Brookline, MA
August 7, 2019
It’s funny how you can live somewhere for years, attend doctor appointments in the neighborhood, shop down the street…and not pay attention to the history that surrounds you. So it was with JFK’s childhood homes. One of my doctor’s offices is just around the corner from where the Kennedy children were born and raised, and before I started this NPS quest, I’d never realized it.
The JFK NHS is the house in which JFK was born and in which he spent the first six or seven years of his life. It sits on a beautiful tree-lined street in Brookline.
There isn’t much room for a lot of people in this house, so one can only do a self guided tour at a specific time of day. Otherwise, you go on a guided tour — there is one every half hour — that limits the number of people so the experience isn’t too crowded. I showed up just before the 9:30 tour got underway. Ranger Jim Roberts gave the tour. His presentation was informative and his manner was warm and friendly.
The first floor has the dining area and the sitting room…and the kitchen (shown later). Almost all the items are the originals. Rose Kennedy (mom to JFK) donated this house to the NPS and restored it to the way it was when the family lived there.
The upstairs has the nursery, the bedrooms, the bathroom, Rose’s study (she had a place to keep personal records of the kids), and various photographs.
Rose got her HS diploma at 15 years old, which was a record for the school (youngest graduate) 
Once back downstairs, we could see the kitchen…
After seeing the house and watching the video shown at the entrance (a short piece on JFK’s life), I took a self-guided neighborhood tour. The park has free maps so you can walk around for forty-five minutes or so and see the places the Kennedy family frequented. First stop is the house they moved into as the number of children grew. It is privately owned now, so you can’t go inside, but I did take a couple of photos from the street (the rangers told me the owners are used to that, just stay off the property itself). Next came the church Rose took her children to multiple times a week, and then the area where the boys attended private school (not shown below), and then finally the elementary school JFK attended.
As I was walking around, I passed the Brookline Fire Station, which had this moving tribute to a fallen 9-11 NYPD firefighter —
It took me about two hours to see everything, and I enjoyed my visit to this site immensely. The Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds worked their way up from poor Irish immigrants to successful businessmen and politicians within just a couple generations. Impressive. I’m a fan of JFK’s presidency too, so it was a real pleasure seeing the place where he was born and raised.