west wing tour guidelines

How to Get a Tour of the West Wing of the White House

Editorial team, 29 sep 2017.

The White House is easily one of the most famous and important public buildings in the world. Thousands of people have had the public tour of the ceremonial rooms of the main residence building. Far fewer have had the opportunity to see the most important rooms in the West Wing, including the Cabinet Room, the Press Room, and the Oval Office. Though getting a West Wing tour is very difficult, here's how you can try to get one.

Get a White House staffer to invite you. West Wing tours are conducted by White House employees with West Wing access (which is not even all White House employees). West Wing tours are conducted on employees' free time, usually on weekends, so they must be willing to volunteer the favor to you. The three categories of visitors most likely to get a West Wing tour are (1) friends and family of White House employees, (2) celebrities or prominent political activists who contact the White House Office of Political Affairs, and (3) friends and prominent supporters of Members of Congress who themselves contact the White House Office of Political Affairs.

Schedule your West Wing tour. The White House has historically had a rule that West Wing tours can only occur outside of regular business hours and when the President is not in the West Wing. Most West Wing tours, therefore, occur on weekends. Your best bet is to try to schedule the tour for a weekend when you know the President will be out of town. Otherwise, if he chooses to work in the West Wing at the time of your tour, your tour may be canceled or postponed.

Provide appropriate personal information to obtain a security clearance. You will need to supply the White House with your full name, birth date, social security number, and possibly other personal data in order for the Secret Service to conduct a background check on you. This is not optional, and if a problem arises, it may prohibit you from being allowed on the tour.

Arrive in appropriate attire at the Northwest Entrance to the White House. The White House has a dress code for tours, though it is fairly flexible. Business casual attire is acceptable. You will start your tour at the Secret Service booth at the Northwest Entrance to the White House grounds. The Secret Service will let you through the security checkpoint after your tour guide arrives to escort you. You will be given a temporary badge to wear at all time on your tour.

• 1 The White House: Tours and Events

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Reserve Your Spot with Confidence! Full Refunds with 24 Hrs Notice. Reschedule at any point, even after tour, if space allows!

I got to tour the West Wing!

Getting a tour of the West Wing of the White House is perhaps the toughest ticket in Washington, DC, but if you do get one, it’s the Golden Ticket.  

Several guides at DC By Foot have toured the West Wing.

It is much easier to tour the White House on a public tour or take our Intro to DC tour to see it from outside with one of our guides.

They are scheduled from 7:30 in the morning until 9:30 at night, though you cannot tour the West Wing during business hours or when the President is working.

Unfortunately, we can’t help you arrange a tour of the West Wing, but we can tell you who can visit the West Wing, how to apply, and what you will see.

HOW TO GET A WEST WING TOUR

Your best chance of getting a tour is to be a friend or family of a White House employee. 

So, who do you have to know? It’s an exclusive club:

• Friends and family of authorized White House employees
• Celebrities and political activists
• Friends and prominent supporters of members of Congress

Celebrities and prominent political activists must apply directly to the White House Office of Political Affairs.  If you are a friend of a prominent member of Congress, that member may apply to the Office of Political Affairs on your behalf.

If you are fortunate enough to be booked on a West Wing tour, you will receive a link directly from the WH asking you to provide the following information: 

• Date of Birth
• Social Security Number (only U.S. residents 18 and older)
• Citizenship
• City and State of Residence

Once you provide that information, you will receive a strict set of rules for your visit. The most important one is bags: the size must not exceed 4x6 inches. Also, no phones are allowed, so you’ll have to lock it away upon entry. 

In the days before your tour, the Secret Service will conduct a rigorous background check, and when you arrive at the White House for your tour, there is additional security screening. Don’t forget your government-issued ID.

The check-in point is at 17 th and E St NW. Upon arrival, you will be given a temporary badge that you will wear for the duration of your tour. Yes. You have to return it following your visit. 

After passing through security, you will follow your guide (the White House employee) past the south façade of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where you will round a corner to the left. 

And there it will be: the entrance to the West Wing! It is an extensive tour, allowing you to see the inner workings of the West Wing and the surrounding exterior grounds, all under the watchful eye of Secret Service members, who will happily answer questions and tell you stories. Be sure to ask about the ghosts in the White House. There are lots of them! 

So, what exactly do you get to see? 

• Situation Room
• West Colonnade
• Rose Garden & South Lawn
• Cabinet Room
• Oval Office
• Roosevelt Room
• West Wing Lobby
• James P. Brady Press Briefing Room

As you are not allowed to bring your phone (or cameras) into the West Wing, the only place where photos are allowed is the Press Briefing Room.

As part of a West Wing tour, you will also visit the adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where you will see the following: 

• Second Gentleman’s Office Suite (exterior only)
• The Vice President’s Ceremonial Office
• Secretary of War Suite
• The Cordell Hull Room
• The Diplomatic Reception Room
• The Indian Treaty Room
• The War Library
• The East and West Rotundas
• Truman Bowling Alley

So, if you are lucky enough to get this Golden Ticket, a tour of the West Wing will surely be a highlight of your time in Washington, DC.

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What You'll Never See on the White House Tour

The White House — yep, the one located in Washington, D.C. — has been home to the presidents of the United States since John Adams came to office in 1797. But, how much do we know about the White House and what's inside?

While tours are available through parts of the East and West Wings, as well as the Residence's main building, they are difficult to come by and require a written request to your senators at least 21 days in advance.

You don't have to wait any longer to take a tour of the White House's inner workings and to learn its many secrets. Let us take you on an insider's virtual tour.

The Cornerstone

Designed by James Hoban, an Irish immigrant, the first stones of the White House were laid in 1792. Although commissioned by George Washington, it was John and Abigail Adams who first moved into the White House in 1800.

The house was still under construction when they arrived and didn't have a chance to be completed before it was burned down by the British during the War of 1812.

Once again, Hoban was called to lead the rebuilding of the White House under James Monroe. Construction began with the South Portico in 1824.

The North Portico was added in 1829, just in time for Andrew Jackson, who had become president, to call the place home.

The West Wing

The first major renovation of the White House began in 1902, while Theodore Roosevelt was president. Roosevelt decided to move his office from the Residence's second floor to the new Executive Office Building .

The building, known as the West Wing, was designed by McKim, Mead and White of New York. There have been numerous expansions of the West Wing over the years, but it has remained the president's office location for more than a century.

The Oval Office

The president's office, however, was not the Oval Office we know of today until the West Wing was expanded during William Howard Taft's leadership. It was Taft who added the Oval Office, located on the first floor of the West Wing.

Every president has the right to redecorate the office to their liking, with all but three presidents since Rutherford B. Hayes keeping the Resolute Desk . (Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford did not use it.)

The Resolute Desk

A gift from Queen Victoria in 1880, the Resolute Desk was made from the wood of the H.M.S. Resolute and given to Hayes. However, the desk did not make its way into the Oval Office until John F. Kennedy moved it here in 1961.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt added the presidential coat of arms on the panel that has a secret door, as was famously captured by Kennedy's children playing hide-and-seek. (Caroline and Kerry Kennedy are pictured here.)

Another Major Renovation

The current White House does not feature the original interior built in the 1800s. Harry S. Truman ordered a complete renovation in 1950, gutting everything but the exterior walls.

The two-year job was completed in 1952. Truman spent nearly three years living at the nearby Blair House, the presidential guest house.

Secret Tunnels

During the renovation, a tunnel connecting the West Wing to the East Wing was added as well as a bomb shelter. Before this tunnel, however, FDR added a tunnel between the East Wing and the Treasury Building to serve as an air-raid shelter.

Ronald Reagan added another tunnel during his presidency. If you go through a secret door in the Oval Office, stairs lead to a basement where a private elevator connects to the Residence.

A Web of More Tunnels?

There are rumors of more tunnels that connect the White House to the Capitol, CIA, FBI, Blair House, the Vice President's Residence, Camp David, the Pentagon and Andrews Air Force Base.

None of the tunnels have been confirmed.

Secret Entrances

There are also secret entrances into the White House, including this H Street alleyway . The ram-proof driveway is located beside a discreet Secret Service window. Once accessed, the alley passes the Federal Claims Courthouse to a door at the Treasury Department on Pennsylvania Avenue.

From there, visitors can move through the tunnel that connects to the East Wing.

Security Measures

It goes without saying that the White House is an extremely secure building . Its windows are bulletproof, and the grounds are covered with infrared lasers that even cover the sky overhead — able to detect a threat from a mile away!

The entire city is a no-fly zone with surface-to-air missiles found all around the capital, as well as Secret Service-flown drones that keep an eye on what's happening around the White House.

Of course, surrounding the White House is an 11-foot spiked fence, patrolled by armed guards in the event anyone tries to scale it. And, as many can see from the ground, armed guards are stationed atop the roof of the White House.

A Full House

One interesting fact about this building is that it wasn't always called the White House . Before Theodore Roosevelt gave it the official name in 1901, it was referred to as the Executive Mansion, the President's Palace and the President's House.

Today, the inside features 412 doors, 12 rooms, 35 bathrooms, 28 fireplaces, eight staircases, six stories (in the Residence) and three elevators.

The Executive Residence Ground Floor

The Executive Residence, at six-stories, is 55,000 square feet .

Rooms on the Residence White House Tour include the ground floor and first floor, also known as the State Floor.

Vermeil Room

A formal sitting room used by the first ladies, the Vermeil Room was added to the White House in 1902.

Before it was this comfortable room known originally as the Social Room, it was used for storage and then a staff bedroom. It was transformed during Theodore Roosevelt's Administration, when staff bedrooms were moved from the ground floor to make way for rooms for public use.

The room received its new name, the Vermeil Room, in the 1960s, after Margaret Thompson Biddle donated 1,575 pieces of her vermeil to the White House. Her portrait hangs above the fireplace.

Woodrow Wilson's second wife, Edith, designated this room as the Presidential Collection Room  to store the ever-growing china collected over the years. Renamed the China Room, the room was redecorated to its red color in 1970.

Nearly every president's state or family china is represented chronologically.

The main kitchen of the White House is large enough to hold a team that can cook and serve those 140 guests for a formal dinner — with the capacity to hand-make 1,000 hors d'oeuvres! 

The kitchen also provides the presidential family with its meals and snacks, and the president has a button on his desk in the Oval Office to order food and beverages. All food brought into the kitchen is screened by the FBI.

There are two additional kitchens in the White House, one in the Residence for the presidential family's casual meals and the second, a pastry kitchen.

President Millard Fillmore added the first Presidential Library to the White House in the 1850s at the time he gained funds to rebuild the Library of Congress, which had been destroyed by a fire that burned 35,000 books.

Part of the Presidental Library's collection contributed by Fillmore includes Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle," along with collections by the Founding Fathers.

The current library, now located on the ground floor, was formerly a laundry room until Jacqueline Kennedy transformed it into the library it is today. She added more than 1,700 books to the collection.

Diplomat Room

The receiving room, or the Diplomatic Reception Room , was originally a furnace room. Renovated during Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, it was where FDR delivered his famous fireside chats during the Great Depression.

The wallpaper featuring landscapes of America was added by Jackie Kennedy, along with the carpet that features the emblem of all 50 states.

Before Kennedy created the current Situation Room, this Map Room was used as such by FDR. It featured world maps hung all around the room, so the president could be briefed on situations taking place during World War II.

The room is used for meetings today and still holds maps from the National Geographic Society.

Although it is not filled with palm trees, this ground floor foyer connects the White House and the West Wing. It is often called the West Garden Room to match the similar visitor gathering spot known as the East Garden Room.

It received its Palm name for its conservatory look.

Flower Shop

In the Basement Hall, White House staff can pickup flowers from the Flower Shop, which manages and arranges flowers to fill the White House and decorate for holidays and special events.

Bowling Alley

The first bowling alley was added to the White House in 1947 as a gift to President Truman. He wasn't much of a bowler and got rid of the alley to make room for a printing press room.

However, Richard and Pat Nixon loved to bowl, so he added a one-lane alley in 1969. It was located underground, beneath the North Portico driveway.

Today, it doesn't get much use and needs a complete refurbishment.

The Executive Residence First Floor

The first floor of the Executive Residence is used for welcoming and hosting dignitaries and special events.

The floor is often referred to as the State Floor because of this.

The East Room

Also found in the Residence is the East Room , which is the largest State Room and is used for events, ceremonies and speeches. Before it became an event space, the room was the last to be decorated and designated as anything more than a large, open space. Abigail Adams actually used the East Room to dry her laundry.

Andrew Jackson had the room decorated for the first time in 1829, and ever since, the East Room has welcomed dignitaries as well as mourners for the wakes of both Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy.

There are some very colorful rooms in the Residence. Meant to be used as a dining room, the Green Room serves as a state parlor. It is located on the first floor. 

Beside the Green Room is the Blue Room . This is where the president receives his guests. The oval-shaped room has been blue since 1837, even following renovations.

The marble-topped table in the center of the room has been in this room since James Monroe purchased it in 1817.

The Red Room , also on the first floor, was originally used as the home of the presidential family, despite its size.

Once the families took residence in the upper floors, First Ladies began to use the room for events. Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, held the room's first press conference.

State Dining Room

Of course, the White House hosts larger dinners for dignitaries in another dining room, known as the State Dining Room . It was originally a smaller, first-floor office space that was also used for formal dinners by presidents since Andrew Jackson, but Theodore Roosevelt had the room enlarged during the 1902 renovations.

