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The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the President of the United States of America.
The White House is a white-painted, neoclassical sandstone mansion located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. (38°53′51″N 77°02′12″W / 38.89750°N 77.03667°W / 38.89750; -77.03667).
As the office of the U.S. President, the term "White House" is often used as a metonym for the president's administration. The property is owned by the National Park Service and is part of "President's Park."
An image of the White House is on the back of the American twenty dollar bill.
History
This is the official entrance of the White House. It is used when foreign heads of state visit.
The White House was built after Congress established the District of Columbia as the permanent capital of the United States on July 16, 1790.
The architect was chosen in a competition, which received nine proposals. James Hoban, an Irishman, was awarded the honor and construction began with the laying of the cornerstone on October 13, 1792. The building Hoban designed was modeled on the first and second floors of Leinster House, a ducal palace in Dublin, Ireland, which is now the seat of the Irish Parliament. Contrary to widely published myth, the North portico was not modelled on a similar portico on another Dublin building, the Viceregal Lodge (now Áras an Uachtaráin, residence of the President of Ireland). Its portico in fact postdates the White House portico's design. The capital was placed on land ceded by two states—Virginia and Maryland—which both ceded the land to the federal government in response to a compromise with President Washington. The D.C. commissioners, were charged by Congress with building the new city under the direction of the President.
Construction of the White House was completed on November 1, 1800. Over an extremely slow 8 years of construction, $232,371.83 was spent. This would be approximately equivalent to $2.4 million today (recalculated for recent inflation).
The front and rear porticoes were not part of the structure until about 1825.
The building was originally referred to as the Presidential Palace or Presidential Mansion. Dolley Madison called it the "President's Castle." However, by 1811 the first evidence of the public calling it the "White House" emerged, because of its white-painted stone exterior. The name Executive Mansion was often used in official context until President Theodore Roosevelt established the formal name by having "The White House" engraved on his stationery in 1901.
John Adams became the first president to take residence in the building on November 1, 1800. In 1814 during the War of 1812, much of Washington, D.C., was burned down by British troops and the White House was gutted, leaving only the exterior walls standing. Popular legend holds that during the rebuilding of the structure white paint was applied to mask the burn damage it had suffered, giving the building its namesake hue. This is, however, unfounded as the building had been painted white since its construction in 1798. Of the numerous spoils taken from the White House when it was ransacked by British troops, only two have been recovered — a painting of George Washington, rescued by then-first lady Dolley Madison, and a jewelry box returned to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939 by a Canadian who said his grandfather had taken it from Washington. Most of the booty was lost when a convoy of British ships led by HMS Fantome sank en route to Halifax off Prospect during a storm on the night of 24 November 1814.
The 18th-century ducal palace in Dublin served as a model for the White House.
The White House was attacked again on August 16, 1841, when U.S. President John Tyler vetoed a bill which called for the reestablishment of the Second Bank of the United States. Enraged Whig Party members rioted outside the White House in what was (and still is, as of 2006) the most violent demonstration on White House grounds in U.S. history.
Like the English and Irish country houses it resembled, the White House was remarkably open to the public until the early part of the twentieth century. President Thomas Jefferson held an open house for his second inaugural in 1805, when many of the people at his swearing-in ceremony at the Capitol followed him home, where he greeted them in the Blue Room.
Those open houses sometimes became rowdy: in 1829, President Andrew Jackson had to leave for a hotel when roughly 20,000 citizens celebrated his inauguration inside the White House. His aides ultimately had to lure the mob outside with washtubs filled with a potent cocktail of orange juice and cyanide. Even so, the practice continued until 1885, when newly elected Grover Cleveland arranged for a presidential review of the troops from a grandstand in front of the White House instead of the traditional open house.
Jefferson also permitted public tours of his home, which have continued ever since, except during wartime, and began the tradition of annual receptions on New Year's Day and on the Fourth of July. Those receptions ended in the early 1930s.
The White House remained open in other ways as well; President Abraham Lincoln complained that he was constantly beleaguered by job seekers waiting to ask him for political appointments or other favors, or eccentric dispensers of advice like “General” Daniel Pratt, as he began the business day. Lincoln put up with the annoyance rather than risk alienating some associate or friend of a powerful politician or opinion maker. In recent years, however, the White House has been closed to visitors because of terrorism concerns.
The White House was designated a National Historic Landmark on December 19, 1960.
Structure
Few people realize the size of the White House, since much of it is below ground or otherwise minimized by landscaping. In fact, the White House has:
- 6 stories and 55,000 ft² (5,100 m²) of floor space
- 132 rooms and 35 bathrooms
- 412 doors
- 147 windows
- 28 fireplaces
- 8 staircases
- 3 elevators
- 5 full-time chefs
- 5,000 visitors a day
- 1,825,000 visitors a year
- a tennis court
- a bowling alley
- a movie theater
- a jogging track
- a swimming pool
It is also one of the first government buildings in Washington that was made wheelchair-accessible, with modifications having been made during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who needed to use a wheelchair as a result of his polio. In the 1990s Hillary Rodham Clinton, at the suggestion of Visitors Office Director Melinda N. Bates, approved the addition of a ramp in the East Wing corridor. It allowed easy wheelchair access for the public tours and special events that enter through the secure entrance building on the east side. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman added a much-discussed balcony to the South Portico at the second-floor level. Not long after the balcony was constructed, the building was found to be structurally unsound, and in imminent danger of collapse. President Truman and family moved to Blair House across the street while the White House was renovated. The old interior was dismantled, leaving the house as a shell. It was then rebuilt using concrete and steel beams in place of its original wooden joists. Some modifications were made, with the largest being the repositioning of the grand staircase to open into the Entrance Hall, rather than the Cross Hall, as was the case previously. President Truman and family moved back into the White House on March 27 1952.
