Hyde Park and Poughkeepsie

We (me, Mark, The Child, Joe, V, and Melissa) drove about an hour from Grandma Mary’s house to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park and visited the museum and presidential library there.

The old home is about 150 years old.   Mark described it as upper middle class, but not gilded.

What I liked the most were the textiles in the house:  the tatted table-cloths, the curtains, and the upholstery.  

The house felt like a great house on the ground floor with its entry hall, large dining rooms, and grand hall.  

Upstairs felt more like a country house with various bedrooms — I’m thinking it was just a little bit like the house in Astoria my grandmother was a child in; grander, yes, but still kind of homespun and without electricity.

 Everyone liked the horse stalls.

 The sitting room.

 The entry hall looking toward the sitting room.

A fainting couch upstairs.

Another bedroom.

The narrative of the museum was “FDR, the Great Man.”  There were a couple of times where the staff (or placards) declared that FDR had “single handedly” done this or that (we were pretty sure that Congress or the voters or the Judicial Branch had a hand in a lot of the great things that FDR proposed or started).

The funniest thing we saw was a giant Sphinx in the likeness of FDR that someone made for a Gridiron Roast.  This was a spin-off of a cartoon commentary on FDR’s “mysterious as a sphinx” stance on the question of his running for a third presidential term.   Apparently FDR liked it so much that he told its creator to ship it to the library.   Later, when Melissa told The Child she’d buy him whatever he’d like from the Gift Shop, he chose a replica of the FDR Sphinx.

The museum was huge, and we could have easily spent the entire day there learning things about American life in the first half of the 20th century.   It was only after we’d left that I learned there was an enigma machine there!



Afterward, we walked around Poughkeepsie (Poughkeepsie is my new favorite word because it doesn't sound the way you'd think it would) and attempted to perambulate over the Bridge Across the River.  Just as we arrived, they closed it because of thunder and lightning, so we had to go in search of Italian Sorbet.  Which took a while.  In the sun.

Eventually, we did manage to get onto the bridge and walk over the rooftops of the rentals and houses we’d walked under only an hour earlier.  The bridge started about six blocks away from the river’s shore, and was easily five stories above the train tracks following the contour of the Hudson.