I added a 1906 pic of the North Portico and a terrific 1858 pic of the South Portico that I found in the Library of Congress. These go nicely with the text I added in the wee hours last night.
This just made me notice that the North Portico was redesigned as part of the Truman renovation. The steps on the sides where changed to be more expansive, something that had escaped me before. So I added a couple of other pics to illustrate that better.
I pulled a few quotes from an account of Charles Dickens’s visits to the White House quoted in the 1908 Inside History of the White House. They color the pages on the North Lawn, North Portico, Entrance Hall, and East Sitting Hall.
AP is reporting that a couple of Secret Service agents were injured today when a firearm was accidentally discharged in the southwest gate booth.
Yahoo News page…
AZCentral page…
The White House has begun serving as a kind of stage for national mourning, as it has many times in the past. It is at these times, I think, that it proves least capable of fulfilling its duty—especially now, when the Press Briefing Room is still being renovated and press conferences must be held in the East Room or outside, and the weather is not good enough to use the Rose Garden. There used to be inadequate facilities for monitoring breaking news, but I think the new Sit Room probably has remedied that.
I recorded a commentary and wrote an analysis for Murder at 1600, the 1997 Wesley Snipes thriller about a murder inside the White House. Find them on the Movies & TV page.
I’ve posted several photos from the 1962 Guide, including some from the West Wing and Residence. It’s interesting to finally see some of the pre-makeover decor in color, looking pretty much as it looked in the Truman and Eisenhower eras.
Arrived home to find the 1962 Guide waiting for me, a bargain from Ebay at 99¢ + $4.75 shipping. It features JFK’s Oval Office with Truman decor, the Truman patterned Blue Room, and my first glimpse of JFK’s Pre-Roosevelt Room “Fish Room,” with mounted sailfish! Several other rooms are shown before their makeover also, including the Family Dining Room, which also includes an 1889 pic that I’ve never seen before. I’ll post photos in a day or so.
John in NOLA, I think you mentioned some time ago how to tell if it was a first edition or second edition. Can you refresh my memory?
Duane writes:
A comparison of 1948 photos and post-Renovation photos indicates a difference in the distance between window sills and floor level in rooms on the western side of the residence floor. This suggests that the Renovation itself involved elevating the floor level west of the staircase landing, including the landing, perhaps to allow for a shallower pitch to the ramp from the landing to the level of the East Sitting Hall and adjacent suites. Such a change in the floor level, however, would have required a change in the floor of the balcony as well in order to keep it at the same level as the Yellow Oval Room. Attempts to contact likely sources of information on this matter have not been successful. Does anyone have information regarding this matter?
UPDATE: John sent a very informative pic of the door to the balcony.
Watched Fail-Safe this evening and added an analysis of its depiction of the White House to the Movies & TV page. Nearly all the WH scenes occur in the Sit Room, which is depicted as a concrete bunker with a handset telephone while the Pentagon and SAC have sophisticated video screens and speaker phones. Walter Matthau’s math (60 million dead is empirically better than 100 million dead) is unintentionally hilarious today, but Henry Fonda is so presidential, you’ll be chilled anyway.
My foray into the caverns below the Truman Library yielded several more good photos of the Residence, which I have added now. Still not sure about that Barber Shop photo, tho.
Returning once again to the Truman Library archives (the gift that keeps on giving), I came across this image of the “barber shop,” labeled “room BM-10.” At first I thought it was the second floor Beauty Salon, but then I compared it with the West Wing Barber Shop picture, and that’s a better fit, tho not perfect (I’ve put it there for now). I haven’t come across any room numbering scheme that shows “BM-10,” so it could be in the WW ground floor or maybe the basement, for which I have no official floor plans (altho the WH has used different room number schemes at different times). Any ideas?
Added a pic of the 2003 Easter egg roll to the Overview page for a couple of days. Also, as a permanent change, I changed the background from green-gray to blue-gray.
Nothing new here. I had hoped to have a Clinton-era An Historic Guide waiting for me, but the Ebay seller is a bit slow. I just ordered the Gary Walters interview from C-SPAN and a White House music documentary called In Tune With History, which hopefully will have something new. I’m holding out for photos of Chester Arthur playing the banjo.
