Sophomores Living It Up, Presidential Style

When three Canaday Hall residents were assigned to Adams House last year, they did not realize that they would be living in a bonafide presidential suite.

The sophomores became the first rooming group in decades to occupy the room of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Class of 1904—and they found the room almost as it was at the turn of the century.

Matthew J. Ferrante ’05 has erected a shrine to the president in the common room next to a plaque commemorating FDR’s residence in Adams B-17 from 1900 to 1904.

The shrine has pictures from FDR’s inaugurations as well as a framed letter to his mother that Roosevelt wrote as a student.

Adams House administrators also decided to leave the students with many of the room’s original furnishings.

The French windows that open out into the street distinguish the room from others in Adams House.

The room also has 15-foot ceilings and an oak fireplace with Doric columns.

“The ceiling is so high that when I sleep on the top bunk, it feels like I am on a normal bed,” says Stephen W. Stromberg ’05, who is also a Crimson editor.

But the room’s most distinguishing trait is its bathroom.

Frozen in time, the toilet is a chain-pull model with a tank above the bowl that works through gravity.

“We didn’t know how to pull the chain at first, so the first few times, it sounded like a tornado,” Donahue says. “You couldn’t even talk on a cell phone in the next room because it was so loud.”

The toilet is the same one that Roosevelt used in 1904.

So is the clawfoot tub, which had a faucet but no shower attachment for the first month of school.

The room’s residents were told that a shower attachment would be installed over the summer, but it was not, and the students were forced to shower in an unoccupied C-entryway bathroom for a month.

“It’s like summer camp again. Every morning had its own private huddle to the bathroom,” says Michael M. Donahue ’05.

The roommates say their tub troubles did not end when the House finally installed a showerhead.

“It was horrible,” Stromberg says. “There was no pressure and the water just dripped onto us.”

Stromberg says he went to Dickson Brothers’ Hardware Store in the Square and purchased both a showerhead to fix the water pressure problem and a shower curtain.

But its residents forgive the room its shortcomings.

“It’s quite a change, we’re very lucky,” Donahue says. “It is very beautiful and special.”

Adams House Master Sean Palfrey said the room was opened for the first time to students because of a space crunch in the House and because Agee Professor of Social Ethics Robert Coles had moved out.

“In the old style, professors frequently had offices in Houses and used them for office hours or seminar,” Palfrey said.

The room was the last in Adams House to be used by a professor as an office, and Palfrey decided to make it a student residence this summer.

Juniors and seniors were unable to apply for the room because they had already completed the lottery process by the time the room was made available.

So the housing tutor circulated an e-mail to all rising sophomores over the summer and asked that all interested rooming groups reply to participate in a lottery.

Palfrey says the sophomores currently living in the suite may also gain the distinction of being the last students to occupy the room.

“We are considering preserving the room as a Roosevelt room for the use of Adams affiliates or visiting scholars,” Palfrey says.

Palfrey is himself a part of the Roosevelt family and has taken special interest in the FDR suite. Theodore Roosevelt, Class of 1880, is Palfrey’s great-grandfather.

Palfrey owns a great deal of Roosevelt memorabilia.

“Teddy’s crib is in the third floor of my residence. I slept in it as a child, my children slept in it,” he says, “and hopefully my children’s children will sleep in this heirloom.”

—Staff writer Maria S. Pedroza can be reached at mpedroza@fas.harvard.edu.