A shrine is set up to honor president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Class of 1904, in his former room. For the first time in decades, his old room houses students in Adams House.

When three Canaday Hall residents were assigned to Adams House last year, they did not realize that they would be living in a bonafide presidential suite.

The sophomores became the first rooming group in decades to occupy the room of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Class of 1904—and they found the room almost as it was at the turn of the century.

Matthew J. Ferrante ’05 has erected a shrine to the president in the common room next to a plaque commemorating FDR’s residence in Adams B-17 from 1900 to 1904.

The shrine has pictures from FDR’s inaugurations as well as a framed letter to his mother that Roosevelt wrote as a student.

Adams House administrators also decided to leave the students with many of the room’s original furnishings.

The French windows that open out into the street distinguish the room from others in Adams House.

The room also has 15-foot ceilings and an oak fireplace with Doric columns.

“The ceiling is so high that when I sleep on the top bunk, it feels like I am on a normal bed,” says Stephen W. Stromberg ’05, who is also a Crimson editor.

But the room’s most distinguishing trait is its bathroom.

Frozen in time, the toilet is a chain-pull model with a tank above the bowl that works through gravity.

“We didn’t know how to pull the chain at first, so the first few times, it sounded like a tornado,” Donahue says. “You couldn’t even talk on a cell phone in the next room because it was so loud.”

The toilet is the same one that Roosevelt used in 1904.

So is the clawfoot tub, which had a faucet but no shower attachment for the first month of school.

The room’s residents were told that a shower attachment would be installed over the summer, but it was not, and the students were forced to shower in an unoccupied C-entryway bathroom for a month.

“It’s like summer camp again. Every morning had its own private huddle to the bathroom,” says Michael M. Donahue ’05.