Location | Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States |
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Coordinates | 42°18′57.21″N 71°2′2.71″W / 42.3158917°N 71.0340861°WCoordinates: 42°18′57.21″N 71°2′2.71″W / 42.3158917°N 71.0340861°W |
Construction start | August 1977 Groundbreaking: June 12, 1977 |
Dedicated | October 20, 1979 |
Rededicated | October 23, 1993 |
Named for | John F. Kennedy |
Architect | I. M. Pei |
Size | 10 acres (40,000 m2) |
Cost | $20.8 million |
Management | National Archives and Records Administration |
Website | jfklibrary.org |
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is the presidential library and museum of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States (1961–1963). It is located on Columbia Point in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, next to the University of Massachusetts Boston, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, and the Massachusetts Archives and Commonwealth Museum. Designed by the architect I. M. Pei, the building is the official repository for original papers and correspondence of the Kennedy Administration, as well as special bodies of published and unpublished materials, such as books and papers by and about Ernest Hemingway. The library and museum were dedicated in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter and members of the Kennedy family. It can be reached from nearby Interstate 93 or via shuttle bus or walk from the JFK/UMass stop on the Boston Subway's Red Line.
During a weekend visit to Boston on October 19, 1963, President Kennedy, along with John Carl Warnecke — the architect who would design the President’s tomb in Arlington — viewed several locations offered by Harvard as a site for the library and museum. At the time there were only four other Presidential Libraries: the Hoover Presidential Library, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the Truman Library, and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library. They were all scattered around the country in small towns from New York to Iowa. Kennedy had not decided on any design concept yet, but he felt that the existing presidential libraries were placed too "far away from scholarly resources."