Theodore Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill Home Cries ‘Bully!’ (original) (raw)
Art & Design|Theodore Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill Home Cries ‘Bully!’
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Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt’s family home, sits on 83 acres on Long Island. After a three-and-a-half-year restoration, the house reopens on Sunday.Credit...Byron Smith for The New York Times
- July 9, 2015
COVE NECK, N.Y. — The big house has been a pretty lonely place for a while now. It has been three and a half years since the public has been able to walk through Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt’s sprawling family home near Oyster Bay on the North Shore of Long Island. In December 2011 the doors closed, most of the artifacts were shipped out and crews of workers moved in for a $10 million restoration. Strollers on the grounds have been able to sit on its big front porch or press their noses to the windows, but the house itself has been locked up tight.
That changes on Sunday, when the National Park Service, manager of the property, throws open the doors, celebrating the event with the kind of reopening ceremony that Teddy would relish.
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Roosevelt’s Rough Rider hat hangs at Sagamore Hill.Credit...Byron Smith for The New York Times
There will be a 25-piece band playing patriotic marches and period tunes. There will be pony rides and animals to pet. There will be Rough Riders giving a cavalry demonstration. There will be bunting and there will be oratory, with two Roosevelt descendants on hand to deliver remarks: Theodore Roosevelt IV, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt Jr., and Tweed Roosevelt, grandson of Archie, the president’s second-youngest child.
But above all there will be the house, open for business and revitalized, an enticing day trip for history buffs, nature lovers or real estate voyeurs. Visitors, who may tour only the first floor on opening day, will see few big changes. One of the great virtues of Sagamore Hill is that it stayed in family hands from the time it was built in 1886 until the 1950s, when the nonprofit Theodore Roosevelt Association took it over. In 1963, the association presented the house, and the 83 acres surrounding it, to the American people, and the Park Service has managed it ever since.
With so few owners, the house has remained more or less intact. Its 23 rooms retain their original furnishings and knickknacks and the profusion of stuffed animal heads, bear rugs, weird furniture and miles of books that Roosevelt amassed and displayed with no particular sense of order or design. It is an exuberant, extroverted house. It is most emphatically a family house, a place where children ran wild and Roosevelt, in some ways an overgrown child himself, expressed every facet of his outsize personality. For house snoopers, it is a trove. There is a lot to look at.
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