Theodore Roosevelt Island

This guide to Theodore Roosevelt Island in Washington, D.C. opens with a question about the plaza's dry, cracked fountains, then works back through the memorial's slow thirty-six-year build. You'll hear how the island was replanted with twenty thousand trees under Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.'s firm, and how sculptor Paul Manship cast Roosevelt mid-speech without his glasses so the likeness would read from a distance. Granite slabs around the plaza carry different threads of Roosevelt's own words, on nature, youth, and manhood.