Famous resident

John F. Kennedy

World leaders US presidents 📍 Washington, D.C.📍 United States 📍 Boston

2 known residences on record

Residence 1

📍83 Beals Street, Brookline, MA 02446, USA

1917 – 1921

“I was born on the 29th of May 1917 at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, the second child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. The Beals Street house was a modest, comfortable frame house in a prosperous Boston suburb — my father had recently moved us there as his business was beginning to succeed. I was born in the master bedroom on the second floor. The family moved to a larger house nearby when I was four, then to Bronxville when I was ten. The Brookline childhood was short, but the Kennedy household's values were already fully formed: the competitive dinner-table conversation, the Catholic faith, the expectation that public service was the natural destination of a Kennedy son. My father wanted his boys to be senators and presidents. I was the second son. The first was Joe.”

👍 LovedThe close Kennedy family life and the high expectations that arrived with it. The Brookline neighbourhood's comfortable New England solidity. The competitive drive that my father required and that I found I had naturally.

👎 DislikedThe sickly childhood that was a constant undercurrent in a family that prized physical toughness. The shadow of my older brother Joe's precedence. The sense that my father's ambitions for his children were not entirely about the children.

Map showing where John F. Kennedy lived — 83 Beals Street, Brookline, MA 02446, USA

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of John F. Kennedy's home at 83 Beals Street, Brookline, MA 02446, USA

📍 Street view today

Sources: Dallek, R. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (2003), Little, Brown; Hamilton, N. JFK: Reckless Youth (1992), Random House

Residence 2

📍1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, United States

1961 – 1963

“Jackie transformed the White House in the first months we lived here — she treated it as what it actually was, the most important house in America, and she believed it should look like it. The restoration project she led brought it back to something genuinely beautiful. I used the house differently. I paced, I read, I held the Executive Committee meetings during the Cuban Missile Crisis in rooms just down the hall from where my children were sleeping, trying not to let what I knew show on my face when I walked past their bedrooms. The thirteen days of October 1962 were the most concentrated experience of my life — the world came closer to ending than it has ever come since, and the decisions that pulled it back were made here, in this building, by a small group of men in shirtsleeves around a long table.”

👍 LovedThe children's laughter in the corridors, the extraordinary access to the best minds in the country, and the genuine belief that government could be made to work beautifully.

👎 DislikedThe impossibility of privacy, and the knowledge that the world was watching every move made here with a scrutiny that left no room for doubt.