The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial You See Over There By the Tidal Basin Is Not the Original

If you scroll through the National Park Service list of national park birthdays, you’ll see a September entry that seems more than a bit odd. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, the list informs us, was established on September 1, 1959. Whoa! Can that possibly be true? The memorial to FDR was established a lot more recently than that, wasn’t it?

Indeed, a quick check of the record shows that the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial that sits on 7.5 acres of prime land near the Tidal Basin’s Cherry Tree Walk was dedicated only 11 years ago (on May 2, 1997, to be more precise).

But that heavily-visited presidential commemorative with all its wonderful statuary and reliefs in four “outdoor rooms” is not the original. The first Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial installed in our nation’s capital was only a simple plaque (see accompanying photo) attached to a marble block situated on a lawn near the corner of 9th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

The inscription, quoted verbatim here, reveals that this humble memorial is exactly what FDR wanted:

In September 1941 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called his friend, Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter, to the White House and asked the justice to remember the wish he then expressed. “If any memorial is erected to me, I know exactly what I should like it to be. I should like it to consist of a block about the size of this (putting his hand on his desk) and placed in the center of that green plot in front of the Archives building. I don’t care what it is made of, whether of limestone or granite or whatnot, but I want it plain without any ornamentation, with the simple carving ‘n memory of ____________’ ”....