All presidents loved America, but no president loved its actual soil, forests and mountains quite like Teddy Roosevelt.
So its fitting the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is anchored into North Dakota’s Badlands like an extension of the earth itself, its low, terrain-toned form and sweeping glass walls blending seamlessly into the dramatic, rainbow-tinted landscape.
Designed by the world-renowned Norwegian firm Snøhetta, it’s also the only presidential library where visitors can arrive by horseback.
“The reason the library is here is not because of Roosevelt’s ego. In fact, he never wanted a monument devoted to him,” Charlie Melcher, creative director of the library, told The Post.
“This land is so powerful. The Badlands are so unique, so intense, they’re like nature concentrated. But it somehow makes you feel that wonderful sense of being small — just a small particle in an infinite universe. And somehow, oddly, that’s incredibly comforting.”
That’s a far cry from other presidential building projects in the news recently — from President Obama’s widely-derided Presidential Center rising like a feudal tower from the middle of Chicago’s historic Jackson Park to President Trump’s hulking White House ballroom and proposed skyscraper in downtown Miami to serve as his library.
“Teddy Roosevelt was a naturalist. He came here to repair a broken heart. Throughout his life, the outdoors was the way that he got healthy,” Matt Briney, comms director for the library, told The Post on a recent exclusive tour of the site.
“He is also an impossible person to live up to, an epic life. One chapter of his story is more incredible than the last. And I think the point that we’re trying to make here is that you don’t have to be president of the United States to make a difference. You just need to stand up and fight for change.”
North Dakota, it turns out, would not only be a refuge for the future president but also his effigies. During the 2020 George Floyd riots, leftwing activists and zealot museum workers demanded the removal of the Theodore Roosevelt statue outside New York’s American Museum of Natural History, calling it racist for showing Roosevelt on horseback accompanied by an American Indian and African man on foot.
The activists won. Citing issues of “hierarchical composition” the museum’s board voted to remove the statue.
But sneaking it out of New York was a whole other drama. Under the cover of a frigid, January night — chosen for when marauding gangs of protestors would be less active — the 16-foot-tall, 168,000-pound granite and bronze tribute to one of America’s most beloved and unifying figures had to be bisected and squeezed through the Holland Tunnel, with just a half-inch to spare, before it embarked on a transcontinental road trip requiring permits from 17 states.
Today, the statue sits shrouded in an undisclosed, protected facility in Dickinson, North Dakota, awaiting its yet-to-be-determined permanent home somewhere on the 93-acre grounds of the library — visited Wednesday by President Trump, and opening for the first time to the public on America’s 250th Anniversary on Saturday. --->LOTS TO SEE IN THIS POST
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