The fireplace mantel originally featured lions, but Roosevelt changed them to be the heads of American bison. The table can extend to accommodate 140 guests.

Family Dining Room

Leave it to Jackie Kennedy to also create the Residence's Family Dining Room . Originally the bedroom of William McKinley, the room has served as the private dining room for the presidential families since the 1960s.

This example is from George W. Bush's presidency.

The Executive Residence Second Floor

The upper floors of the Executive Residence are reserved as living quarters for the presidential family.

There are 16 rooms and six bathrooms on the second floor. International leaders are welcome to stay on this floor, where the president, first lady and their children reside.

But we can give you a closer look...

Yellow Oval Room

Located on the second floor, the Yellow Room is the third oval room found in the White House. This room is not available on tours, as it is in the private residence of the presidential family and is often used as a sitting room. 

It is actually the same room that was used as Fillmore's initial library before Jackie Kennedy moved it.

Treaty Room

The original Cabinet Room in 1890 was converted into the Monroe Room by President Herbert Hoover in 1940 after the West Wing became the home to Executive Offices.

Kennedy rechristened the room as the Treaty Room in 1962 and installed a table that once belonged to Ulysses S. Grant. The 1869 Pottier & Stymus table has been used to sign numerous treaties, including the one that ended the Spanish-American War.

Residence Kitchen

Although the First Family can order anything they'd like from the White House kitchen, the Executive Residence includes a private kitchen for the family to make snacks and quick meals.

Lincoln's Bedroom & Sitting Room

Another famous room in the White House (said to be haunted by the ghost of Abraham Lincoln) is the Lincoln Bedroom . Located on the second floor, this once served as Lincoln's office.

Harry S. Truman had the room converted into a bedroom for guests, decorated with furnishings from Mary Todd Lincoln, herself.

Queen's Bedroom & Sitting Room

Another guest bedroom is the Queen's Bedroom , where Winston Churchill stayed while meeting with FDR.

Located on the second floor, across the hall from the Lincoln Bedroom, a mirror presented to Truman by then-Princess Elizabeth in 1951 still hangs in the room.

Master Bedroom

The Master Bedroom is another one that gets an interior makeover every time a new presidential family moves in here. In 1962, the Kennedys had separate bedrooms, and this room was originally Jackie's space (pictured).

Then, Gerald and Betty Ford made it a shared master bedroom in 1974, and it has remained as such ever since.

Living Room

Just like any family, the presidential family needs a place to relax and sit together to watch TV at the end of the day.

The private family living room is located next to the master bedroom on the second floor.

The Executive Residence Third Floor

The third floor of the White House is used as a relaxation space. You'll find indoor and outdoor relaxing spaces here as well as offices and sleeping space for the personal staff of the First Family.

Located on the roof, above the South Portico, is the Residence's Solarium . It was originally created as a sleeping room for Taft, who liked fresh air at night.

Indoors is a private living space for the presidential family, while outdoors they can enjoy basking in the sun and even grilling , as Dwight D. Eisenhower was known to do.

Truman Balcony

Now famous as a place where the First Family may wave and preside over events taking place on the South Lawn, the South Portico didn't originally feature a balcony. Instead, awnings hung over the doorway below.

During Truman's renovation, the horseshoe-shaped balcony was added, which is why it is known as the Truman Balcony .

Recreation available to the First Family includes a game room, where a pool table has been a fixture since Reagan's era, as seen in this photo.

Billiards have been popular for many presidents, with tables found in different locations until this former bedroom space was converted into a permanent game room.

Also a former bedroom, the Music Room was added in the 1990s for the Clintons.

President Clinton was known to play the sax, and this room gave him a quiet place to play. (Plus, it is soundproof.)

Grand Staircase

The Grand Staircase is where the president descends from his quarters on the second floor to greet his guests awaiting in the Entrance Hall on the State Floor.

It, too, was completed during Truman's renovation — the fourth staircase to occupy the space — and meant to provide a "grand" entrance.

45-Second Commute

The West Colonnade walkway connects the Executive Residence to the West Wing and the Oval Office.

Passing by the Rose Garden, the walk is referred to as the president's 45-second commute.

The West Wing First Floor

The West Wing is considered the executive offices of the White House and is where day-to-day business functions take place.

Tours are available to some of the rooms, again, only by request through Congressional staff.

The Cabinet Room

Day-to-day meetings and discussions with the president take place in the Cabinet Room . The president sits in the middle of the table as members of the appointed cabinet of ministers meet.

Those sitting in this room include the Vice President, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Labor, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Transportation, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Secretary of Energy, Secretary of Education, Secretary of Homeland Security, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the CIA, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Administrator of the Small Business Administration, Office of Management and Budget, and a Trade Representative.

At Great Heights

In both the Cabinet Room and the Roosevelt Room, the smaller meeting room located outside of the Oval Office, the chair in which the president sits is higher than the other chairs around the meeting table.

The Roosevelt Room was the original office of the president and became a waiting room once the Oval Office was built. The room is often used to announce nominations and appointments of staff. Named for FDR, the original nickname of the room was the Fish Room, as FDR displayed fishing mementos and an aquarium in the room.

The Situation Room

In times of crisis, the president meets his team and intelligence in the National Security Council's room, known as the Situation Room.

Located on the ground floor of the West Wing, the room was created after the Bay of Pigs. With televisions, video systems and other forms of real-time communication, this is where presidents may receive the current information on what is taking place, unlike what occurred during Kennedy's failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs.

Vice President's Office

The vice president keeps an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is located across the street from the House.

However, some VPs choose to be closer to the action and use this space dedicated to them, located just down the corridor from the president.

Chief of Staff's Office

Opposite the Vice President's Office and just down the hallway from the Oval Office is the Chief of Staff's Office.

This space is often used for more casual daily meetings.

Brady Briefing Room

Perhaps the most recognized space of those not privy to the interior of the White House, the Brady Briefing Room is the press room used to deliver the news. Although there are nearly 200 members of the White House press corps, the room has chairs for less than 50. The White House Correspondents Association determines who gets a seat.

The briefing room was installed by Richard Nixon and renamed in honor of James S. Brady, Ronald Reagan's press secretary who was shot and permanently disabled while shielding the president from an attempted assassination in 1981.

Press Corps Offices

You see the press gathers during briefings, but they also can use office space within the West Wing. Here, they can make calls and get stories written and sent to their editors.

In 2007, a Radio Row was added to allow for live broadcasts behind soundproof doors.

The number of press members has grown so large that additional office space was added to the ground floor.

The West Wing Ground Floor

Below the Oval Office is a host of amenities for the press, security and the Situation Room, where the president and his advisors meet in times of national security issues.

Below the Briefing Room

Below the Briefing Room is an indoor swimming pool that was installed by FDR for his physical therapy. There is a staircase behind the Briefing Room stage that leads to the now-empty pool.

Hundreds of miles of cable to keep the press connected is now located found here — and the walls are covered with the signature graffiti of former White House staff.

Secret Service Room

The Secret Service has its own office with monitors of every square inch of the White House.

From this room, the Secret Service can see the location of every person on the property and keep a close eye on the president, first lady, vice president and visiting dignitaries.

The West Wing is home to the White House's very own restaurant . Known as the Navy Mess and Ward Room and managed by the Navy, it's located in the West Wing's ground floor.

A mess hall has been in service for the White House since 1951 when it was proposed by Naval Aide to the President, Rear Admiral Robert L. Dennison. It even has a takeout window for on-the-go orders.

The East Wing Second Floor

The two-story East Wing , built in 1942, serves as the entrance into the White House. Visitors go through security on the ground floor, where above, the offices and meeting rooms of the First Lady lie.

Prior to the wing's construction, the space held a greenhouse.

The First Lady's Office

Like the president, the First Lady has her own staff , which includes a chief of staff, a social secretary and a press secretary. She also manages the chief floral designer and the executive chef.

All staff serving the First Lady have offices in the East Wing.

The Calligraphy Room

Yes, there is a room dedicated to calligraphy in the White House.

Here, there is a chief calligrapher and two deputies who hand-write invitations, greetings, awards, proclamations, military commissions and place cards for state dinners and events.

East Wing Ground Floor

There are more offices found on the ground floor of the East Wing as well as two different rooms for welcoming guests.

The family enjoys its own theater within the East Wing.

Originally, the room was a coatroom until FDR converted it into a movie theater. Reagan, a former film star, remodeled it in the 1980s to include tiered rows with 51 seats.

Garden Room

Located on the ground floor of the Residence leading to the East Wing, this corner room overlooks the Jackie Kennedy Garden. 

This is often the place tour groups will meet before receiving their tour of the White House and is often referred to as the Visitor's Foyer.

Heading Outside

The famous Rose and Kennedy Gardens that flank the outdoor corridors to the East and West Wings were added by nature-lover Thomas Jefferson. 

In addition to them, the White House offers a host of outdoor amenities for the families and staff.

Basketball and Tennis

The White House tennis courts were originally installed in 1902, behind the West Wing, but moved to their current location in 1909, after the West Wing was expanded.

Nearby, a small basketball court was not big enough for a full-court game, so Barak Obama had the tennis courts converted into both a tennis and basketball court during his presidency.

In 2020, Melania Trump unveiled plans to construct a tennis pavilion and remove some of the holly trees surrounding the court to let in more light and remove shadows.

Kitchen Garden

Installed by Michelle Obama, the White House got its first kitchen garden in 2009. Providing locally grown food for the presidential family, the garden is 2,800 square feet and filled with vegetables.

The First Lady invites local children to assist with the harvesting of seasonal vegetables in an effort to promote healthy eating.

The White House's outdoor pool was added by Gerald Ford in 1975. An avid swimmer, Ford didn't want to relocate the press room by reopening the indoor pool and chose to build a new pool. 

Its hot tub was added by Hilary Clinton in the 1990s.

The Children's Garden

The Children's Garden , created by Lady Bird Johnson, features the handprints of presidential grandchildren and is an enclosed and quiet space of reflection.

You'll find the handprints of the grandchildren of Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush set into plaques.

The Rose Garden

As the White House was renovated in 1902, a conservatory was removed. First Lady Edith Roosevelt demanded a garden for her roses. 

This West Garden is just outside the Oval Office and features tulips, hyacinth, boxwood and other flowering plants surrounded by shrubs.

Jacqueline Kennedy Garden

Jackie Kennedy wanted to continue developing gardens for the White House to keep in tradition with its 18th century look. 

The East Garden was named in her honor by Lady Bird Johnson in 1965.

How to Visit the White House

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I’ve been traveling to Washington, D.C. almost every week for work for the past three months. A couple weeks ago, on my last day in the D.C., I finally got to visit the White House!

It was the perfect way to end my time in D.C. and I highly recommend that anyone visiting D.C. comes to the White House.

However, visiting the White House is not a very simple or straightforward process, which is why I’ve written this guide to help you plan your visit!

How to Request a Tour of the White House

Tours of the White House are free and self-guided.

The first thing you will need to do is submit a tour request through your congressional representative. You can click here to look up who your representative is.

You can request a tour up to three months in advance, and no later than 21 days in advance (although I actually did not make my request until 17 days before my tour date and was still able to visit.)

Tours occur Tuesday through Thursday from 7:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and Fridays and Saturdays from 7:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. (excluding federal holidays.)

The more flexibility you have in your schedule, the better chance you have of getting a tour. Try to request as early as you can because dates fill up quickly on a first come, first served basis.

My tour was on a Thursday morning at 7:30 a.m.

Once your request has been submitted, you will receive an email (NOT a confirmation of your tour) and you will need to register all your guests who are attending.

If you are not a U.S. citizen, you can request a White House tour by contacting your country’s embassy in D.C.

Getting Confirmed for Your Tour

Once your tour request has been submitted, you can expect to receive confirmation two to three weeks before your tour date.

It personally took eight days for me to receive confirmation for my tour (which was a little over a week before my tour date.)

In your confirmation email, you will receive instructions about the tour, including a “Boarding Pass” that you must print before your tour and bring with you.

What to Bring to the White House

Here’s what you CAN bring to the White House, according to the official government website:

• Valid government-issued ID such as driver’s license or passport (you need to bring this if you are 18 and over)
• Cellphones (still photography IS allowed, just no video or streaming)
• Small cameras with a lens less than 3 inches long
• Umbrellas without metal tips
• Any items needed for medical purposes

And here’s what you CAN’T bring to the White House:

• Video cameras, cameras with detachable lenses, tablets, iPads, tripods, monopods, and selfie sticks
• Any kind of bag (no purses, backpacks, camera bags, clutches, etc.)
• Food and beverages
• Any type of weapon

See the full list right here.

Basically, just bring as little with you as you can (phone and ID) and leave the rest at your hotel!

What’s on the Tour?

The self-guided tour starts in the East Wing of the White House, which is where the visitor’s reception area is. You will walk through the East Colonnade and East Garden Room before arriving in Center Hall.

From there, you can see the following rooms on the ground floor of the White House:

• Vermeil Room
• The Library

Then you can go upstairs and walk through the following rooms:

• East Dining Room
• State Dining Room

You finish in Cross Hall (the perfect place for a photo op in front of the Blue Room!) and the Entry Hall, then exit out to Lafayette Square.

