FDR Hope Memorial

Blackwell's Island, purchased by the City of New York in 1828 for charitable and corrective institutions, became the site of the penitentiary, the New York City Asylum for the Insane, the Smallpox Hospital, Charity Hospital, and the work-house before being renamed Welfare Island in 1921 and Roosevelt Island in 1973. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, born in 1882 in Hyde Park, New York, married Anna Eleanor Roosevelt in 1905, was elected to the New York State Senate in 1910, contracted polio in 1921 and never regained use of his legs, formed the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation for Polio Rehabilitation in 1927, was elected Governor of New York in 1928 and President of the United States in 1932, was re-elected in 1936, 1940, and 1944, led the United States during World War II, envisioned the United Nations, and died in 1945 at Warm Springs, Georgia. Against the wider history of polio, from the first known United States epidemic in 1894 to the severe New York City epidemic of 1916, the first patient saved by the newly invented iron lung in 1929, the Birthday Ball fundraisers for polio care and research beginning in 1934, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis announced by Roosevelt in 1937, polio cases in the United States peaking at over 57,000 in 1952, and Dr. Jonas Salk developing a polio vaccine in 1953, the island's Goldwater Hospital, opened in 1939, became a leader in care for paralyzed polio patients. In later years, Goldwater Hospital patients joined the residential community in accessible apartments in 1976, the Americans with Disabilities Act became law in 1990, FDR Four Freedoms Park opened at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in 2012, Goldwater Hospital was decommissioned and demolished in 2013, and in 2020 the FDR Hope Memorial opened as the World Health Organization announced polio is eradicated globally and communities are called to become more accessible, inclusive, and welcoming.

New York, New York · United States