Harvard Roommates Living in FDR’s Footsteps

Matthew Ferrante opened the door to his Harvard dorm room and walked into a bit of history.

Alongside the regular college fixtures -- a “Harvard Class of 2005” poster and paper lamps -- was a framed letter that a student named Franklin Delano Roosevelt had written to his parents from the room at the turn of the last century.

Ferrante and his two roommates are the first students in decades to live in the FDR suite, where the 32nd president resided during his Harvard years, 1900 to 1904.

Furnishings from the Bed Bath and Beyond store fill the rooms that were bedecked by a Paine Furniture rug and Jordan Marsh curtains in Roosevelt’s times.

The three-room suite -- which the roommates consider one of the best on campus -- takes visitors back a hundred years, with its 15-foot ceilings, an oak fireplace with Doric columns and French windows lining an entire wall. The bathroom, with its claw-foot tub and a pull-chain toilet, also hasn’t really changed since Roosevelt used it.

“It’s weird knowing that you’re sitting on the toilet where FDR sat,” said roommate Stephen Stromberg, a 19-year-old Russian studies major.

The suite was occupied by students until the late 1950s, when it was converted into a study and then into a professor’s office.

House Master Sean Palfrey had always taken a personal interest in the suite because of family connections: He is Teddy Roosevelt’s great-grandson. Due to a housing crunch, Palfrey decided to open it up to students this past summer, after the professor vacated it in the spring.

Stromberg, of Los Angeles; Ferrante, a 19-year-old sophomore from Arlington Heights, Ill., and Michael Donahue, 20, of St. Louis, were the lucky ones who landed the suite through a lottery system.

“I’m a political junkie. FDR is one of my heroes,” Stromberg said. “I definitely never expected to be living here.”

The roommates struggled at first with the century-old toilet tank that ran all day and the recently added showerhead in the bathtub that just dripped water instead of spraying.

“But then our friends look at us strange, like, ‘Why are you complaining about your bathroom, when you’re living in FDR’s room?’ ” Ferrante said. “That shuts us up, I guess.”

Some of his friends are jealous, Donahue said, and people sometimes stop him on campus to ask to see his famous suite.

An official plaque on a wall commemorates Roosevelt’s years in the rooms. Around it, Ferrante has erected a makeshift shrine of pictures of Roosevelt, wife Eleanor, Teddy Roosevelt, the “Big Three” -- FDR with Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill -- and charts showing Roosevelt’s presidential election victories in 1936 and 1944.

“We haven’t quite done the fireside chat yet,” said Ferrante, a theater enthusiast and history major, referring to Roosevelt’s presidential radio addresses. “It’s definitely on our list of things to do.”

It was probably a fluke that the framed handwritten letter from Roosevelt to his parents was left behind in the room, instead of being moved to the Harvard archives, Palfrey said.

In this pencil-written, slightly smudged letter, Roosevelt describes his first few days at Harvard, where he studied history.

“We saw many rooms but the pick was at Westmorly,” Roosevelt wrote, referring to the old name of this part of Adams House. “First floor, corner, looking on the Southwest and guess the price. $400 without extras. The floor is roughly like this,” he wrote, sketching the floor plan.

“The sitting room is large enough for two desks. The bedroom and bathroom light and airy. The ceilings are very high,” Roosevelt wrote.

Stromberg says the history in the room leaves him in awe.

“You see pictures of FDR approving the New Deal and then you think, he also wrote that letter and it hangs in our room. His hands drew that picture,” he said.

Ferrante has been given a glimpse into a different side of the legendary president.

“It’s kind of neat to see him not just as a president or historical figure, but as a student,” he said. “It’s like one of us writing to our parents.”

But their stint in FDR’s suite may be short-lived.

Palfrey said that although there are no definite plans, officials are considering preserving it as a guest room for visiting scholars.

“If there is enough space to keep this room as a guest room next year, we would do that,” Palfrey said, adding that Adams House has no guest rooms now. “It would be nice to have some flexibility to offer eminent people who want to come here, to host them in this house, maybe give talks and engage with the students.”

Stromberg thinks it is fate that he’s living in this room. Exactly a century ago, Roosevelt was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper, where Stromberg works now.

“You wonder if he was a political junkie as well. Did he have presidential aspirations in this room?”