There are Secret Service agents posted in every room who are there to answer any questions you might have about the White House and its history.

Can You Tour the West Wing?

The West Wing of the White House, home to the famous Oval Office and Situation Room, is not part of the public self-guided tour.

Tours of the West Wing are typically reserved for VIPs and your best bet of getting one is knowing someone who works in the White House.

White House Christmas Tour

Christmas is one of the most popular times of the year to visit the White House, due to its fantastic Christmas decorations!

There are themed Christmas trees in almost every room, along with plenty of other holiday decorations.

Unfortunately, I was about a week too early to see the Christmas decorations, but if you’re visiting after Thanksgiving and before the second week of January, you should be able to see them.

How to Get to the White House

If you aren’t staying within walking distance of the White House, you can take the Metro. The closest stations are Federal Triangle, Metro Centre, and McPherson Square.

There’s no public parking at the White House, but you may be able to find paid parking nearby.

The visitor’s entrance to the tour is on 15th Street at Hamilton Place. Plan to arrive 15 minutes in advance for your tour and dress for the weather because you will have to spend some time waiting outside.

Miscellaneous Thoughts and Impressions

• I didn’t bring my DSLR camera to the White House because it has a detachable lens. If you have a DSLR, you will want to leave it behind and rely on your cellphone camera or a camera with an attached lens instead.
• My tour was at 7:30 a.m. before I went to work for the day. I was surprised by how quickly I went through the tour. Altogether, I was only inside for under half an hour. Of course, you could spend longer if you wanted to.
• You will end up waiting outside for probably 15 to 20 minutes, so be sure to dress for the weather! On my tour day, it was quite cold in the morning and I saw some people who looked like they were freezing.
• I was surprised by how “plain” a lot of the White House is, at least compared to extravagant residences like Versailles. The interior of the White House is understated and elegant.
• Talk to the Secret Service agents! They can answer almost any question you have about the White House and its history, and they are stationed in every room on the tour.
• There is a visitor’s center outside the White House that you can visit when you’re done with your tour. It’s also a good alternative if you aren’t able to schedule a tour.

I hope you found this guide on how to visit the White House helpful!

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About Denise Cruz

Denise is a marketing executive who escaped corporate to travel the world… twice. A Brazilian native living in the U.S., she’s lived in 4 countries and visited 35+ others. After side-hustling her way to financial independence, she curates solo destination guides, slow travel tips, and travel blogging advice on Wander Her Way. When she’s not on the road, you can find her in Miami with her dog Finnegan.

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We had tickets last year for the East Wing tour but they closed down for hours and with the delay we couldn't stay. A friend who works there arranged for a West Wing tour this visit, and it was wonderful. We got to see the cabinet room, Roosevelt room, go by the situation room and the Navy mess hall, and out to the rose garden. Then we went to the press room where photos were allowed. The Obama photos on the hallways were very impressive. I'd seen Bill Clinton's at his library, but the ones being made of Obama are even more impressive. A great experience.

Really nice tour. Relative went and ended up getting an invitation to the 4th of July party!

It's incredibly frustrating to get an appointment to the White House (they only give you a specific date and time like 2 weeks in advance so it makes it hard to plan the rest of your trip), it is so worth it. It's only about an hour long tour with security and viewing the different rooms, but it can be longer if you have questions. The people in the room (I don't know if they are secret service or just guides or what exactly they are) are SO knowledgeable. And quite comical as well (most of them at least). They have some great stories and information if you take the time to ask them some questions. It's really neat to see places the president and other people use, to see where the state dinners occur, and other things is really cool to me. You can feel the history and the present happening all at once it's an incredible place to see. Make sure to contact your local congress person well in advance to try to get a tour. It is well worth it.

Didn't get in, But, Well, I can cross it off my list. Pretty iconic place to see, from both views, in front and walk around to the back. A must see when in DC

I enjoy the white house from outside the gate because white house tour was took long of wait.

White house with Lush green place with full of security

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The East and West Wings of the White House

History in Architecture and Building

Copyright © Summer 2011 White House Historical Association. All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this article may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Requests for reprint permissions should be addressed to [email protected]

On a cold March 11, 1809, Thomas Jefferson paid the ferryman $1 to take him and his carriage across the Potomac River at Georgetown and headed south toward retirement. What he left behind at the President’s House were unfulfilled dreams of remodeling the still-unfinished mansion and completing its partly built domestic service wings, which were entirely his idea. It is ironic, in retrospect, that these wings, with their zigzag roofs and flat terrace platforms, would become his physical heritage there, because they have been mostly forgotten.

If the White House is, as the historian William Seale has written, “an American Idea,” 1 it includes one of Jefferson’s most tenacious architectural ideas— domestic service wings. Jefferson did not invent the concept but borrowed it from those seen attached to Renaissance villas in Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture (1570). Domestic service wings appear in Jefferson’s earliest drawings for his bookish Palladian- style home, Monticello, built in the early 1770s. Placing domestic outbuilding functions in wings gave order to what would have been the typical scattered backyard arrangement of necessary buildings; more important for Jefferson, it saved the space for ornamental landscaped gardens. He adapted the same ideal for the White House.

Urban houses of pretense needed the same domes- tic services as large country houses. In America those functions were squeezed into backyard spaces as connected or detached buildings, while in Europe they filled the lowest floor and continued into connected wings or were separated and grouped as service courts. The overall service requirements of the White House amplified those of even large urban American houses on small lots like the ones George Washington and Jefferson had used in Philadelphia. Pierre Charles L’Enfant, in his famous plan for the Federal City, had, in fact, indicated a palace-derived solution for the White House with greatly extended wings and terraced ensembles. Washington, however, especially liked James Hoban’s Irish Georgian house design and declared it the winner of the architectural competition for the President’s House in 1792. 2 Historians have indicated that Washington and Hoban actually discussed wings on the house, but details are not known and Hoban confined the immediate service needs to the basement story of the White House. 3 He probably rationalized that typical food-related functions could be supplemented through daily trips to the local meat and produce market, as indeed happened.

When President John Adams arrived in Washington to move into the White House in november 1800, there were no separate service structures except for simple brick stables two blocks away; the grounds held only workers’ sheds. It was up to him and Mrs. Adams to make the unfinished brick and stone interior shell habitable. The basement, containing work and chamber spaces for cooks, housekeepers, and servants, probably seemed more cozy and finished than the principal rooms above. Adams’s addition to the house consisted of rickety wooden stairs to a scabbed-on wooden balcony that gave the public unintended access to the south entrance of the house. When Jefferson replaced John Adams as president in 1801, he quietly slipped into a shell of a house still reeking of fresh plaster. His creative design propensities must have been stoked as never before.

White House Remodeling

Thomas Jefferson never resided in any house very long without altering it to suit his ever-developing taste for comfort and convenience. The incomplete interior of the White House presented him with a remodeling opportunity he had already practiced in Williamsburg, Paris, new York, and Philadelphia. 4 This practice on landlords’ houses later paid dividends when he remodeled Monticello, constructed his idealistic villa retreat Poplar Forest in Bedford Country, Virginia, and eventually created his largest work, the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. 5 While his remodeling skill bore mostly unrealized fruit in his interior plans for the White House, the two service wings he added established an important link to his three most personal projects and represent an enduring experiment in architecture.

Probably even before Jefferson took up residence in the White House, his creative mind whirred with ideas of how to tweak the large Georgian pile. What he had been given as a starting point was a house of generous size with domestic services confined to the basement story and flanking government buildings about 500 feet to the east and west. The mostly barren shell vacated by John and Abigail Adams was a tabula rasa , as were the grounds around the house, facilitating the amateur architect’s fertile imagination to produce remodeling solutions to the former and initial plans for the latter.

To Jefferson’s dismay, domestic necessities such as shelters for fowl, goats, and cows had begun to supplant the workers’ shanties that had sprung up around the house during construction. Jefferson found other needs wanting. The stables were two blocks distant; guests and servants shared an exterior privy; keeping ice was difficult without an ice house; the basement offered inadequate storage for wood and coal; and other functions such as a hen house and smokehouse were needed and best placed outside the basement. Jefferson’s solution to put these functions in wings developed from his use of attached Palladian-style service wings at Monticello. To accomplish this would take time, congressional budget approval, and a capable construction superintendent. The latter job fell to Benjamin Henry Latrobe as surveyor of the public buildings and his assistant John Lenthall. 6

Jefferson had corresponded with Latrobe since 1798, most likely meeting him in Philadelphia about that time, and had first hired him in 1802 to study the Tiber Creek Canal between the White House and the Capitol and then to design a dry dock for the fledgling U.S. navy on the Anacostia River at the base of Capitol Hill. Having confirmed Latrobe’s skills as the most accomplished, and arguably the only, professional architect and engineer in America, Jefferson hired him in March 1803 as surveyor of the public buildings, a position he held until 1811.

Latrobe’s initial task at the White House was to replace a leaking roof of slate embedded in mortar and gutters that were letting buckets of water into the house, threatening to destroy the few newly installed architectural finishes. Jefferson also called upon Latrobe to fix the two new water closets on the Second Floor that were fed from rain-collecting cisterns in the attic. Jefferson redesigned the grand, but unbuilt, west stair- case that Latrobe would construct off-axis in order to open the vista and public access to the terrace promenade once there was a wing built to support it. A similar glass door was retrofitted in the similar eastern Serliana or venetian window for east wing terrace access. Jefferson’s other interior plans to fashion a French three- room chamber and study suite on the First Floor were never accomplished but are shown on plans by Latrobe. 7 What Jefferson focused on and pursued to at least par- tial completion were the domestic service or “office” wings and their intended connection to the flanking federal buildings.

Jefferson began remodeling with the easiest, yet important, projects related to convenience and service: replacing the outdoor privy with two indoor water closets from Philadelphia; establishing a cooled wine cellar; hanging service bells throughout the house; upgrading the kitchen for his French chef by installing stew stoves, boilers, and ranges; and having the unsightly and dangerous south stairs removed in favor of a bridge-like entrance on the north side of the house, which had been intended for public access. Jefferson did keep Adams’s scabbed-on wooden balcony as a temporary outdoor room from which to view the distant Potomac basin’s wilderness, quickly disappearing beyond the already denuded White House grounds. Later he could enjoy the outdoors on his own terraces, but the view would remain less than scenic.

The Domestic Service Wings

Jefferson’s solution to the deficiencies of the White House came from his own house rather than from the sophisticated Paris town houses where he resided in the 1780s. His plan drawing of c. 1804 shows what he wanted (illustrations 16, 17). These drawings were first published by the architect and architectural historian Fiske Kimball in Thomas Jefferson, Architect (1916), a monumental work that established Jefferson as an accomplished self-trained architect in addition to his myriad other capabilities. onto each side of the White House he proposed attached service wings, commonly called “offices.” These wings, partially set into the grade on their north or public side, would expand east and west as needed, or as funded, until they joined the Treasury Department building on the east and the War Department building on the west (illustration 15). The common thread visibly connecting these segments on the south would be a Tuscan order colonnade that provided a covered walkway. Jefferson’s drawing also shows a 100 foot section of parallel wings to the south of the main block at the east and west ends, intended for government clerks’ offices for the Treasury and War Departments, to which they connected. Latrobe’s advocacy of fireproof construction influenced Jefferson to designate the extremities of the wings, opposite the span of proposed clerks’ offices, for fireproof storage rooms for each department. This lateral expansion to each side of the White House served to visibly connect the three existing federal buildings in an American way, stretched out horizontally in the wide-open space. 8 The grouping of services in these wings left the large, ungraded expanse south of the house for Jefferson’s private landscape mixture of formal and picturesque features (illustrations 11, 12).

Kimball’s book also depicted Monticello’s prototypical north and south colonnaded wings. The difference in function between these and the White House wings had to do with what was already housed in the basements and the scope and function of each house. The common denominator was service. Monticello’s daily routine and its economy depended upon enslaved servants. Jefferson’s preference at the White House was for paid servants. 9 Monticello’s wings captured most of the economic and domestic functions of a large Virginia plantation that ordinarily existed as separate buildings arranged hierarchically in the surrounding and distant landscape. Jefferson’s imitation of Palladio’s domestic service wings reserved the surrounding grounds for picturesque pleasure gardens as well as making the linked and covered buildings convenient.

The White House wing plans can be scaled for size because of a drafting convention Jefferson learned in Paris. The famous antiquarian architect Charles-Louis Clérisseau taught Jefferson the architectural drafting advantages of using pencil on carpetmakers’ point paper. Jefferson thereafter used this ruled graph paper (which became standard for architects in the twentieth century) as a visible scale in architectural drawing. The paper consisted of a grid of large red lines containing ten small squares between them. Typically, for Jefferson, each small square equaled 1 foot. Thus this “decimal” paper required no scale rule or written dimensions for understanding scaled size. By scaling Jefferson’s White House wing plan with this method, one can see that he is placing the intended columns on 10 foot centers with door and window openings centered between them. The interior room wall divisions are also centered on the columns, with some larger rooms necessarily being a double or a multiple of the 10 foot module. The first sections of the wings, separated 20 feet from the main house wall, were meant to be 24 feet wide and 150 feet long. The plan shows partially penciled walls, indicating the subsequent extension to the adjacent federal buildings and the parallel row of clerks’ offices. Jefferson’s precision on the graph paper can be seen in the thickness of the brick walls dividing each room, which are shown to be about 6 inches less than two squares, or about 18 inches, being the standard size of a 2 wythe thick wall using standard 81⁄2 inch long handmade brick with a mortar joint of about 1⁄2 inch. 10 In this scaled method, the room sizes are as follows: on the west the wine cellar was 18 feet in diameter, the wood room with coal cellar, 8 feet wide; the necessary, 9 feet; the saddle room, 81⁄2 feet; the servant’s room 18 feet; and the coach house 58 feet. on the east the meat house with vault below was 131⁄2 feet; the cellar stairs, 31⁄2 feet; the necessary, 8 feet; the servant’s room, 18 feet; the hen house, 18 feet; and the stables, 58 feet.

