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On this day in New York · October 20, 1964

Herbert Hoover Dies at the Waldorf

The man most Americans blamed for the Great Depression spent his last twenty-four years two floors above a Park Avenue lobby, and New York let him do it quietly.

Herbert Hoover Dies at the Waldorf
Wikimedia Commons / Herbert Hoover

The facts

Died
October 20, 1964, at 11:35 a.m.
Where
Suite 31-A, Waldorf Astoria Towers, Park Avenue
Age
90
Years in residence
Moved in December 1940; lived there full-time from 1944 until his death in 1964

Herbert Hoover, the thirty-first president, died on October 20, 1964, in his apartment at the Waldorf Astoria Towers on Park Avenue. He was ninety. Hoover had moved into Suite 31-A in December 1940 and made it his full-time home after his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, died in 1944, running a long second act of relief work and government commissions out of a hotel suite instead of a mansion or a ranch. He died at 11:35 in the morning after a long battle with internal bleeding that had put him in hospitals repeatedly over the previous two years, with his sons at his side. Within hours President Lyndon Johnson had issued a statement and ordered flags lowered to half-staff, closing out a life that had run from the White House to a Park Avenue address New Yorkers passed every day without a second thought.

In their words

The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.

  1. We have lost a wise American, and the world has lost a humanitarian citizen of all mankind.

    President Lyndon B. Johnson, statement on the death of President Hoover, October 20, 1964

    Source: The American Presidency Project (UC Santa Barbara)

  2. Beginning in December 1940, Hoover lived primarily in New York City. Home was Suite 31-A of the Waldorf Towers, a Park Avenue landmark.

    Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, "Years of Struggle and Acclaim, 1933-1964"

    Source: Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum (National Archives)

Why it still matters

Hoover's Waldorf years helped invent the modern job of ex-president, turning a one-term man the country had turned against into the model of the elder statesman later presidents kept calling on. It's a New York story too: even a man exiled from popular opinion could hide in plain sight on Park Avenue for two and a half decades and still be taken seriously in Washington.

Sources

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