Pictured in this photograph is a lovely home that sat, still but no longer, on the shore of leafy fashionable Union Square. The fashion tells you it was taken some time ago. The fashion’s dark palette may further indicate the mood—the kind of national grief our country had not yet encountered.
This was the day lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed, the day the cortège winding its way from Washington DC to Springfield, Illinois and bearing the catafalque of the the first US President to be assassinated found itself in New York City. It found itself amid the hushed, cowed, war-addled, grief-stricken crowds lining its route here in lower Manhattan. It found itself under the window of a terrified six year old little boy.
He sits here above the red arrow indicating his presence, the first US President to have witnessed the funeral of one of his predecessors.
Theodore Roosevelt was the first from his storied wealthy Dutch merchant-class old American monied family tree to fall from the family business and, oddly, up, up into the heights of public service. We owe so much to him and the legacy his family left us, here in NYC, in these United States, and in the world at large. One wonders how much of that legacy can be traced directly to this very solemn shocking moment captured arbitrarily in one of the world’s very first photographs.