Jefferson’s first addition was neither in the house nor in the wings but an exterior ice house constructed just west of the house in 1801. Some functions might wait, but those related to the quality of food and drink could not! This 18 foot round by 16 foot deep structure was not unlike the ice house constructed as part of the north wing at Monticello in 1802. Jefferson’s memorandum book notes that he paid for filling the White House ice house in 1802 and for carpentry work by John Lennox the same year. 11 The work by Lennox could be for any or all of the tasks of constructing the ice house roof, for an internal platform, or for an enclosure that appeared by 1803. The ice house was then joined to the west side of the basement level by what must have been a simple frame structure that also served to shelter the preexisting well just west of the house.

This was more than simply an ice house, however. Having no deep cellars in the basement posed a problem for keeping expensive drink at cool temperatures.

Apparently the subject became one of anecdote, as Sir Augustus John Foster mentioned in his travel memoir that the ice house–wine cellar had been occasioned after President Jefferson experienced “great losses in wine” from inadequate storage in the basement. 12 Latrobe also gossiped of Jefferson’s losses when, in a letter to William Lee, he shared his opinion that, due to the absence of an original underground cellar, “Mr. Jefferson lost 800 bottles of Crab cider for want of one” and that “a good provision [for a] cider and beer cellar never existed in the house.” 13 To prevent further loss of pre- cious liquors, Jefferson had a platform fitted out inside the ice house as a sort of wine cellar room that had impressed Foster enough to remark on its temperature relative to the heat outside. Latrobe lamented that “the wine cellar in the West wing is fit for nothing but wine” but that the “present kitchen will admirably supply the deficiency [for beer and cider].” 14

Digging for the west wing began in the summer of 1804 under the direction of architect and engineer Latrobe and his assistant and construction supervisor Lenthall, the same team working on the Capitol construction under Jefferson’s supervision. Jefferson had chosen the right man to undertake the most complex of American building projects. While the completion of the Capitol and the President’s House was his primary responsibility, Latrobe found that he first needed to supervise emergency rebuilding on both buildings. 15 He had promptly engaged builder John Lenthall as his assistant, beginning an interesting correspondence among the three regarding both building projects, with Lenthall serving as an outlet for Latrobe’s frequent frustrations with the architect-president.

Latrobe and Jefferson found themselves intellectual and architectural soul mates of a sort, while Latrobe and Lenthall bonded over details of building construction. In the beginning, at least, Latrobe was taken with Jefferson, writing home to his wife after a White House dinner in 1802: “It is a long time since I have been present at so elegant a mental treat. Literature, wit, and a little business, with a great deal of miscellaneous remarks on agriculture and building, filled every minute. There is a degree of ease in Mr. Jefferson’s company that every one seems to feel and to enjoy.” 16 The honeymoon would soon be over, however, when Jefferson’s architectural ideas and taste clashed with Latrobe’s over certain building concepts and construction details.

Construction of the White House wings in 1805 marked the beginning of a restrained and testy relation- ship between Latrobe and Jefferson. Responding to Jefferson’s early concern for a seamless height and connection of the wings from the White House to the Treasury and War Department buildings, Latrobe wrote, “I find many difficulties in the arrangement of the connecting porticos of the public offices with the President’s houses which however I do not despair of conquering.” 17 Still, Latrobe found that this collab- oration of his own architectural taste and reason with Jefferson’s as “damned hard work” and confessed, “I have bestowed much labor upon them [designs for the wings] already, and find myself exceedingly puzzled how to determine the exact mode of accommodating the two ends of the wing between the President’s house and the Treasury to each other so as to answer the object of each in the best manner.” 18

In a letter to Lenthall, Latrobe complained of the difficulty of aligning the east wing deck level with the flanking Treasury fireproof wing at a higher grade level. Latrobe lashed out in frustration and famously remarked: “I am sorry that I am cramped in this design by his [Jefferson’s] prejudices in favor of the old French books, out of which he fishes everything, but it is a small sacrifice to my personal attachment to him to humor him, and the less so, because the style of the Colonnade he proposes is exactly coincident with Hoban’s Pile,—a litter of pigs worthy of the great Sow it surrounds, and of the Irish boar, the father of her.” 19 When Latrobe accidentally addressed the letter to Jefferson, Jefferson returned it stating he had not read it. Latrobe then wrote, somewhat embarrassed, to Lenthall: “The president, might have very safely read the whole of my last letter to you, even to the litter of pigs. He is certainly one of the best hearted men that ever came out of the hand of nature and has one of the best heads too.” 20 An indication that Jefferson actually did read Latrobe’s reference to “old French books” is a letter Jefferson wrote in 1807 asking Latrobe for the return of his Kraft and Ransonnette book on the mansions of Paris, saying: “Being about to build some little temples in my grounds at Monticello, I must pray the return of the Plans des Maisons des Paris . . . as I expect to find some good designs in that.” 21 In other words, Jefferson planned a fishing expedition in new (1801) French books.

The first portion of wings, east and west, appeared by the end of 1805 under Lenthall’s supervision. When Latrobe submitted the surveyor’s annual report on the public buildings to the president and Congress, part 3 of that report addressed the White House: “At the President’s House two small buildings have been erected, containing some of those domestic offices without which that building could not conveniently be inhabited. They contain a meathouse, cellars for liquors, coal and wood, and privies, and are intended to be faced to the South by a covered passage, or colonnade. Further menial offices, and some of them of the first necessity, are still wanted, before the dwelling of the President of the United States will be provided with all those domes- tic accommodations which are required by most private citizens.” 22

Evidence for the Design of the Wings

Were these first sections of the White House wings, with later “menial” and subsequent sections, constructed according to Jefferson’s original plan? Did Latrobe influence changes to what Jefferson designed and intended? Did President James Monroe and the architect James Hoban alter the original design after the 1814 fire? This article is the first to seriously address these questions. To decipher the answers, a rather detailed account must be given to support an interpretation that stands on the variety of sources. The best answer to all of these questions requires some historical sleuthing based on the analysis of different sets of relevant evidence: Jefferson’s c. 1804 drawing of the intended wings; drawings and written references to the wings during construction; Hoban’s account of rebuild- ing the wings in 1817; the earliest known post-Jefferson wing plan drawing, by the architect Thomas U. Walter from 1853; and illustrations and photographs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially photo- graphs of White House renovation projects from 1969. The myriad sources and types of evidence are not always in perfect corroboration, but they have been assembled and reassembled to test all the possible hypotheses and present the case that is best supported. 23

Correspondence among Jefferson, Latrobe, and Lenthall implies that Jefferson’s initial design was stubbornly adhered to despite Latrobe’s personal preferences. one of many lengthy letters indicates that Latrobe worked from Jefferson’s design but was producing working drawings, more or less in accord with Jefferson’s drawing, for Lenthall’s use. Latrobe wrote Lenthall during the initial season of building:

As to the president’s calculations of his coal cellars, pray don’t plague yourself about them, nor about the necessary. You have my ground plan; let that be your guide & of what consequence is it, whether there be a foot or two more or less for coals or dung provided there be the room enough. now the president’s 20 feet, are two spaces of 10 feet, whereas my two spaces make only 19'6"—& my are produced by the actual division of the spaces allotted for the Colonnade into equal parts & his are assumption near the truth and as to the door & windows, it is also only of consequence whether they fall centrically into the intercolumni- ations or not, but of none at all whether they fall symmetrically internally. 24

Latrobe considered his own drawings the more accurate ones for Lenthall to follow while reconciling Jefferson’s ideal design regularity to the reality of wall thicknesses and the practical space in each room. Walter’s plan, subsequent plans, and what is still stand- ing of the west wing confirm that exterior appearance and style did matter. Door and window openings were centered between each Tuscan column on the south (the columns did not come until 1808) and between the evenly spaced lunette windows on the north. That this design trumped internal room division walls is at the heart of the matter for understanding changes. Latrobe’s mention of rooms 10 feet wide does not match the sur- viving Jefferson plan and indicates either some missing updated drawings by Jefferson or some tweaking by Latrobe.

The 1805 report to Congress describes the first wing segments as “two small buildings” containing a “meathouse, cellars for liquors, coal and wood, and privies” (illustrations 27, 28). Taken at face value, according to Jefferson’s plan, this description would include three spaces on each side: ice house, coal and wood room, and privy on the west; and meat house with vault, stairway, and privy on the east. Latrobe’s working drawings for the wings are not known to survive, and the later physical evolution of the wings makes it is hard to confirm this arrangement and size except for the first room on the west. Key to distinguishing between Jefferson’s intentions and Latrobe and Lenthall’s con- struction is Walter’s 1853 wing plan, the second oldest known after Jefferson’s (illustrations 16, 17).

While it offers a distant comparative view in time, we know that President James Madison was determined to rebuild the house and wings as they were before the fire, a symbolic gesture that also implied the already iconic nature of the house. Hoban left a pretty good description of the extent of the main house’s standing walls but not of the wings. The wing’s masonry walls, partially in-ground, might have withstood substantial destruction just like those of the basement. The Walter plan thus serves as one verifiable measure in addition to other evidence when determining the original room usage and size for the east and west wings.

on the west the subterranean ice house became re-enclosed in brick as part of the west wing in 1805. It constitutes the “room” and contained the wine cellar space referred to in the report to Congress as “cellar for liquors.” 25 The proposed Walter plan substantiates the ice house use and location in 1853, since its survival was structurally assured and its function easily reactivated after the fire.

In Jefferson’s plan next came the wood room with a coal cellar below. The period use of the term “cellar” did not necessarily mean a below-grade room but could denote any type of storage room or space. In this case, however, the Jefferson drawing labels this space “coal below, wood above.” What it does not indicate is how servants accessed the piles of Virginia Midlothian coal. 26 What seems odd on the Jefferson plan is the narrowness of the wood room and coal cellar, scaled to be about 8 feet wide. It is here that a reference in the above mentioned letter from Latrobe to Lenthall makes sense. Latrobe complained about the president’s “calculations of his coal cellars” and that a few inches difference in size for the cellars, be they for “coals or dung ,” did not matter. This reference seems to be linked to the one that immediately followed, referring to two spaces of 10 feet each. Jefferson apparently increased the size of the sec-ond room to 10 feet wide, a width that still worked with the exterior openings and made the adjacent necessary 10 feet wide. The lingering question is how anyone reached the below-grade cellar. The Walter plan shows a much larger second room of about 20 feet wide, the combination of Jefferson’s two rooms, that in later plans is still labeled as wood and coal storage.

Jefferson’s third space, the necessary or privy, Seale indicates was for servants on this side whereas the east privy would be reserved for the family and guests. 27 At 10 feet wide it might have been divided into two stalls but, one or two, was probably still “unisex,” as per the custom. Latrobe’s reference to cellars for “coal or dung ,” mentioned in relationship to rooms 10 feet wide, seems to confirm a combined cellar space for the coal cellar and privy waste removal. This combination works only for the west wing, but it does not resolve the question of access. A fourth room is unidentified and was probably used by servants.

A surviving drawing helps establish the size of the initial west wing (illustration 9). This drawing shows someone taking measurements of the existing house and wings. If it is related to working out the dimensions of Latrobe’s design of a pilaster and pier, it would date to 1807 or 1808. The west wing length given in this draw- ing is 50 feet. 28 This size accommodates five window or door bays and accounts for all three of the Jefferson designated spaces as well as an extra space on the end. on the Jefferson plan that fourth space is labeled “saddle room,” but at this period there were no stables in the west wing. Walter’s plan shows a necessary of about 12 feet wide, divided into two stalls with seats, but placed to the west of Jefferson’s necessary.

What complicates a reconciliation of the Jefferson and Walter plans is the odd fenestration shown in 1853. While we can expect the room division walls to vary from the regularity of the exterior features, four blind windows shown on Walter’s west wing plan for the first five bays produce an awkward collision with internal walls. It is here that other sources help sort out the contradictory evidence. These include a period drawing, personal and official correspondence, and physical evidence shown in photographs.

Latrobe drew a beautiful south elevation of the White House showing a proposed portico (illustration 18). It also shows four bays of the east and west wings at that time. on the west is pictured: a lunette window on the ice house wall; a doorway with typical lunette window above, another doorway, and a window. This fenestration would seem to support the Jefferson room plan and sequence of an ice house, a wood room, and a necessary.

Another piece of evidence is an unlikely photo- graph taken on november 28, 1969, by a White House photographer documenting three men digging out the west end of the west wing for Richard nixon’s new Press Room (illustration 22). The men are working below grade in a Piranesi-like view amid piles of dirt and fragments of masonry structures. While far from a suitable documentary recording of architectural evidence, this photograph sadly provides our known universe of physical evidence from which to interpret and test hypotheses of the initial west wing room plan.