Visits to WhiteHouseMuseum.org have been increasing pretty steadily since it went live in June 2006. In mid-July, it was pulling in about 3,000 page views a week. Now it’s pulling in over 30,000. That’s still not a lot, but it’s a good growth pattern. Typical daily page views of around 4,000 suggest there are several hundred individual visitors each day.
Adding links to WHM from Wikipedia articles that relate to the White House has been the most help, but a fair number of hits come from MySpace pages, most of which seem to be leeching photos (linking directly to them to be served from my host when someone looks at their page). I don’t really understand why Dorishemar would want a picture of George Bush’s sitting room as her background, much less why Rory the Bass would want the Presidential Park diagram as his. And I’m completely baffled as to why Budd Dwyer Suicide Fan Club would want a picture of Harry Truman’s bowling alley prominently displayed along with Ronald McHitler.
Top 11 Queries that bring visitors to WHM:
Changed the front page to one of JBK’s 1962 bedroom, with the twin mattresses belted together. If only the SelectComfort Sleep Number bed had been available—a 1 for Jackie and a 99 for Jack. As it was, Jack’s side was stuffed with horsehair and Soviet communiques and topped with a slab of concrete. Jackie’s side was stuffed with the softest angora from 300 bunnies, kept in suspension by circulating air breathed by a chorus of Catholic choir boys singing “Ave Maria.” No foolin’.
Just got the 1979 and 1991 WHHA Guides delivered via Ebay. I find it a little irritating the way that the exact same photo is sometimes used for more than a decade just because the decor doesn’t change much (the 1991 Private Dining Room photo is identical to the one from 1975). It wouldn’t be so bad if they at least dated the pictures…. Anyway, my thanks to John in NOLA, who sent along a 1962 1963 WHHA Guide to help complete my collection. Very cool.
I’ve added a few photos from these and also a couple I got from Monkman’s Furnishings….
For the record, the White House Museum Library* now includes An Historic Guide from:
1963, 4th edition* Photo does not show the White House Museum Library Video Annex
UPDATE: The other books in the collection are (left to right, back to front):
Stumbled across an article on the recreation of the original Cabinet Room lighting fixtures. Kind of cool.
Finished the Ike Hoover memoir–great fun despite its jumble of information. I was fairly shocked to find lists of who was generous and who not, and who was a ladies man and who not. Harding, as it turns out, “was a sporting ladies man.” Who knew?
Now I’m deep into Inside History of the White House, a gem from the good people at the Christian Herald in 1908. As you might imagine from such a source, the book spends a fair amount of ink on how each president worshipped, but mostly spends its time explaining how absolutely marvelous every president was.
One interesting point—given that I just learned that Ike Hoover wired the White House for electricity—is that the wiring of the White House was done badly. Holes were drilled thru timbers and wires run thru without porcelain or iron piping. In the 1902 renovation, many of the holes were found to be scorched from short circuits from frayed wiring.
I’m about 2/3 of the way thru Ike Hoover’s memoir. It’s a toboggan run of a read—just like JB West’s was. But Hoover is decidedly more candid in his appraisals of his employers, sometimes to the point of laugh-out-loud frankness. And what I took at times to be political partisanship I soon found was merely personal affection—or disaffection. His praise of both the Clevelands and Roosevelts is boundless. His admiration for both McKinley and Wilson is striking. He goes on for pages and pages about trivial events (Colonel House falling out of favor with Wilson) but says almost nothing at all about the entire Harding administration. And his distaste for the peculiarity of Coolidge and bald antipathy for the Hoovers is almost comical.
After sections in the Coolidge chapters with titles like “Coolidge Eccentricities” and “Coolidge Talks for Once,” a short section at the beginning of the Hoover chapters is called “Never a Kind Word” and starts:
When Coolidge reigned, we thought he was an odd person, but with the coming of Hoover, we changed our minds by comparison. Coolidge was quiet and did queer little things, but Hoover was even more peculiar. He would go about, never speaking to any of the help. Never a kind word or even a nod of the head. …
To hammer the point home, this section is followed by a section titled “Hard People to Work For”! On the other hand, he does grant that the very wealthy Hoovers were never stingy.