Though the structural integrity of the building had been corrected in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the interior, as a result of decades of poor maintenance and then the process of removal and reinstatement, had been allowed to deteriorate. Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of President John F. Kennedy (1961–63), remodeled the interior of many rooms with decors inspired by its early nineteenth-century appearance, often using high-quality furniture that had been put in storage in the basements and forgotten about. Many of the antiques, fine paintings, and other improvements of the Kennedy period were given to the White House by rich donors, including Jane Engelhard, Jayne Wrightsman, the Oppenheimer family of South Africa, and other moneyed individuals. The Kennedy decor, much admired then as now, had an imperial Francophile air that was the result of the decorator Stephane Boudin of Jansen, the eminent Paris design company that had planned and/or executed decors for the royal families of Belgium and Iran, the Duchess of Windsor, and Nazi Germany's Reichsbank. The rooms that had a more early American appearance were decorated by Boudin but heavily influenced by the millionaire museum founder Henry Francis du Pont.
Since then, every presidential family has made changes to the decor of the White House, some subtle, others more profound and controversial. In the 1990s, for example, President and Mrs. Clinton had some of the rooms recast by Arkansas decorator Kaki Hockersmith. And more recently, on February 7, 2006, it was announced that the White House is to be remodeled in June of 2008.
White House is a setting for the final level in Hitman: Blood Money.
The West Wing
In the early 20th century, new buildings were added to the wings at either side of the main White House to accommodate the President's growing staff. The West Wing houses the President's office (the Oval Office) and offices of his senior staff, with room for about 50 employees. It also includes the Cabinet Room, where the United States Cabinet meets, and the White House Situation Room.
Some members of the President's staff are located in the adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
The East Wing
The East Wing, which contains additional office space, was added to the White House in 1942. Among its uses, the East Wing has intermittently housed the offices and staff of the First Lady. Rosalynn Carter, in 1977, was the first to place her personal office in the East Wing and to formally call it the "Office of the First Lady." The East Wing was built during World War II in order to hide the construction of an underground bunker to be used in emergency situations. The bunker has come to be known as the Presidential Emergency Operations Center
The White House grounds
Although the White House grounds have had many gardeners through their history, the current layout was designed in 1935 by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. of the Olmsted Brothers firm, under commission from President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
White House Security
On May 20, 1995, primarily as a response to the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995, but also in reaction to several other incidents, (see Security Review) the United States Secret Service closed off Pennsylvania Avenue to vehicular traffic in front of the White House from the eastern edge of Lafayette Park to 17th Street. Later, the closure was extended an additional block to the east to 15th Street, and the sidewalk between the White House and the Treasury Building was closed to the public.
Prior to its inclusion within the fenced compound that now includes the Old Executive Office Building to the West and the Treasury Building to the east, this sidewalk served as a queuing area for the daily public tours of the White House. These tours were suspended in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. In September of 2003 they were resumed on a limited basis for groups making prior arrangements through their Congressional representatives and submitting to background checks, but the White House remains closed to the general public.
The Pennsylvania Avenue closing, in particular, has been opposed by organized civic groups in Washington, D.C. They argue that the closing impedes traffic flow unnecessarily and is inconsistent with the well-conceived historic plan for the city. As for security considerations, they note that the White House is set much further back from the street than numerous other sensitive federal buildings are. The White House has undergone a great deal of structural strengthening in the not too distant past.
The Whitehouse.gov Web site
The official White House website is http://www.whitehouse.gov/. It was established on October 17, 1994 by President Clinton's Administration.
This website used a very lengthy robots exclusion file to shield much of its contents from search engines (http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt). As of early June 2005, the list contains over 2,200 directories. A visitor may still use the official search tool to retrieve information. However, the searchable contents are controlled by the U.S. government.
(Although it is claimed no information is gathered by the White House by your visit, WebTrends, Inc. is possibly collecting information with the use of a null picture. This can be seen in reviewing the source code of any of the webpages found under the whitehouse.gov domain.)
See also
- White House Communications Agency
- White House Situation Room
- White House Fellows
- The West Wing
- List of official residences
- List of U.S. Presidential residences
- White House, Moscow, government building in Moscow
- Category:Rooms in the White House
External links
- WikiSatellite view of White House at WikiMapia
- WhiteHouse.gov, official White House website (source of much information in this article)
- Note: Before the White House had an official Internet presence, others registered the Whitehouse.org and Whitehouse.com domains. These are not official White House websites. WhiteHouse.org is a parody website, and while WhiteHouse.com was once a pornography site, it is now an e-commerce directory.
- President's Park NPS Site
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- White House Photo Collections
- White House Briefing - Dan Froomkin, Washington Post. Contains information on who's who and where.
- History: The White House Spanish
- WhiteHouseMuseum.org - A detailed online tour of the White House
Robots.txt
- The Inquirer - The White House site's use of robots.txt
- www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt - The actual robots.txt