The photograph clearly shows a round brick out- line of the ice house, the wing room most substantiated. By using the window and door bays as markers, it is possible to place the “ghosts” on the upper walls and the below-grade remains in a proper context despite the photograph’s warped perspective. on the right, the south wall, can be seen the first lunette window bay adjacent to the ice house, with a later doorway below it. To the right of that bay is the “ghost” of a missing wall that separated the ice house from room two. The second bay shows the sill of a doorway accessing the wood room that was later filled with brick. The third bay is shown as a doorway that would have accessed the necessary. These three bays confirm Latrobe’s elevation and the Jefferson plan. The evidence would seem to confirm the Walter plan’s depiction showing a window in bay two.

on the north side (left side of photograph) the ice house wall “ghost” is visible to the right, and continuing below window bay two. This defines the wall between the ice house and the wood room, whose walls are shown on the Walter plan as recessed for the original window and door to open into the room. on the wall to the right of window bay three (upper left foreground), and below to the right of the mason, is evidence of the missing wall between the wood room and the privy. This same wall also appears on the right side of the photograph in the foreground just below and east of the doorway (due to the perspective of the photograph things do not seem to align if the opening bays are not used as reference). This wall also establishes the eastern wall of room three, the necessary, whose full extent can- not be seen in the photograph. These walls for the original rooms two and three prove that the larger room shown in the Walter plan was created out of two earlier rooms. To the left of the mason is a lower brick wall that seems to be directly under the third window bay, with an arch springing from it.

In addition to showing five later period doorways, there are three things of interest in the photograph. First, at the far wall, the eastern end of the wing, a large masonry arch has been filled in. This arch presumably carried the weight of the wing’s eastern brick end wall above the ice house that protruded beyond it at a lower level. Constructed first, the ice house was covered by a wooden roof structure that was demolished when the wing was constructed, leaving the protruding wall that needed to be captured in the squared brick wing walls. The ice house might have been identical to that Jefferson constructed at Monticello at the same time, with a wooden roof structure below the level of the wing roof. 29 The original arch extended just to the south (right in the photograph) of the later doorway that was inserted in the filled wall when the ice house ceased to function.

Because the ice house is off-center to the north in the wing, there is room on its south side under the arch for space containing a stairway to be squeezed between the curved ice house wall and the south exterior wall. This is the most likely place for a narrow stairway accessing the cellar space below rooms two and three, and making sense of a cellar for “coals or dung .” Jefferson’s drawing hints at this arrangement by show- ing a south doorway in bay one, although with no indication of stairs. 30 The Walter plan does not show any access or stairs but simply a solid mass of masonry in this location. 31 The only reasonable access to cellars below would be a narrow stair space defining a third room, like that shown on the east wing plan, but nothing supports this scenario.

Finally, one perplexing bit of evidence in the photograph is the remains of two arches on the north side shown on either side of the mason. It would be reason- able to think that Jefferson might have created vaulted spaces for the coal cellar and/or a necessary clean-out. However, a letter from Latrobe seems to rule out this possibility. Latrobe remarked to Jefferson: “I regret that your Coal cellars were not arched. I have seen so much rotten timber in every building erected in Washington, that my passion to exclude it altogether grows upon me daily.” 32 The arches could have been added in the 1818 rebuilding to help support the combined spaces of rooms two and three for wood and coal storage. There is no means of a lower-level access in Walter’s plan, so the arches would not be for the necessary, which must have been cleaned from the space itself. 33 The other possibility is that the arches are relieving arches for the north wall, allowing the “Coal cellars” to extend beyond the wall into the higher north grade. As such, they would not have fit Latrobe’s definition of an arched floor like that designated for the meat house’s vaulted floor.

For the east wing a comparison of the Jefferson and Walter plans can be made, but the photographic and physical evidence is lacking due to that wing’s demolition in 1866. Jefferson’s plan calls for room one to be “Meat house above, vault below,” room two as “Descent into cellar” stairway, and room three as “necessary.” All three functions are mentioned in the 1805 report. What is seen on Walter’s plan is consistent with Jefferson’s room use and sequence but shows the rearranging of internal room walls to achieve a larger meat house and necessary.

“Meat house” was a term contemporary with “smokehouse,” a structure where meats were smoked and salted for curing and then usually suspended from the rafters until needed. The difference with this meat house, due to Jefferson’s flat terrace roof above, was that it did not have the typical tall pyramidal peaked roof wherein the hams cured in the upper reaches of smoke. Did this meat house contain only hams smoked elsewhere? Two clues suggest that fires were actually made in the space. The “vault below” refers to a mason- ry vault of brick. This would not be necessary for constructing the floor above a cellar or for creating a ceiling above a cellar space, but it would be necessary if the floor structure needed to be fireproof for a fireplace or firepit in the room. The other possible clue to smoke being present is that the Walter plan shows a possible opening for ventilation on the west wall of this space facing the exterior passage between wing and house.

In two other applications where Jefferson created a low ceiling smokehouse under a terrace deck roof— Monticello and Poplar Forest—there was no apparent exit for smoke other than what seeped through the roof or deck. 34 The vault was not necessary for a fireproof floor since typical smokehouses had floors of dirt or brick. The vault not only made for a fireproof floor but created a cellar space below, as the stairway indicates. What the cellar was used for is unknown, although the proximity might indicate that it could have housed wood for the fires above. The possibility that the fireplace was located below the space seems to be negated by Jefferson’s use of the word “cellar,” which implies storage. The stairway, constituting the second room space, in addition to accessing the “cellar below,” could also have accessed the underside of the necessary where waste could be removed. Its window most certainly would have been used originally for light, as opposed to the blind window shown on the Walter plan.

The third space on Jefferson’s east plan was the “necessary” that, enlarged to 10 feet wide, might have accommodated two separate stalls for bench seats as shown in the Walter plan. Typically, Jefferson put louvers in his privy window openings for ventilation, but unfortunately his plan does not show windows and the Walter plan does not distinguish anything different in this opening.

In summary, it seems Jefferson stuck to his original plan but allowed for larger spaces (illustrations 27, 28). The first section of the west wing ended up as a five bay section, 50 feet long. The east was first a four bay section, 50 feet long. This arrangement seems to be con- firmed by the fact that in 1805 Jefferson mentioned that he wanted to extend the east wing by 60 feet and in 1807 mentioned extending the west wing 50 feet, giving each by 1809 their 100 foot lengths. 35 on the east this extension was accomplished in two sections: a stable space was added in 1806, and a carriage house was added to the end in 1809. The west wing did not get its matched extension until 1818.

The Roof Structure

The innovative significance of Jefferson’s service wings lies in their roof structure. To create his flat terrace—or what he called “terras”—roof deck or walking platform, Jefferson had experimented at Monticello with several ways to compress the roof structure by altering the ceiling joists of the rooms below. The roof needed to act in a typical manner to keep out water while giving support to the deck and rising to a minimal height, typically behind the entablature trim. It was important that the deck level be at the same level as the floor of the house from which one stepped. 36

Jefferson might have seen versions of flat roofs and terrace decks in Europe, where masonry “platform” roofs were more common, but his documented evolution of experimenting with different methods leads to the conclusion that he did invent his ultimate “terras” roof-deck construction. 37 Latrobe, who certainly knew European construction methods, called it the “President’s zig zag roof of sheet iron uniting all the good qualities of the pantile, without its bad ones.” 38 Latrobe had more than a passing interest in sheet iron for roofs, because he was partners with Samuel Mifflin in the first iron rolling mill in the United States and claimed to have been the first to use sheet iron for roof coverings. 39 Latrobe and Mifflin were providing sheet iron for Monticello in 1803 at the same time that they were busily producing it for both the White House and the Capitol. At the White House the iron was needed for a hasty retrofit to replace the leaking slate roof and gutters of Hoban’s roof.

Jefferson had ultimately settled on a compressed series of high and low ceiling joists for his wings that he called the ridge and gutter joists (illustrations 4, 5, 6). By spanning the closely spaced high and low joists with two layers of shingles, he created a miniature shingle roof that was hidden underneath the deck and at the same time acted as its support. If sheet iron was used, wide horizontal boards would be used to span the joists. Rain water fell through the cracks between deck boards to the sloped shingles or tin-covered boards below, where it was directed into the scooped-out wooden gutter joists that were pitched outward to carry it, by gravity, to one or both sides. In some instances the water was directed into cisterns, and at other times it fell out to the ground through scuppers in the entablature. 40 At the White House, hidden gutters directed water to tin pipes that ran down the outside of the room walls and from there it probably fed into cisterns in the basement, just as the main roof gutters delivered water into attic cis- terns that fed the interior water closets. As Latrobe put it to Lenthall, “[There are] cross gutters inside the [wing] wall, into which all the others piss , as you say.” 41

The Achilles’ heel of this system was the wooden gutter under the deck that stayed dark and damp and rotted. Jefferson solved this problem by using some sheet iron intended for the Capitol. Folded sheet iron was placed over the wooden ridges that overlapped, like a pantile roof, with inverted folded sheets in the gutters. Jefferson’s “terras” roof drawing for the White House shows a v-shaped gutter to accommodate the sheet metal. 42 The terrace deck above required a wooden cap on top of the ridge in order to hold and secure the perpendicular sleepers to which the deck boards would rest and fasten. Even with sheet iron covering the wood, the same longevity problem existed: the thin sheets of rolled iron could not be tinned like smaller sizes and had to be continually painted to be preserved.

The fixed deck not only kept air and sun out but also prevented maintenance, causing the iron sheet metal to rust or uncovered wood gutter joists to rot. Jefferson apparently first saw a similar use of sheet iron at General Samuel Smith’s modern house, Montebello, outside of Baltimore. In a letter to Latrobe in 1803, Jefferson asked him to stop to see the house with its flat roof that used iron sheet metal in gutters, being “the first and only example yet executed.” Jefferson asked Latrobe to examine it so that “it may furnish us, by the manner of its execution, information both as to what succeeds, and as to what may not succeed, and therefore is to be avoided, if anything about it does not succeed.” 43

There is no known further correspondence on the matter, but Jefferson proceeded with the sheet iron, and in fact had already ordered the material for Monticello’s roof. While he used sheet metal for gutters at the White House and later at the University of Virginia, he came to acknowledge its failure. Concerning a similar “terras” deck and zigzag roof on the 1815 service wing at Poplar Forest, Jefferson remarked that sheet iron was expensive (when not at federal expense) and lasted no longer than the thick wooden gutter joists, which at Poplar Forest was only ten years. 44 At Poplar Forest wood shingles spanned the high and low joists and directed rain water into the wooden gutters and out through scuppers in the entablature, where it fell to the ground. 45 Using sheath- ing boards covering with sheet iron rather than wooden shingles saved a great amount of labor. A surviving wing roof shingle found at Poplar Forest shows that they were not typical shingles but were specially made. Each pine shingle—and there were about nine thousand for a 100 foot long roof—had to be planed on four sides, cut with beveled tops and bottoms, and incised with two parallel 1⁄4 inch grooves on their faces to facilitate downward movement of water. The labor, it must be remembered, on Jefferson’s own projects at Monticello and Poplar Forest, was slave labor. At the University of Virginia in the 1820s, with state money, Jefferson experimented with even more versions of this system over the student rooms on The Lawn, sometimes with wood shingles and at other times with sheet metal in the gutter joists. 46

The sheet metal used in the White House roof gutters probably lasted until the British torched the place in 1814, but another typical type of failure before that pre- vented President James Madison from strolling or sitting on the deck as Jefferson had. Latrobe wrote Madison in 1812 that the “platforms covering the gutters were rot- ten and must be replaced.” 47 This message must have chagrined Madison, who had adopted one of Jefferson’s zigzag roof systems to create decks over the 1809 wings at his Montpelier. Whether they were replaced at the White House, or not, is hardly relevant because they would be burned in two years. When the wings were rebuilt by James Hoban in 1818, the roofs were copper. Whether Hoban constructed the roof structure with Jefferson’s joist system or simply constructed a low pitch rafter roof is unknown.

The Terrace Deck and Coach Houses

on April 22, 1805, Jefferson wrote to Latrobe with the request that his drawings of the wings be returned and asking for Latrobe’s comments so that the “offices” could begin. 48 About that time Latrobe wrote to his brother and mentioned two of his projects: “I shall this Year build wings to the president’s house of his own design (he is an excellent architect out of books by the bye, but loves the taste of Queen Elizabeth best), [and will build] additions to the Treasury offices.” 49 Just prior to sending a long critique of Jefferson’s “ own design ” along with his ideas, Latrobe confided in Lenthall that “neither my taste nor my reason could at first be made to yield acquiescence” to the architect-president. 50 In addition to a design improvement of terminating the colonnades with piers and pilasters rather than columns, Latrobe addressed two major issues: the difficulty of reconciling the wing roof deck height from the White House to the Treasury building on the eastern terminus, and the recommendation that the long 500 foot stretch of eventual service buildings on each side of the house needed to be broken up in the middle by a stables or coach house pavilion. The pavilion, he reasoned, would allow for more convenient north-south horse and carriage access, instead of going around the long wings. At the same time the messy stable yard could be accommodated farther away from the house. Further, the repetitive colonnade, Latrobe pointed out, allowed insufficient room for carriages to pass through.