Also–disappointingly, Hoover describes the White House rooms only occasionally and rarely mentions where specific events took place. And he makes the strange error of suggesting that Lincoln may have signed the Emancipation Proclamation on the Resolute desk.
Update: Dennis notes that the book was edited together from Hoover’s notes after his heart attack while still on the job in 1933, which explains the holes and general disjointedness, especially of the second half. Time magazine carried the story on the day, with the ironic conclusion:
Once he was offered $50.000 to write his memoirs. He refused, saying: “When I pass out, everything I know goes with me.”
Not if you’ve written it all down it doesn’t.
Returned home to find 42 Years in the White House waiting for me. A quick look at the photo plates showed only one that seems worth adding to the site (the early Wilson bedroom). But as I started to read, I found on page five that this is going to be interesting, as Ike describes that day in 1891 he first came to the White House to install electrical lighting and looked around the basement (today’s ground floor):
The floor was covered with damp and slimy brick; dust webs were everywhere. An old wooden heating trough hung the entire length of the ceiling of the long corridor. Everything was black and dirty. Rooms that are now parlors were then used for storage of wood and coal. In the kitchen of the original house, now an engine-room [now the north hall and offices], could be seen the old open fireplaces once used for broiling the chickens and baking the hoecakes for the early Father of our country, the old cranes and spits still in place. Out the door to the rear there yet remained the old wine-vault, the meathouse, and the smokehouse.
I’ve already added this and some other quotes to some of the pages.
Nick Valenziano (Nix) kindly sent some photos from his visit to the White House Symposium in 2000, which include a couple of rare shots of restrooms as well as a nice one of the China display cases and a really, really nice one of the Family Theater. Thanks, Nick!
Simultaneously, I have begun (on the Ground Floor) adding little maps to each room page—snippets of the floor plan—to help orient the reader about where the doors and windows and fireplaces are in that room.
After an e-mail exchange on the subject of Tade Styka’s equestrian portrait of TR in the Roosevelt Room, it occurred to me that what this country needs is a dollar coin with TR’s portrait. Was there ever a face better suited to the obverse of hard specie? I ask you, what face has this nation chosen to chisel in stone 60 feet high and yet not mounted on a minted round? And don’t tell me he’s already on the reverse of the South Dakota quarter. Theodore Roosevelt should not have to appear in the company of a ring-necked pheasant!
I know that he’ll get his moment in a few years, but he’ll be lumped in with McKinley, Taft, and Wilson, for pity’s sake. Maybe TR’s could be a two dollar coin. The man needs his own denomination! And for the reverse? A bull moose whacking a Spaniard with a big stick.
I’ve posted several photos from the 1908 White House book I got on Ebay. It has some interesting insights, altho I haven’t been able to read much of it yet. The photos are c1903 Master Bedroom, Yellow Oval Room, President’s Office (Lincoln Bedroom), Cabinet Room (Treaty Room), Cross Hall, and West Wing. There are a number more of the state floor rooms, but I already have good ones of them. Too bad there is no pic of the West Sitting Hall. There is an interesting one of the stables, but I’m pretty sure that the stables had been moved out of President’s Park well before 1903. (Anyone know which Starbucks now occupies the location?)
UPDATE: John in NOLA pointed out that the Yellow Oval Room pic had to be pre-1902 and sent a terrific c1910 photo of the room showing the fresh walls and new mantelpiece. Also, Robert M sent a juicy stereograph of the Cleveland’s West Sitting Hall (first or second term, I can’t tell–there’s no slim, girlish Frances or chubby, matronly Frances).
Added a separate page for the china collection and linked to it from the furnishings page, where I also added an entry for Stuart’s stony-jawed (or hippo-jawed, as the case may be) Washington.
After adding the new pics to the Oval Office page, I noticed that it now has 40 photos. Other important rooms have only about 30. I’m concerned that, with all the photos, the pages won’t load fast enough for casual viewers. I’m wondering about dividing the OO page out into:
or by era:
The “today and earlier” idea would work pretty well for other rooms as they get longer, altho there are surprisingly few good photos of many rooms as they are today.
UPDATE: For the time being, I’ve broken the page out into Oval Office and Oval Office History. You can compare it to the previous version.
The Elliptical Saloon 