List of Tables
The Kennedy National Historic Site in Brookline, Massachusetts preserves and. explains the birthplace of the nation's 35th president in 1917. The first was to place Joe and Rose Kennedy in the Beals Street neighborhood of Brooklyn to provide a better understanding of the spheres in which members of the Kennedy family lived, worked, and played. The second was to analyze the significance of the establishment of the city as a memorial to the recently assassinated president.
Kennedy's birthplace is both a product of the larger conservation movement and a very personal expression of the president's mother.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The fourth chapter follows the history of the creation of the memorial site, and places it in the. Chapter One examines the development of the house, neighborhood and town where the Kennedys settled. Boston stimulated real estate and commercial development of the Coolidge Corner area where the Kennedys lived.
The chapter also outlines the role the public has played in defining the meaning of the John F.
Home, Hometown, and Urbanism
Brookline, Coolidge Corner, and the Neighborhood
The chapter begins by tracing the history of the town of Brookline to the time when the Kennedys arrived. Urban growth in the Coolidge Corner area in turn led to the building of the house, which the Kennedys purchased in 1914. Real estate development in the Coolidge Corner area encouraged the sale of the George Babcock farm to James M.
Brookline Village, in the northeastern part of the town of Brookline, was the earliest neighborhood to be densely settled. Gradually, streets were laid out in the area between Brookline Village and the Charles River at the city's northern limits. Mary's of the Assumption, built in the densely populated Brookline Village in the mid-nineteenth century; St.
The Social Identities of Rose Fitzgerald and Joseph Kennedy
Their grandparents had risen from the ranks of the Irish working class to achieve modest prosperity. Likewise, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Irish spanned the economic and social spectrum. Fitzgerald also became a local historian and became a guide for tourists through the historic sites of the North End.97.
Josie Hannon was the daughter of cousins with whom Thomas Fitzgerald had farmed upon his arrival in America before joining his immediate family in the North End of Boston. They were wonderful years, full of the traditional pleasures and satisfactions of small-town New England life. She was the youngest member of the public library's research committee (which recommended books for children) and a member of a number of clubs.
Kennedy's persistence in trying to join the board of the Massachusetts Electric Company would pay off in several ways. It is one of the most popular Republican clubs in the United States.” The names of the various officers of the club were listed on the letterhead. A closer look at the club's membership, however, may help provide some clues to Kennedy's acceptance of the invitation to join the club.
The most intriguing piece of possible evidence is the presence of prominent Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge as one of the club's officers. As historian Peter Eisinger has noted, many of the Brahmin community in Boston radically changed their views of the Irish.
The Brookline Years
The effect of the house was outwardly not unpleasant, so formal and artificial as a doll's house. A number of biographers have noted as particularly significant in relation to the couple's choice of neighborhood, however, was that the town of Brookline was an exclusive, Protestant suburb of Boston. Indeed, one should not make too much of the selection of Brookline as an upper-crust Protestant enclave.
Most of us took the trolley cars or ... the subways.”168 The Kennedy family probably parked their car at one of those. They didn't pay attention to anyone, just to the service.''170 Rose especially emphasized the children's religious education. It was a house much more in the grand style that the home Rose Kennedy had known as a young girl on Welles Avenue reflected.
Fitzgerald and Joseph Kennedy in the 1910s and 1920s were not only complex but also in tension with the social realities of the time. Unyieldingly ambitious, Joseph Kennedy for a time sought to become President of the United States, and when he saw that he could not achieve it, he transferred these aspirations to his sons. At the same time, both Kennedys identified with sections of society that did not belong to the legacy of the Anglo-Protestant elite.
Irish heritage and therefore thought of themselves as part of the populous ethno-national category known as Irish-Americans. However, the Kennedys' social background and their aspirations to enter the upper ranks of American society brought them into conflict with the establishment of the Protestant elite.