Jefferson replied to Latrobe’s suggestions stating that the piers and pilasters were fine and that the pavilions were along the lines of his own thinking, but the terrace deck level was not negotiable: “nothing can be admitted short of the terras of the offices from the President’s House to the pavilions each way being absolutely in the level of the floor of the house. How it shall drop off from the last Pavilion to the Treasury, and gain from the West one to the War office is the difficulty of the art which will be worthy of you to conquer.” 51 Jefferson evidently felt very strongly on this point because when he directed construction of the 100 foot service wing at Poplar Forest, he adamantly stated the deck should be “in the level of the floor of the house.” 52 Jefferson’s stubborn reply was later echoed in a Latrobe letter over the debate of whether real stone or rough cast (stucco) was appropriate on the north side of the wing. Latrobe wrote to Lenthall: “The back front [north] of the presidents buildings must absolutely be in ashler, let him manage the south as he will; I shall oppose rough cast on the north side tooth and nail, at the Treasury end, where I am master [it will be ashler].” 53 Latrobe’s pencil sketch shows how he intended to accommodate the wing levels through an intermediate terrace deck level next to the house that gained height once over the wings proper with a low solid balustrade added to mask the difference (illustration 5). He also sketched a pier and pilaster design for any interruptions or terminations of the colonnades (illustration 10). otherwise, Latrobe faithfully carried out the ridge and gutter system sketched by Jefferson (illustrations 4, 6).

The visual clue to what Latrobe proposed as the “middle pavilion” is seen on a collaborative site plan drawing c. 1805 that evidently merged Jefferson’s design for wings and landscape with Latrobe’s counter- design with middle pavilions (illustration 13). The pen- cil drawing might have been the work of Jefferson’s architecture student Robert Mills, who was working in Latrobe’s office, with heavier ink overlays by Latrobe. 54 The pavilions are shown as wing segments cut up, turned perpendicular, and pulled apart with a generous pass-through space in between. They project north from the wing wall 35 feet, and each side bay is 35 feet wide. 55 The center portion is a carriage passage that, at a very generous 60 feet wide, would have spanned the different heights of north and south with a pitched and paved surface. Altogether the structure was 70 by 130 feet, a rather large building. At a later date, after 1806 by the indication of the east wing’s extension and the appearance of the Treasury fireproof, Latrobe’s hand is seen in the heavy overlay lines on the drawing that directs a major roadway from the north through this opening southeast toward his Pennsylvania Avenue gateway. 56

It is worth quoting a good portion of Jefferson’s reply to Latrobe’s critique and design suggestions, as it reveals the detailed level of Jefferson’s involvement as well as his polite reminder of who was in charge:

That the coach house cannot permanently remain where I have planned it, is certain because of the inconvenient distance a carriage would have to go from the South to the north front when the whole line of offices shall be closed. The upper floor of the Middle pavilions, level with the surface of the ground on the north side, and opening on it, must ultimately be destined for coachhouses. But I want a coach house immediately and hope we may the next year add 60 f. to this year’s work which may be conveniently used as a coach house, while the rest of the line is unclosed, and may be converted to any other use, when further calls for accommodations shall render it necessary to build as far as the center pavilions. The obstructions to the colonnade from the stables, may be prevented by giving them a north door, as horses will easily ascend or descend the terras on the north side. But the most difficult of all is the adjustment of the new connecting building to the different levels of the three existing buildings. nothing can be admitted short of the terras of the offices from the Pres.’s House to the pavilions each way being absolutely level of the floor of the house. How it shall drop off from the last Pavilion to the Treasury, and gain from the West one to the War office is the difficulty of the art which will be worthy of you to conquer. The depression of the Treasury floor favors eminently the giving the necessary height to the Treasury offices now to be built. By the bye, I observe in the drawings for the Treasury offices in mr. Gallatin’s hands, that the barrel of the vault runs lengthwise of the building, to wit, from East to West. I thought that you had concluded it would be better for them to run across the building from n. to S. so as to press against each other, and rest on piers or partition walls. These would take little from the internal room as they would serve to place presses against, and this arrangement would give large South windows; not indeed material for the Treasury offices now to be executed, but indispensable for those hereafter in which the officers and clerks will write. They will want doors too open- ing into the colonnade. My opinion is that in time they will want a double row of offices, as in my sketch given you, the passage between which will range with the colonnade. These suggestions are for your consideration; but your presence here for a few days is indispensable to consult and deter- mine ultimately on the plans. In the mean time the digging is going on, and mr. Lenthall found that the excellent rough building stone here is cheaper than brick in the proportion of 3. to 5. It is certain- ly as durable, and either of them being to be rough cast, it ought to be preferred, because it enables us to do more with our appropriated sum in the pro- portion of 5. to 3. which is a great matter. 57

This letter informs us of a number of important issues respecting the immediate and continuing construction of the wings. Whatever he had contemplated (and we must take him at his word that he had), Jefferson accepted Latrobe’s idea for distant middle pavilion coach houses and stables. Jefferson threw Latrobe another challenge. Making the pavilion’s upper floor level with the north grade would pose yet another grade-building height to conquer, especially with a steeper grade for horses and carriages. At the same time Jefferson affirmed what he had drawn in his wing plan, that the stables and coach house would be closer to the house, even if temporary. Latrobe raised a good question when asking how carriages and horses would exit through the southern colonnade. For the present it was a mute question given the short sections of wings, but Jefferson’s solution to the colonnade problem was sim- ply to put a north door in the stables where the horses could “easily ascend or descend the terras on the north side.” Jefferson’s adamant statement about keeping the terrace deck level regardless of the change in grade reveals the sovereignty of Jefferson’s “terras,” for it connected architecture, landscape, and nature. The letter also confirms Jefferson’s idea for using a parallel row of clerk’s offices, the fact that he had sent Latrobe sketches, the frustration with Latrobe working long distance from Delaware, and the debate over using good stone versus cheaper stone covered with rough cast.

Jefferson’s response to Latrobe’s critique contains the first mention of a wing extension. Jefferson wanted an immediate extension for a coach house 60 feet long with a north doorway for horses. He acknowledged that this was temporary and when eventually the coach house would be located farther away in the pavilion, the wing space can “be converted to any other use.” 58 The congressional report of 1806, however, mentions that a stable, rather than a coach house, was added on the east and that a coach house was still needed. 59 If this first addition, a stable, is defined on the 1853 Walter plan by the three bay room in the center of the east wing, the center opening on the north side indicates the doorway mentioned by Jefferson as the solution to north-south access (illustration 17).

Jefferson’s west wing expansion had to await a considerable grade change (illustration 21). The “temporary stable” had been “added under the colonnade” on the east side (illustration 27). “Under the colonnade” had now become the catch phrase for “temporary,” hold- ing out hopes of some grand central pavilion. 61 The east wing grew again with a temporary coach house extension in 1809 under President Madison. The access problem through the intended colonnade, mentioned by Latrobe, was solved by two large carriage openings forming the east end of the wing and shown on the Walter plan. This temporary solution, due to the incomplete wing row, is also confirmed on the collaborative site plan showing Latrobe’s bold marks leading a carriage drive from the north public grounds directly into the end of the east wing. While servants might have occupied the extended wing as Jefferson indicated, his “hen house” was forgotten.

Photographs from a 1969 excavation in the West Wing confirm that the eighth lunette window opening had been a doorway and later filled with brick for a window (illustrations 24, 25). 62 Walter’s 1853 plan also indicates the location of this doorway. Plans from 1877 and 1902 actually show it as a pass-through, with the north door aligned with one on the south. Architectural elevation drawings from McKim, Mead & White clearly show this doorway being reduced in size to a pedestrian one from its former, larger size. 63 The 1808 congressional report also stated that a coach house would be added “under the colonnade” of the east wing. 64 When this “temporary” “stable and coach house” function extend- ed the east wing in 1809, supervised by Madison’s steward J. P. Sioussat, it faced the same colonnade access problem. 65 Walter’s plan shows that two large carriage openings formed the east end of the carriage house. This temporary solution, due to the incomplete wing row, is also confirmed on the collaborative site plan c. 1805 showing Latrobe’s bold marks leading a carriage drive from the north public grounds directly into the end of the east wing. Walter’s 1853 plan shows the 1809 extension as two rooms, the western one being the carriage horse stable and not the servant’s room or the “hen house,” as intended on the original Jefferson plan.

The Treasury Fireproof

At the same time that the White House wings were under construction and considered the president’s project, Latrobe started his “own” project, for which he was “master”—or almost. on March 1, 1805, Congress appropriated $9,000 for a Treasury fireproof building. Although fireproof wings were suggested by clerks in the Treasury, Jefferson saw them as part of his scheme for connecting the flanking public departmental buildings. The design of the fireproof buildings allowed Latrobe to demonstrate his professional architectural and engineering skills in comparison with Jefferson’s. Latrobe first proposed to Secretary Albert Gallatin a quadrangle of fireproof buildings north of the Treasury that almost equaled its size. 66 The idea appealed to Gallatin but “in Compliance with Mr. Jefferson’s wish” it became an eastern segment in the envisioned east- west chain of service buildings. 67

Because the money for the fireproof building came through the Treasury, Latrobe served two masters: Secretary Gallatin who did not tend to interfere, and President Jefferson who had oversight of his surveyor of the public buildings and used it. Latrobe’s beautifully executed drawing dated April 27, 1805, was sent to Secretary Gallatin but soon after was examined by Jefferson (illustration 34). The structure’s fireproof nature was just the thing Latrobe loved, and he advocated for permanent and substantial construction: below-grade “carriage” arches in conjunction with a longitudinal groin vault, upper transverse arches that contained between them shallow masonry vaults, and cast-iron lunette window sash (illustration 35). Like the wings flanking the White House, and those projected for the future, Latrobe showed a Tuscan colonnade that would provide a covered walk on the wing’s south side and the typical “terras” roof of Jefferson’s that is indicated in Latrobe’s drawing by pitched wooden joists. Jefferson’s “terras” covering was undoubtedly the weakest link regarding fire hazards. Inside were specially designed bookcases supported by iron rods passing north and south to the outer pier arches.

Jefferson apparently misread Latrobe’s drawing, about which Latrobe confided to Lenthall: “The President objects to my mode of constructing the fire- proof arches, and proposed another method, which won’t do at all.” 68 With an almost free hand, Latrobe told Gallatin that the design pleased him, being “infinitely the best morceau,” and that he was “entirely satisfied” with his design freedom, on the fireproof project at least. 69

When forced by financial circumstances to lop off the western two bays of the Treasury fireproof, reducing the building from 90 to 70 feet, Latrobe convinced Gallatin that a three bay, two story connection between the fireproof and the Treasury building could house a library for the secretary on its second floor adjacent to the secretary’s office. Jefferson again intervened, as the idea involved his tenacious plan for the White House wings, and as Latrobe put it to Gallatin, he “interdicted your library upstairs.” 70 After a conversation with Gallatin, Jefferson relented and allowed him the fashionable, shallow saucer-domed library space, which became even more elegant when filled with Latrobe- designed neoclassical furniture. 71 It was August 1807 when the 19 foot long section of the “fireproof of snail pace growth,” which had collapsed and been rebuilt, finally reached completion, with its first floor fireproof room and the secretary of the treasury’s library above. 72 This completed the easternmost end of the intended east wing range, but a gap of 250 feet still existed on this side of the White House (illustration 32, 33).

