albany Post Road, Hyde Park, NY 12538, USA
1882 – 1945“I was born on the 30th of January 1882 at Springwood, the family estate at Hyde Park on the Hudson River in New York, the only child of James Roosevelt and Sara Delano. Springwood was my home for the whole of my life — I was born here, I brought Eleanor here, I raised my children here, and I returned here between every presidency and crisis. The Hudson Valley landscape — the river, the woods, the broad fields, the distant Catskills — gave me the visual world I carried everywhere. My mother Sara was a formidable woman who managed Springwood and managed me with equal confidence. The childhood was privileged and somewhat isolated — I had tutors rather than schoolmates — and it produced a man who was comfortable with power in ways that only those who grew up near it can be.”
👍 LovedThe Hudson River Valley landscape — the river light and the changing seasons that I never stopped finding restorative. Springwood's combination of family warmth and social confidence. The library that gave me the reading habit that sustained the presidency.
👎 DislikedMy mother's possessiveness that complicated my marriage to Eleanor. The polio that struck me at thirty-nine and permanently changed the physical conditions of my life. The isolating privilege of a childhood without peers.
🗺️ Approximate location today
🛰️ Satellite view · © Google
Sources: Goodwin, D.K. No Ordinary Time (1994), Simon & Schuster; Burns, J. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (1956), Harcourt
Residence 2
📍1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, United States
1933 – 1945“I moved into the White House in 1933 with a country in ruins and the deliberate intention of making this building feel like a working government again. We converted rooms into offices, added a swimming pool for my rehabilitation, and turned the Map Room into a war operations centre once the conflict began. Eleanor used the house differently than any First Lady before her — she held press conferences, conducted her own correspondence, pushed causes the house had never before entertained. I gave my fireside radio addresses from here and imagined Americans gathered around their sets listening, which steadied me on the hardest nights. Twelve years is long enough to know a building intimately. I knew where every draught came in, which floorboards announced visitors, which rooms absorbed grief and which ones seemed to resist it. I did not die here, but I gave everything I had to the work done here.”
👍 LovedThe sense of purpose that the office demanded, the Map Room where strategy became real, and the knowledge that the decisions made here were bending the arc of history.
👎 DislikedThe isolation that comes with the presidency — the way the building separates you from ordinary life until you can barely remember what ordinary life felt like.
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: FDR's White House years are documented in Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time (1994) and Jean Edward Smith's FDR (2007).
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