[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 79 (Monday, June 9, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Page S5428]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      IN HONOR OF ROGER G. KENNEDY

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. I wish to pay tribute to Roger G. Kennedy upon 
his retirement as director of the National Park Service and for a 
distinguished public service career as director of the Smithsonian 
National Museum of American History, vice president of the Ford 
Foundation, and special assistant, variously, to the U.S. Attorney 
General, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, and the 
Secretary of Labor. Mr. Kennedy will be honored at a grand celebration 
in New York's historic Battery Park tonight and I deeply regret that 
the press of Senate business prevents me from attending.
  Roger Kennedy is a man of enlightenment tastes. He has been a lawyer, 
a scholar, a writer, a public servant of the first rank, but his 
avocation has always been architectural history. In Orders From France, 
his masterpiece on architecture, Kennedy wrote brilliantly about the 
career of Joseph Jacques Ramee, the French architect who was trained at 
the court of Louis XVI and designed buildings all over Europe, but 
helped pave the way for American neoclassicism.
  In 1815, Ramee designed the magnificent campus of Union College in 
Schenectady, N.Y., one of the Nation's first liberal-arts colleges west 
of the Hudson River. Ramee's campus plan embodied a vision of education 
that entwined rationalism with the laws of nature--an ordered court 
opening to a romantically landscaped garden and the endless view to the 
west. Kennedy wrote that Ramee ``placed his buildings in the context of 
nature, but nature tamed, organized, made orderly, like the energies of 
students.'' A decade later the Union College campus, the first in the 
Nation to have a rotunda at its center, become the model for Thomas 
Jefferson and Benjamin Latrobe to design the glorious University of 
Virginia in Charlottesville.
  Given Roger Kennedy's interest in Ramee, a man with both an 
architectural and educational vision, it is most fitting that we should 
honor him at Battery Park, the site of the Castle Clinton National 
Monument, one of the National Park Service's most important historical, 
cultural, and educational sites. The park is visited by over 3 million 
people a year who come to marvel at its spectacular views of New York's 
harbor, the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island, and drink of its rich 
history.
  For Battery Park's history fascinates. Fort Amsterdam was built by 
the Dutch on the site in 1626 and surrendered to the British in 1664, 
and subsequently renamed Fort George. In 1783, the British colors at 
Fort George were hauled down, marking the beginning of American rule. 
Fort George was subsequently demolished, its rubble added to the 
Manhattan shoreline. By 1811, a sturdy red sandstone fort--later named 
Castle Clinton--was erected.
  Castle Clinton served as everything but a military facility. It was 
first an entertainment center for concerts and theater. P.T. Barnum 
staged the American debut of Jenny Lind--the ``Swedish Nightingale''--
there in 1850. It then served as an immigration processing center, 
welcoming over 8 million immigrants from 1855 to 1889, prior to the 
opening of Ellis Island. In 1896, Castle Clinton reopened again as the 
first American aquarium, designed by the distinguished architectural 
firm of McKim, Mead & White. Castle Clinton and its aquarium were then 
partially dismantled in the 1940's, costing New York one of its most 
treasured venues for cultural and educational enrichment.
  In 1946, Congress established the Castle Clinton National Monument to 
be administered by the National Park Service. In 1991, I incorporated 
into the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act an 
authorization of $2 million for the reconstruction of the Battery's 
seawall and promenade. I hoped those funds would serve as a catalyst to 
begin redeveloping Battery Park and implementing a master plan to 
address the Battery's needs for the 21st century. With his commitment 
to history and ``teaching the public through place,'' Roger Kennedy has 
helped spur that plan, working closely with the Conservancy for 
Historic Battery Park and its energetic and dedicated president, Warrie 
Price.
  I know that through his books, documentaries, and dedication to 
projects such as Battery Park, my friend Roger Kennedy shall continue 
to educate, inspire, and delight future students of American history, 
culture, and architecture. I wish him well at his gala tonight and for 
all the many years to come.

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