The final component added during Jefferson’s time was the long-awaited stone Tuscan columns that lined up on the south of the wings, creating the covered pas- sage colonnade. on the distant east end the Treasury fireproof never received the columns that were to join seamlessly with those of the extended wing sections beyond the planned central pavilion. If Latrobe ever drew plans for the central stable or coach house pavilions, they have been lost. Were these mysterious buildings ever built? It seems that Talbot Hamlin, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Latrobe of 1955, misinterpreted letters referring to the Treasury fireproof connection collapse of 1806, thinking they were in ref- erence to the middle pavilions. A number of historians thereafter relied on his interpretation and perpetuated the error. Hamlin’s mistake stems from his misreading of Latrobe’s letter to Lenthall of December 31, 1806, in which Latrobe offers his explanation of how the build- ing connecting the fireproof section with the actual Treasury building collapsed. In that letter Latrobe refer- ences a “Carriage arch,” which Hamlin took to mean an arch for a carriage opening rather than the below-grade groin vault’s arch whose task it was to carry the mason- ry above, as in “the East carriage [that failed].” 73 A close reading of Latrobe’s letter, keeping in mind that the Treasury connection was between the Treasury fireproof wing and the Treasury building to its east, dispels the notion of the middle pavilion as the subject of this letter, as do several other facts. Latrobe’s indication of the middle pavilions on the collaborative site plan c. 1805 show the structure to be enormous in size, each about 70 by 130 feet. A building of this size, not too much smaller than the White House itself, would have to have been authorized and funded by Congress, but there is nothing in the records to this effect. It would no doubt have been thoroughly discussed by Jefferson, Latrobe, and Lenthall in its lengthy construction, yet there is no mention of its construction other than Jefferson’s refer- ence to its need in the future. The “new fireproof between the Treasury fireproof and the Treasury” did not have a finished roof and had to be temporarily cov- ered with boards, and thus was vulnerable during the winter of 1806. Latrobe later mentions that the failure of the carriage arch was due to both frost damage and the premature removal of the centering from the upper arch. William Thornton’s snide remark of March 1807 refer- ring to Latrobe’s arch failure, “one of the fireproof rooms, viz. that next the Treasury,” 74 has also been mis- interpreted to mean the central pavilion. Latrobe’s defensive reply to Thornton and James Hoban that the failed structure was rebuilt the following year for $80 could hardly be for a large structure. 75 There are several mentions that the Treasury fireproof connection was rebuilt in 1807, but nothing about a stable or coach house structure collapse. 76

After the Jefferson Presidency

Thomas Jefferson left “the splendid misery” 77 of the presidency to his friend and protégé James Madison in March 1809. At the end of that year Latrobe’s survey- or of the public buildings annual report provided a summary of what had been done that year in addition to a concise history of his and Jefferson’s time: “The appropriation made at the last session for the President’s house, has been expended towards the arrangement of the grounds and garden within the enclosure; the coping of part of the surrounding wall, the construction of carriage house (the 60' extension of the east wing), and the better arrangement of the interior for the accommodation of a family.” Latrobe then listed the priorities for the next year by first providing a history of accomplishments: on the removal of the seat of government to Washington, in the year 1800, the President’s house was in a most unfinished state, and quite destitute of the conveniences required by a fam- ily. The roof and gutters leaked in such a manner as materially to injure the ceilings and fur- niture. The ground surrounding the house barely enclosed by a rough fence, was covered with rubbish, with the ruins of old brick kilns, and the remains of brick yards and stone cutters’ sheds. During the presidency of Mr. Jefferson, from the year 1804, annual appropriations have been made, by the aid of which several bed chambers were fitted up; the most necessary offices and cellars, which before were absolutely wanting, were constructed; a new covering to the roof was provided; a flight of stone steps and a platform built on the north side of the house; the grounds were enclosed by a wall, and a commencement was made in leveling and clearing them in such parts as could be improved at the least expense. But notwithstanding the endeavors of the late President, to effect as much as possible by these annual legislative grants, the building in its interior is still incomplete. It is, however, a duty which I owe myself and to the public, not to conceal that the timber of the President’s house is in a state of very considerable decay, especially in the northern part of the building. The cause of decay, both in this house and in the capital is to be found, I presume, in the green state of the timber when first used, in its original bad quality, and in its long exposure to the weather before the buildings could be roofed. Further progress in the leveling and planting of the ground, in the coping of the wall, and in current repairs and minor improvements, are also included in the estimate submitted. 78

Clearing and improving the grounds around the house had been a constant and never-ending story, paralleling that of the wings. Landscaped grounds were never far from Jefferson’s mind as he looked out his study window onto the bleak surrounding site’s contrast to the breathtaking distant views. Even more to Jefferson than Latrobe, landscape was integral with architecture. The fits and starts of improving the White House grounds had been excruciatingly slow due to the laborious amount of work entailed and to congressional appropriation for the same. Jefferson’s unexecuted plans, seen perhaps as an echo on the collaborative site plan c. 1805, were not in vain, however, because they reappeared in his landscape at his retirement villa retreat Poplar Forest. Starting in 1805, as he worked on various projects from his White House study, Jefferson had been sending and receiving weekly letters to his workers in Bedford County, Virginia, who were preparing the modern octagonal house he would use as soon as he depart- ed public life in March 1809 and continue to use until 1823. 79 Seale has indicated that Jefferson’s landscape ideas were not forgotten but finally found form in schemes executed by Hoban, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson. 80

In 1814 British marines infamously compromised the physical preservation of Jefferson’s “office” wings. After the devastating fire, President Madison declared the following year that all must be rebuilt as before, without deviation. James Hoban, the original architect, came back by conservative demand to rebuild the largely destroyed mansion, just as Latrobe also returned to rebuild the Capitol.

Both Latrobe and Thornton inserted themselves as architects willing to help with a White House rebuilding directed—in an ironic second poor choice, they must have felt—by the original architect. Latrobe saw the opportunity to influence some kitchen improvements in the basement, while Thornton sought to help with the wings. Thornton solicited former President Jefferson’s advice in 1815 on rebuilding and completing the wings and enlarging the executive office buildings. When Congress failed to approve either, Thornton suggested to Jefferson that the ends of the wings be terminated on top with neoclassical tempietos . As C. M. Harris has noted, Jefferson “would not, and probably could not, return to these past scenes.” 81

Phoenix-like, the house, and then the burned wings, rose again and returned to use in 1818. President James Monroe suggested, either from Thornton’s inquiry or perhaps after a conversation with his friend Jefferson, that the service wings be extended all the way east and west as intended. 82 When denied funding in 1819, Monroe insisted that a new coach house and sta- bles be built on the west, abandoning the “temporary” coach house and stables that had been added “under the colonnade” on the east. The Report of the Committee on the Public Buildings from January 1819 stated that the western extension was 60 feet long, a symmetrical necessity to match the 60 feet added earlier to the east wing (illustration 28). 83 Hoban’s addition housed a sta- bles, carriage house and granary. Walter’s plan shows that the carriages were accessed from large openings on the west end in a fashion similar to that on the east wing. Photographs from the 1969 excavation of the west wing confirm that the eighth lunette window opening in the stables space had been a north access doorway that was later filled in (illustrations 24, 25). This north door- way, similar to one on the east wing, is shown on plans from 1877 and 1902. Architectural drawings from McKim, Mead & White show this doorway being reduced in size to a pedestrian one from its former, larger size. on the east the extant wing stopped about 50 feet from the intended position of the intended pavilion and 200 feet short of the Treasury fireproof. The enormous 450 foot gap between the White House and its flanking federal buildings equaled a vast space that required congressional funding to fill. 84

Hoban’s 1818 construction estimate for the wings reveals little about Jefferson’s original plans or departures from what existed before the fire. Hoban’s specification of copper for the wing roofs does not detail the roof construction or shape. Did he replicate Jefferson’s zigzag roof system? From early illustrations it appears that the roof had a low profile behind the low parapet and might still have served as a terrace walk. The roof was apparently flat enough to serve the first greenhouse added on top of the west wing in 1857. Hoban’s estimate for the wing’s ground-up construction provides some evidence of the extent of Jefferson’s west wing.

Along with the “best granite” stone for foundations, and freestone for the north and west exterior-facing walls, the parged brick exterior walls that formed the new stables courtyard contained 60 feet of “entablature over columns,” “6 column shafts,” and 11 semicircular windows, ensuring the wing would visually fit with its original neighbor. The walls shown on the 1853 Walter plan seem to confirm the room divisions and an open carriage end similar to one on the east.

The Treasury fireproof also got a postfire makeover as a toolshed for the now-installed vegetable garden to its south, shown proposed on the collaborative site plan c. 1805. Given Jefferson’s love of vegetables, this must have been his intention, because he had sketched a plan in 1807 that designated a 100 foot wide garden space to the south of each terminating double range wings, reserving about 1,000 feet in between for a pleasure garden (illustration 33).

The use and function of Jefferson’s rebuilt wings changed over time as frequently as the building they supported. By the end of the 1820s the gardener, John Ousley, and his family were residents of the former fire- proof wing, while cows temporarily resided in the west wing along with servants. Andrew Jackson’s new remote stables near the southeast gate freed the old stable wing for service and as the residence of the vegetable garden- er, Charles Bizet, in the 1830s. In 1835 the old Treasury fireproof building was upgraded from toolshed to orangery by Andrew Jackson to house a salvaged sago palm from Mount vernon, among other things.

During the 1840s the west wing laundry room that had moved out of the basement caught fire. Fire was still a danger from the kitchen that never left the basement space. During the 1850s the orangery was taken down, rebuilt, and demolished, its function moved to the roof of the west wing. The privies were moved to the space between the wings and the house, freeing up space for servants’ quarters and bathing rooms in the west wing along with the continuing laundry and iron- ing function. Andrew Jackson’s own shower bath was put in the east wing in 1832.

By 1870 the ice house had been floored over for a black servants’ dining room and lounge, hiding that ear- lier feature for the rest of the century. The most dramatic change came in 1866, when the east wing, having succumbed to a toolhouse, potting shed, and compost storage, was demolished and a balcony added to the east elevation in its stead. When the west terrace greenhouse burned in 1867, the entire roof was rebuilt with iron support beams and brick arches that supported a new greenhouse on top. President Ulysses S. Grant found the west wing convenient for his infamous billiard room in the east end of the conservatory just next to the house. President Rutherford B. Hayes took full advantage of the victorian conservatory fad by rebuilding one of cast iron on the west terrace in 1880 and expanding with even more of them to the south of the wing. Hayes also relocated the billiard room to a space in the lower wing and reinstalled Jefferson’s prominent glass doors that let family or guests promenade from the dining room into the popular tropical plant splendor.

Jefferson had created the terraces as a place to sit or stroll, enjoying the outdoors in good weather. While he undoubtedly used them for this purpose, the view was one of still open spaces retaining some naturalness in the far south vista. Had he been there in Hayes’s time he, too, might have used the greenhouses as a retreat from an expanding and encroaching Federal City.

President Theodore Roosevelt chose for a major White House remodeling in 1902 the new York architect Charles McKim of the famous McKim, Mead & White firm. McKim sought to bring Beaux-Arts order to the exterior by removing what he considered as unsightly the greenhouses that crept out from the house in a southwestwardly direction. He finally won a sensitive battle of influence over the first lady and other conservatory lovers, smashing the houses of glass and restoring Jefferson’s idea of an exterior flat roof promenade. To further restore Jefferson’s vision, McKim convinced Roosevelt to champion a reconstructed east wing to match and balance that of the west. This new east wing took on higher purpose than its predecessor and served as a secondary entrance to the house.

The west wing continued to house servants and laundry functions, but McKim and his government contact Colonel Theodore Bingham added an important new building just west of the old wing. A presidential and staff office building allowed those functions to depart the Second Floor of the White House, leaving their spaces to be remodeled for the needs of a good- size presidential family.

President William Howard Taft expanded the president’s office even more, taking over the west wing and moving some service functions back into the basement where they originally began. In the process, Taft built the first oval office. Another exchange of service “office” rooms for real clerks’ offices took place during President Woodrow Wilson’s term. Finally, under President Herbert Hoover, when the president’s office building was destroyed by fire, it was rebuilt even larg- er, replacing the old wing as the oval office we know today. 85

McKim’s reconstructed East Wing continued to serve later presidents in the role for which it was designed, while the West Wing offered space with which to fiddle. Architectural fiddling is what pleased President Franklin Roosevelt, and in 1933 student contributions from around the country funded his exercise swimming pool and two dressing rooms within the West Wing walls. Roosevelt’s architect, Lorenzo Winslow, proudly kept the Jeffersonian lunette windows of the north wall but added glass doors on the south to help light the room. 86 Gone from the West Wing forever were the “office” functions of both sorts. In 1969, in an ironic boost to press reporters’ convenience, President Richard nixon floored over FDR’s swimming pool room that had been recently remodeled by President John F. Kennedy and created the Press Room that remains today. Workers on bulldozers within the wing posed for the camera, looking eerily like President Harry S. Truman’s directed army of bulldozers that had scooped out the interior of the White House in 1949–50. 87 Unfortunately, whatever evidence of Jefferson’s original wing spaces that might have been gathered at that time is only accidentally captured in these photographs. As late as 1985 the staff of the Ronald Reagan White House, working on a new “west garden room” west of the house in the original north-south exterior passage, briefly revealed traces of the wing’s large arch that had spanned the ice house.

Thomas Jefferson’s spirit returned to the White House in the twentieth century after a long absence in the later nineteenth. It was not so much a guardian spirit, with so little left to guard, as it was a name invoked for periodic remodeling progress and the occasional brief reminders when architectural relics were found and destroyed. In making his case to clean up the White House exterior, Charles McKim invoked the spirit of Jefferson, as he did that of L’Enfant at about the same time when cleaning up the Mall under the McMillan plan. McKim referred to the “restored” wings on the house as returning the “saucer” to the “cup.” 88 He proudly reported the discovery of the original east wing’s foundations as they were excavated for the new reconstructed wing (illustration 38). Jules Guérin’s evocative images from 1902 show a romanticized land- scape with the visual impact of Jefferson’s two wings as they might have looked had his landscape been executed (illustration 43). McKim was not a historical architect by any means, but his partner Stanford White had been immersed in studying Thomas Jefferson during the reconstruction of the Rotunda at the University of Virginia in the 1890s. McKim’s passing interest in Jefferson led Roosevelt to acknowledge him in a public statement: “In making the restoration the utmost care has been exercised to come as near as possible to the early plans and to supplement these plans by a careful study of such buildings as that of the University of Virginia, which was built by Jefferson.” 89

Excavations inside the West Wing have from time to time turned up bits of Jefferson’s structure. Hoover’s remodeling in 1929 revealed some, as did the 1933 installation of Franklin Roosevelt’s pool. Truman invoked Jefferson for a hotly criticized project of adding to the White House exterior. Having given a speech at the University of Virginia in 1947, Truman admired Jefferson’s suspended balconies on The Lawn pavilions and used that device’s origin in arguing for a similar suspended balcony on the South Portico. Although Jefferson is probably mentioned by every president who dwells in the house, Kennedy famously invoked Jefferson’s intellectual spirit in his tribute during a nobel laureates’ dinner: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” 90

Since the 1940s Jefferson has stood in oversize bronze in the Jefferson Memorial, gazing north toward the White House. Jefferson would not lament the loss of his architectural vision or the treatment of his special wings, for he was known to favor the future over the past. The White House remains, in the words of William Seale, far more significant as a “cultural artifact” than as a misunderstood piece of venerable architecture. 91 Inherent in the original wings, however, are the thematic elements of Jefferson’s synthesis of ancient and modern architecture, landscape design and nature, construction technology, and the efficiency of domestic and public service. Jefferson’s wings, like the house itself, have suffered use, reuse, and abuse. They recall the unfulfilled and unfinished business that is historically appropriate for the ever-changing nature of the White House. There newness has always been considered superior, and even in the nation’s best interest, to any regard for historical fabric. Like the unquenchable need to use and interpret Thomas Jefferson from generation to generation, the symbolic and imaginative power of the White House is intangible and never ending, and always focused on the present and the future.

