Education: Hunter's New House

• Share

Last week one more Roosevelt shrine was preserved for posterity. The old five-story town house in Manhattan's East 65th Street, where Franklin Roosevelt went in 1921 to fight his way back from his crippling illness, and where in 1932 he heard the returns that elected him President, became a part of Hunter College (New York City's municipal college for women, three blocks away). Some arch-Republicans were instrumental in creating this memorial.

At Hunter's commencement last week, where Eleanor Roosevelt was a speaker, a group of 33 prominent citizens, who had raised $50,000 to buy Franklin Roosevelt's house and his mother's next door (assessed value of both: $139,000) presented the two buildings to the college as a community house. It will serve primarily as a home for students' Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clubs and will be called the Sara Delano Roosevelt Interfaith House.