While researching a book about Abraham Lincoln, writer Stefan Lorant uncovered this April 25, 1865 image of Lincoln’s funeral procession passing Broadway at 13th Street.

The photo is one of many taken on that solemn afternoon. And it contains an amazing coincidence.

The building on the corner was the mansion of Cornelius van Schaack Roosevelt. Peering out the second-floor window are his seven- and five-year-old grandsons, Theodore and Elliott Roosevelt.

“Yes, I think that is my husband, and next to him his brother,” confirmed Edith Carow Roosevelt, Teddy’s widow. A childhood friend of the Roosevelt boys, she too was at the mansion that day.

We know how Teddy Roosevelt’s life unfolded: he attended Harvard, became a state assemblyman and then reform-minded city police commissioner, colonel of the Rough Riders, New York governor, vice president, and in 1901, at age 42, the youngest president in history.

TR was dynamic, combative, robust, and moralistic—a family man who found his greatest happiness in his home life with his wife and five children.

But what about Elliott?

As Teddy’s life was marked by achievement and success, Elliott’s took the opposite direction.

Well-liked and amiable, Elliott (above) was supposed to be the academic and athletic star of the family.

But while Teddy went to Harvard, Elliott used his inheritance to travel, enjoy society, and drink, developing the alcoholism and drug addiction that would plague him his entire life.

In 1883, he married a beautiful socialite named Anna Hall (left). Elliott and Anna had three children, including first-born Eleanor (below).

By all accounts, Elliott was adored by Eleanor. But sickly and overwhelmed by life, he continually sought escape, and his behavior was erratic and disturbing.

Stints in the business and real-estate world didn’t last. By the early 1890s, his drinking was out of control. He fathered a child out of wedlock with a servant, and he spent time in a European sanitarium.

Disgusted with his brother’s behavior, TR sought to have him declared insane, so his money could be put in a trust for his children.

More misfortune fell. Anna, estranged from her husband, died of diphtheria in 1892. Son Elliott Jr. succumbed to scarlet fever in 1893.

Separated from his children, he wrote letters to Eleanor, who lived with her maternal grandmother on West 37th Street.

“Elliot, as his daughter Eleanor was to note later, now had ‘no wife, no children, no hope,'” according to this 1988 article.

In 1894, Elliott jumped out of the window from his house on West 102nd Street, either attempting suicide or in a delirious state.

He died in his bed on August 14, 1894, the year before Teddy would become New York’s police commissioner and be launched toward a life on the national political stage.

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Tags: Edith Carow Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt father, Elliott Roosevelt, Roosevelt mansion NYC, Roosevelts in NYC, Roosevelts watching Lincoln funeral, Teddy and Elliott Roosevelt