Who said you couldn’t put Humpty-Dumpty back together again? Several day’s worth of hard work later, the Suite has emerged with its new coat of paper, remarkably transformed, looking for the first time in over a century very nearly like a Victorian room:
The study looking south
Our piano, festooned with period tunes. That's Johnny the bobcat, by the way, our mascot; beneath his sharp claws poor old Eli the quail is down for the count
The study looking north; FDR's bedroom on the left, Lathrop's center. You can just glimpse "George," Lathrop's eight-point buck through the door, named by Judith Palfrey, our master, after our Foundation's dear Father George. "The white collar says it all." Amen to that.
FDR slept here...
Lest we forget: the Suite this past February, and the same view this afternoon, August 6, 2010.
What’s next? Window treatments, and – hopefully – more generous contributions from our friends and supporters, as our coffers are again growing bare…
Wow, that wallpaper is beautiful, goes really well with the woodwork and fireplace, and takes us to yet another level. Thanks, Michael.
Sean
My earlier reply disappeared while incomplete. Please forgive any repetition. I believe that there is a reasonable probability that FDR did not live in B-17 but rather in the suite directly above it. One of his writings describes the suite as on the first story and another as up one flight. I think it’s not unlikely that he used the British usage of “first story” for the first floor above the ground floor; and that the one flight was that from the B-17 level to the one above it. I believe that the only entrance from street level on the east-west (straight) section of Bow Street at that time may have been to the basement level apartment that was occupied by Jim Cogan, Archie’s assistant janitorial supervisor in my day, and that FDR would probably never have entered the building at that level. Instead, he would have climbed the several steps to the entrance terrace on the (curved) east section and entered the building at that level, on which B-17 existed. Thus, up one flight would place him at the floor above B-17. I invited myself into both suites in June 2009 and found nothing inconsistent with this theory. My interest arises from the fact that I occupied B-16 during the 1941-1942 and 1942-1943 academic years.
Dear Emil.
The evidence for the Suite location is based on Lathrop’s Brown’s 1958 letter (you can see it here: http://fdrsuite.org/brownletter.html), though the question of the room numbering (B-17 vs 27) has never been completely resolved.