The Fund for Roosevelt is supporting the project to renovate the FDR memorial and amphitheater with a major fund-raising campaign to offset the Borough’s costs and the cost to taxpayers. In addition to the support we have already provided to the Borough ($88,700), we have obtained over $170,000 in donations and pledges and look forward to even more support from the community of Roosevelt , including current and former residents and all friends and fans of Roosevelt.
The Story of the FDR Memorial Amphitheater
On April 15, 1945, the artist Ben Shahn and other Roosevelt residents went to Trenton to watch President Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral train pass by on its way from Washington to Hyde Park. “That very evening,” his neighbor Ed Rosskam wrote, “Ben started working on plans for a memorial to the dead president. He wanted it built in the open field near the school.” It didn’t happen right away, but with the impetus of the borough’s twenty-fifth anniversary, it began to take shape and came into being seventeen years later.
Shahn was the driving force behind creating the FDR memorial amphitheater. He recruited Bert Ellentuck, a young architect who’d recently moved to town, to design the memorial and his son Jonathan Shahn to sculpt the monumental bronze head of FDR that greets visitors well before they actually arrive at the amphitheater. And, as Rosskam wrote, after first getting Borough Council to set aside one thousand dollars for the project, he “went out of town and clubbed his affluent friends, collectors of his work, and such public figures as were indebted to him or the New Deal into giving more than they had any idea of giving.” The largest contributor was Dore Schary, author of the acclaimed 1957 play about FDR Sunrise at Campobello, who gave $6,000, the equivalent of nearly $65,000 today.
While firm cost figures are hard to find, estimates are that the total cost of the memorial was around $25,000, or about $270,000 today. The construction and landscaping were done by local residents, including then-mayor Irving Plungian. Work was either done at cost or donated.
The FDR memorial was dedicated on June 3, 1962, in what may be the most memorable day in our community’s history. Described in one press account as “believed to be the only memorial to the World War II president except for his home at Hyde Park,” the dedication was a national event. On a beautiful sunny day, an overflowing crowd of two thousand gathered for the event, which was covered by national TV networks and made the front page of The New York Times.
At the head of the list of dignitaries at the dedication was Eleanor Roosevelt, in one of her last public appearances. Roosevelt, who died only six months later, told the thousands assembled that “what we should want to commemorate is that he cared about people and that he had the courage to experiment.” In addition to Roosevelt, prominent attendees included Adlai Stevenson, then Ambassador to the United Nations, Governor Richard Hughes, and actress Anne Bancroft, who read excerpts from some of President Roosevelt’s Depression-era speeches. The Asbury Park Press wrote that “the memorial is expected to become a national shrine.”
