FDR Memorial Exists at Hunter College - No Need for Louis Kahn Memorial at Southpoint Park, Roosevelt Island

According to this NY Times City Room article, Council Member Jessica Lappin supports the Louis Kahn memorial at Roosevelt Island's Southpoint Park, because:

...the memorial would “attract people who would otherwise not be interested in Roosevelt Island, because of the F.D.R. piece and the Kahn piece.” But she said there was an even more compelling reason to build it.
“There should be a memorial to F.D.R. in New York,” she said. Besides the F.D.R. Drive.

Well there is a more fitting place for a FDR memorial already in existence right here in NYC and, I believe, it is in Ms. Lappin's Council district. This memorial would be a living, breathing memorial that helps support values and issues that were of deep concern to FDR and his wife Eleanor Roosevelt unlike any humongous stone edifice as currently contemplated for Roosevelt Island's Southpoint Park. A reader of the very same NY Time City Room article comments (#67) that:

By the way, there is another site in the city of great significance for FDR, which is the house on East 65th Street that his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, presented to her son and Eleanor as a wedding present in 1905 (it was attached to a townhouse for Sara, so she would always be close at hand). The house is owned by Hunter College and is currently undergoing renovation. Such a site — with a mission of sponsoring programs about FDR and issues with which he and Eleanor were associated — would be a much more fitting living memorial in New York City. And with just a short drive up the Hudson to Hyde Park, New Yorkers can visit the enchanting FDR home and presidential library and museum, a very appropriate place to remember and salute our 32nd president. As President Roosevelt himself declared: “[a]ll that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River.”

More from 2003 NY Times article about the Hunter College Sara Delano Roosevelt House which is a far more appropriate venue for a FDR memorial than Southpoint Park.

Recent years have been less kind. For want of money, the Roosevelts' house on East 65th Street, later a Hunter College student center, has been sitting empty since 1992 -- ceilings leaking, woodwork moldering, plaster crumbling -- while its remarkable history has dwindled almost to a whisper.

Now, hoping to restore the building's architectural luster and its place in civic affairs, the City University of New York plans to spend $15 million to renovate it as the home of a public policy institute concerned with social and humanitarian issues -- ''the domestic version of the Council on Foreign Relations,'' said Jennifer J. Raab, the president of Hunter.

...''It is to me of happy significance,'' President Roosevelt said, ''that this place of sacred memories is to become the first college center established for the high purpose of mutual understanding among Protestant, Jewish and Catholic students.''

Just shy of the half-century mark, the student center was closed in 1992. The building was acquired in 1997 by the Hunter College Foundation, a private nonprofit corporation, which cobbled together $1.6 million in pledges for restoration, far short of what was required.

''It's very difficult to raise private money for the guts of a renovation: plumbing, new roofs, all the systems that need to be repaired,'' Ms. Raab said. ''That's why I made the decision to bring it back into the public fold.'' The property was transferred to City University ownership in December, she said, enabling it to qualify for state financing.

In 2006 Assembly member Jonathan Bing secured a $1 million grant to renovate the Roosevelt House.

The $1 million grant to renovate Roosevelt House adds to The Hunter College Foundation’s $6 million campaign to renovate and technologically upgrade the currently closed facility and establish an endowment to support scholar programs named for the first family. The renovation itself costs $4.5 million, with more than half already raised.

Roosevelt House, once the home of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his wife Eleanor, and his mother Sara, has been part of Hunter since 1943, when Eleanor Roosevelt formally dedicated the home as a center for students from Hunter’s nearby campus at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the 1908 English Georgian double town house was designed by architect Charles Platt and commissioned by Sara Delano Roosevelt as a Christmas present for her son and daughter-in-law. Roosevelt planned his first campaign in the residence and also recovered from polio in 1921 in its fourth floor bedroom.

“The state grant will help honor the Roosevelt legacy and promote the college’s own notable mission in education,” Bing said

I guess there are ways to honor President Roosevelt in New York City without the Louis Kahn memorial at Southpoint Park. Ms. Lappin, will you and your colleagues, Assembly Member Kellner, City Council President Quinn and Congresswomen Maloney now withdraw your support for the Louis Kahn memorial and utilize your efforts and skills to honor FDR by assisting in the renovation of the Hunter College Sara Delano Roosevelt House as well as assist in building a whole and complete waterfront park at Southpoint? I am sure Roosevelt Islanders would be thrilled to name a new waterfront park after President Roosevelt. Together with the renovation of Sara Delano Roosevelt House, a true waterfront park would be a much more fitting and appropriate FDR memorial at Roosevelt Island than the current plan to memorialize Louis Kahn at Southpoint Park.

Image is of the Sara Delano Roosevelt House, Hunter College from CUNY.