FDR Memorial’s Designer Open to Wheelchair Idea

The designer of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial said Thursday that he will include a depiction of FDR in a wheelchair as long as it fits with the spirit of the design.

“I’m not obsessed on this issue,” said Lawrence Halprin, the San Francisco landscape architect who has been working on the memorial on and off for 20 years.

Others, however, were. Several advocacy groups of disabled people had planned a protest at the 7.5-acre memorial next week, when President Clinton dedicates it. Discussions at the White House resulted in an announcement Wednesday that the president would send legislation to Congress to modify the design.

“This is a democracy,” said Halprin in a telephone interview. “If it is decided for some reason that we didn’t adequately cover what needed to be covered and, if by any chance, the Congress asks us to examine a possibility of doing it, that’s OK.”

Any change, however, “should come within the context of the memorial,” Halprin said.

The visitor to the nearly completed site walks through four outdoor rooms, each representing one of Roosevelt’s terms.

Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down from a polio attack in 1921. He was unable to stand unaided, yet he masked his disability to the point where only two photographs showing him in a wheelchair are known to exist.

One of those pictures, along with an exact replica of the chair, will be displayed in the entry building to the memorial. And a timeline of FDR’s life, in the last room, mentions his being paralyzed.