Kennedy Family Life and the American Home
The size of the average middle-class home became smaller than in the nineteenth century, and the types and functions of rooms within the home changed. The arrangement and use of the rooms at the Kennedys. home in Brookline reflects some of these changes. At the same time, the Kennedys also maintained certain characteristics of the American house that appeared in the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth century.
The shrinking size of the standard middle-class home was in large part related to the rise in the costs of building materials and labor in the early twentieth century. The drawing room in American homes in particular underwent a major transition at the beginning of the twentieth century. For an example of Joseph Kennedy's use of the term 'salon', see below in this chapter, Joseph P.'s other activities in the house - and also out of sight.
The most private spaces in the house were the bedrooms, isolated from the public, family and work spaces on the first floor by the house's floor plan. As a leader of activities in the home, a woman was expected to be an uplifting influence. In the case of the Kennedys, it was true that I had the most influence on them when they were young.”185.
Although no local pharmacies were noted on the cards (others in Palm Beach and New York were noted), several of the children received the "Schick test" (for susceptibility to diphtheria, developed in 1916). Of course, recreational vacations were hardly unique to the Kennedys; they were an important part of middle class life.
John F. Kennedy National Historic Site
Unlike the Kennedy Library, the Beals Street house is a historic site directly related to the lives of the Kennedys. The behavior of the public, even if independent of the approach encouraged by Rose Kennedy or the National Park Service, is a testament to the popular appeal of Kennedy's hometown. In fact, as Hosmer writes, the house became a new shrine dedicated to the memory of the late president.
At the same time, the National Park Service became interested in the disposition of the house, no doubt to see if it could acquire the property. In March 1967, if not earlier, she decided to give the restored house to the National Park Service after the restoration was complete. Although members of the public had begun to treat 83 Beals Street as a memorial to John F.
The restoration of the Kennedy birthplace provides a number of examples of later perspectives influencing Rose Kennedy's memories. Kennedy, probably understood better than anyone her needs and wishes regarding the renovation of the house. In the cases of the presidential birthplaces reviewed here, the government hardly exercised hegemony.
Far from dictating, the National Park Service was beholden to private groups most of the time. So, as in the beginning, the public, along with Rose Kennedy and the National Park Service, helped define the significance of the birthplace.
Occupational Categories
Report on Status of Collections John F. Kennedy National Historic Site
The Kennedy/Luddington Restoration Methodology
Kennedy's papers indicate her association with Robert Luddington dating back to at least 1961.329 In writing to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, Mrs. Onassis' influence on the site's interpretation is known, and how this may or may not have influenced Rose Kennedy's interior design decisions ((current Supervisory Park Ranger Christine Arato has asked question whether the prominence given to King Arthur and his knights in the nursery may have to do with Mrs. Onassis's preaching of the Camelot myth.) No records exist at the Harpers Ferry Center of the editing history of the tour manuscript.
This is further confirmed by a letter found among US Regional Director Rose Kennedy's papers. Of the items in the wedding log furniture list, the Ivers & Pond piano is the only clearly recognizable piece now in the hometown museum collection. The inclusion of the piano and the omission of a victrola in the reinstallation illustrate the selectivity of her memory.
However, the family's Irish roots are clearly visible, albeit subtly, in the shamrock motifs of the lace baby cap, the framed pen, the gilt cutlery and the embroidered bed cover. Foy and Karel Ann Marling (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1994) for a discussion of the piano as a symbol of women's moral role in the domestic sphere of the home. Kennedy's renovation was to recreate the house "as it was at the time of the birth of the 35th.
Kennedy continued to oversee the reproduction of the embroidered Irish bedspreads for the master bedroom, and that the existing reproduction bedspread in the guest bedroom would also be replaced once the current reproduction work was completed per the Mrs. Kennedy National Historic Site Collections Management Plan (Boston, MA: Northeast Museum Services Center, National Park Service, 1999) for a timeline of the opening process.
Collecting After NPS Ownership
In 1967, the treatment of the third floor was still being determined: “I didn't do anything up there. It was suggested that we might duplicate some different things to post here.
