Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park

The idea of a Roosevelt memorial in New York began in 1970, when the Four Freedoms Foundation opened discussions with the City and the State. The site is the southern tip of an island the City had bought in 1828, as Blackwell's Island, for prisons and hospitals; it was renamed Welfare Island in 1921 and Roosevelt Island on 24 September 1973. In a December 1972 report to the State's Urban Development Corporation, William Walton, who had chaired the United States Commission of Fine Arts from 1963 to 1971, recommended Louis Kahn. Kahn received the commission early in 1973 and signed a contract with the State corporation; on the day the island was renamed, an early model of his design was shown.

In January 1974 Kahn's firm sent a final, approved design to New York. Kahn died on 17 March, aged seventy-three, of a heart attack while passing through Pennsylvania Station; he was carrying a drawing of the finished design in his briefcase. In 1975 the city's fiscal crisis put the memorial on hold. In 1981 Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan reintroduced in Congress a bill for a national memorial to be built on the island according to Kahn's plans, and in 1985 Governor Mario Cuomo set up a commission to assess whether the design could be realised; the project did not move forward. In 1994 the site was cleared, graded, sculpted and compacted to the specifications of Kahn's design, but a lack of funds kept the memorial from being completed; developers then put forward a plan for a hotel and conference centre on the public land.

In 2005 an exhibition at Cooper Union revived the project: Ambassador William vanden Heuvel announced that the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, which he had founded and chaired, would work to raise the funds to build the park as Kahn had designed it. A company, Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, LLC, was set up in 2008 for that purpose. When construction began on 29 March 2010 it had gathered $35 million toward an expected cost of $50 million, from city and state funds, a first grant from the Reed Foundation, and a gift of $10 million from Alphawood. Building took two and a half years, in three phases: the Room, then the Garden, then the monumental stair and the copper beech trees at the entrance. The park, completed in September 2012 on schedule and on budget, was dedicated on 17 October 2012 with President Bill Clinton, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg taking part, and the Governor designated it a New York State park at the ceremony. It opened to the public on 24 October.

Kahn explained his starting point in a lecture at the Pratt Institute in 1973: his only starting point was the idea of a memorial as "a room and a garden". For him the garden is a personal nature, "a gathering of nature"; the room is "the beginning of architecture", an extension of self.

The site is a triangle at the southern tip of the island. The design makes use of it by emphasising it: a forced perspective draws the visitor's gaze towards Roosevelt's colossal head, placed where the "Room" begins. An entry stair a hundred feet (about thirty metres) wide, a triangular central lawn, two rows of linden trees and angled walls lead to that room, enclosed on three sides by rectangular granite columns of thirty-six tons. There one reads an inscription from the Four Freedoms speech and looks out over the East River towards the United Nations and the skyline of Manhattan.

A naval theme runs through the design: the park is symmetrical, and its construction drawings take their dimensions from a centreline, the practice of ship designers. In a sketch of an earlier scheme, a floating structure, something like a tug and barge, sits against the city skyline; in its final form the park acts as the prow of the island's "boat".

All the granite in the park comes from Mount Airy, North Carolina. Each solid block in the Room is six feet by six by twelve (about 1.8 by 1.8 by 3.7 metres) and weighs thirty-six tons; trucked to New Jersey, they reached the site by barge. The Room is made of 190 stones, seventy of them monumental in size. The columns were set with a one-inch slot between each stone, and the slabs of the east and west embankments were set by hand on a thirty-two-degree slope. For the edge of the island Kahn specified riprap made of the island's own granite gneiss. The inscription of the 1941 speech, in V-cut letters, was laid out by the John Stevens Shop of Newport, Rhode Island, and carved by hand on site. The park is planted with 120 littleleaf lindens and five copper beeches, the lindens planted at fifteen to eighteen years of age and the beeches at thirty.

The park is a public memorial and a New York State park at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. Its name comes from the speech Roosevelt gave on 6 January 1941, describing a world founded on four essential freedoms: to speak and express oneself, to worship, and to be free from want and from fear.

The Four Freedoms Park Conservancy, a non-profit organization established in June 2011, runs the park's programmes on behalf of New Yorkers, together with the State's parks and historic preservation office.

The park is closed on Tuesdays, on Christmas Day and on New Year's Eve; entry is free. It is a fifteen-minute walk south of the Roosevelt Island subway station. An independently operable platform lift serves the grand stair.