Natural feature
Theodore Roosevelt Island
Granite memorial plaza with a bronze presidential statue, twenty-one-foot inscribed stelae, and a moat once fed by dry fountains.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.