This was originally published in White House History Number 29 on Summer 2011

Footnotes & Resources

• See William Seale, The White House: The History of an American Idea , 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2001). General refer- ences to the history and the architectural history of the White House are based primarily on this book and on other published sources to which all White House researchers in the past twenty years must turn: William Seale, The President’s House: A History , 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2008); and various articles in White House History , all published by the White House Historical Association. For convenience, see the three bound volumes of White House History (2004 and 2008).
• Jefferson’s architectural style and taste were decidedly different from Washington’s. Jefferson had anonymously entered the 1792 competition with his version of Andrea Palladio’s villa Rotonda, but while his plan won second place, it was perhaps too radical for the time. When Jefferson failed to win over conservative minds, he fell silent on the issue in deference to Washington. nevertheless, he had architectural traditions and personal forms that he would carry with him everywhere, including to the new national capital.
• Seale, President’s House , 109.
• S. Fiske Kimball first discussed Jefferson’s various plans for alterations in the virginia Governor’s House in Williamsburg, in his rented Paris house, and in his rented town houses in new York and Philadelphia. Kimball, Thomas Jefferson, Architect (1916; reprint, new York: Da Capo Press, 1968). See also Mark R. Wenger, “Thomas Jefferson, Tenant,” Winterthur Portfolio 26, no. 4 (1991): 249–65.
• Jefferson remodeled Monticello, first begun in 1769, after he returned from Paris in 1789 and completed it c. 1809; he began Poplar Forest in 1805 and completed it in 1826; and he began designing the University of virginia c. 1810, with construction beginning in 1819.
• In addition to Seale and Kimball, the complicated Jefferson and Latrobe archi- tectural collaboration is found principally in Michael W. Fazio and Patrick A. Snadon, The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Jeffrey A. Cohen and Charles E. Brownell, The Architectural Drawings of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (new Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), vol. 2; Talbot Hamlin, Benjamin Henry Latrobe (new York: oxford University Press, 1955); Saul K. Padover, Thomas Jefferson and the National Capital (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing office, 1946); William C. Allen, History of the United States Capitol: A Chronicle of Design, Construction, and Politics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing office, 2001); and C. Ford Peatross, ed., Capital Drawings: Architectural Drawings for Washington, D.C., from the Library of Congress (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, in association with the Library of Congress, 2005).
• Benjamin Latrobe’s floor plan drawing of 1807 shows how Jefferson intended to remodel the house based on his experience with French hôtel (town house) plans for apartments that were fashionable when he lived in Paris in the late eighteenth century. See Seale, President’s House , 62; Michael Fazio and Patrick Snadon, “Benjamin Latrobe and Thomas Jefferson Redesign the President’s House,” White House History , no. 8 (Fall 2000): 36–53.
• The architectural historian vincent Scully has commented on the Jeffersonian, and American, trend for horizontal spread: “Much of Jefferson’s work should be seen, metaphorically speaking, as a struggle between the fixed European past and the mobile American future, between Palladio and Frank L. Wright, between a desire for contained, classical geometry and an instinct to spread out horizonally along the surface of the land.” vincent Scully, quoted in Lois Craig, The Federal Presence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), 27.
• Lucia Stanton, “‘A Well-ordered Household’: Domestic Servants in Jefferson’s White House,” White House History , no. 17 (Winter 2006): 8.
• Examination of photographs showing the interior of these wing walls during deconstruction in 1969 confirm the practice of an interior brick wall using a three course common or American bond whereas the outer wall was undoubt- edly the more refined Flemish bond. The outer and inner courses would be bonded together with header and stretcher bricks respectively. It was common for Jefferson to specify for public buildings that the outer mortar be richer in lime than the inner-face mortar and that a lime mortar grout be used between the two. He used these specifications at the University of virginia.
• Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826, ed. James A. Bear and Lucia C. Stanton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 2:1066.
• Sir Augustus John Foster, Notes on the United States of America Collected in the Years 1805–6–7 and 11–12 by Sir Augustus John Foster , Bart ., ed. Richard Beale Davis (1954; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 12. Latrobe wrote, “The President’s House was erected by an Irish mason who gave as his own the plan of the Duke of Leinster’s house in Dublin. This being shown to General Washington was approved of by him; and the Irishman, who had been but a journeyman under the real architect and designer of the plan, was appointed to superintend the building. He left out the upper story however and built no cellars, which President Jefferson, after experiencing great losses in wines, has been obliged to add at a depth of sixteen feet under ground. These are so cool that the thermometer stood two degrees lower in them than it did in a vacant spot in the ice-house early in July, when in the shade out of doors it was at ninety-six.”
• Benjamin Henry Latrobe to William Lee, March 22, 1817, The Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe , ed. John C. van Horne and Lee W. Formwalt, et al. (new Haven: Yale University Press, 1984–88), 3:873.
• Foster, Notes on the United States of America , 12; Latrobe to Lee, March 22, 1817.
• Latrobe faced the complications of taking over design and construction of buildings that had been designed by others and partially constructed. His uneasy relationship with Congress stemmed from his contention that much of the already constructed Capitol, designed in competition by William Thornton, was faulty in both structural design and quality of construction. Latrobe’s criti- cism of Thornton’s skill resulted in a protracted war of words between the two, especially after parts of the Capitol collapsed. Latrobe was called back after the 1814 fire to rebuild the Capitol. The classic story of the Capitol’s architectural history and its roster of prominent architects is contained in Glenn Brown, History of the United States Capitol (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing office, 1900) and updated by Cohen and Brownell, Architectural Drawings of Latrobe ; Padover, Jefferson and the National Capital ; Allen, History of the United States Capitol ; and Peatross, ed., Capital Drawings .
• Latrobe to Mary Elizabeth Latrobe, november 24, 1802, Correspondence of Latrobe , ed. van Horne and Formwalt, 1:232.
• Latrobe to Jefferson, March 26, 1805, The Microfiche Edition of the Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe , ed. Edward C. Carter and Thomas E. Jeffrey (Clifton, n.J.: James T. White & Company, 1976). Latrobe was as meticulous as Jefferson in his correspondence, separately numbering sequential letters to dif- ferent people. This numbering system is evident in the microfiche copies, pro- viding great service to researchers, but the numbers do not appear in the pub- lished letters. Latrobe was delighted in 1803 to start using Charles Willson Peale’s polygraph machine that produced, by means of an attached second pen, a copy of each letter written. In February 1804 Latrobe lent Jefferson his poly- graph to try and asked Peale to send one to the president for his own. Jefferson began using his in 1804 and later remarked that it was the finest invention of his age, reflecting the care he took to document his life and letters. For later historians of Jefferson and Latrobe, their use of this machine is the equivalent of a modern copy machine as opposed to press-copy roller machines that pro- duced a faint, backward copy. The only other good letter and document copies of the time were those copied by clerks who were paid to do so for official rea- sons. Jefferson had hopes that the government would purchase multiple poly- graph machines to lessen the reliance on copy clerks.
• Latrobe to Jefferson, May 4, 1805, and April 28, 1805, ibid.
• Latrobe to John Lenthall, May 3, 1805, ibid.
• Latrobe to Lenthall, May 11, 1805, quoted in Seale, President’s House , 113.
• Jefferson to Latrobe, May 26, 1807, Microfiche Papers of Latrobe , ed. Carter and Jeffrey. Perhaps as payment for the loan of the copiously illustrated books, Latrobe hand-tinted all the plates.
• Latrobe, “Report on the Public Buildings,” December 22, 1805, Correspondence of Latrobe , ed. van Horne and Formwalt, 2:168–72.
• The drawings are illustrated in this article; illustrations and photographs are in the office of the Curator, The White House. See also Report of James Hoban, Superintendent of the President’s House, to Samuel Lane, Commissioner of Public Buildings, Washington, December 3, 1816, available at loc.gov. This author has diligently combed many primary and secondary sources for this arti- cle. However, one important source—the various files of correspondence in the national Archives—was not examined firsthand but through William Seale’s two monumental works, The President’s House , and The White House . An excellent guide to the most important White House records is contained in Alysha E. Black, “Making the Most of the Archives: Finding White House Documentary Sources at the national Archives,” White House History no. 9 (Spring 2001): 4–13.
• Latrobe to Lenthall, July 29, 1805, Microfiche Papers of Latrobe , ed. Carter and Jeffrey.
• Jefferson’s drawing shows the ice house as 20 feet from the house, but between the house and the ice house is written “24 feet,” an annotation that might indi- cate someone verifying the actual dimensions when constructed. It is possible that the vaulted cellar space under the meat house could have been used for storing other liquors such as beer or cider.
• The Jefferson drawing shows a doorway and a small space on the south wall of the ice house that might have been a space for a staircase to the coal cellar, but nothing supports this idea and in fact other clues suggest it was always a win- dow bay, although later a doorway was retrofitted in the area.
• Seale, President’s House, 112. Whether the west privy was for all servants or only for black servants is not known. Interestingly, of the two octagonal origi- nal privies at Poplar Forest, oral history claims that one was for the family and guests and the other was for the later nineteenth-century tenant farmers and thus likely for the enslaved population during Jefferson’s time since there did not seem to be a segregation in early privies by sex, but by race.
• Jefferson’s statement in 1807 that he wanted to extend the west wing by 50 feet would work with the evidence that it eventually was 100 feet long. Jefferson to Latrobe, August 5, 1807, Microfiche Papers of Latrobe , ed. Carter and Jeffrey. The initial 50 foot length is also confirmed by an 1811 perspective drawing from the north by Latrobe that shows the west wing with five window bays.
• The Monticello ice house roof was correctly reconstructed in 2009 and is prob- ably identical to that at the White House, with the exception of the inserted wine room.
• Jefferson’s drawing also shows a wooden south wall, similar to ones at Monticello, that was eventually constructed in brick intended to be stuccoed. The north wall of the first segments was constructed of stone below grade and brick above grade. The second segment of wing was constructed with brick below and above, according to photographs from 1969.
• At the time of the Walter plan the large room formed by combining rooms two and three served for wood and coal storage without the need of an underground space; the stairs access might have been closed off and the space shown as solid masonry.
• Latrobe to Jefferson, September 13, 1805, Microfiche Papers of Latrobe , ed. Carter and Jeffrey.
• Generally, how were permanent privies cleaned? Permanent privies, such as the temple-like octagonal brick privies at Poplar Forest, did not use a deep shaft for waste and required a clean-out method of one type or another. If not a remov- able section right under the seat as in a close stool, or some type of drainage system, access was needed to a deeper space below. At Poplar Forest this access consisted of an arched opening at grade both for the octagonal privies and for the retrofitted privy under the staircase next to Jefferson’s chamber. on the north public front of the White House wing this method seems unlikely. Rather, it seems that a vaulted space under the privy, adjacent to a similar one for the coal cellar, provided access for servants to haul away waste.
• In both places Jefferson solved the low ceiling–smoky room problem by creat- ing a vestibule with a fireplace where logs could be fed without being in the smoky space. The flue simply went into the room on the other side of the vestibule. A doorway on the side of the vestibule would provide access, when needed, to place or retrieve the meat.
• Jefferson to Latrobe, May 11, 1805, Correspondence of Latrobe, ed. van Horne and Formwalt, 2:67; Jefferson to Latrobe, August 5, 1807, Microfiche Papers of Latrobe , ed. Carter and Jeffrey.
• At Monticello the terrace decks attached to the house at the enclosed green- house space off Jefferson’s chamber suite on the south and off the open porch on the north but, basically, from the house floor level. Poplar Forest was like the President’s House, where one stepped onto the terrace deck directly from the house, requiring the same floor level.
• William L. Beiswanger, “Jefferson and the Art of Roofing,” Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association 58, no. 1 (2005): 18–25, 36. See also the Report on Phase II-C Investigations, 1994, prepared for Poplar Forest by Mesick Cohen Wilson Baker Architects, which documents the various evolu- tionary construction systems that Jefferson tried for his flat deck supported by a serrated joist system. Jefferson’s use of the Palladian wings came with the first Monticello before he experienced Europe, but it had a conventional roof like Palladio’s wings. It was not until the President’s House occupancy that Jefferson decided to build the upper roof at Monticello and to rebuild the wing roofs with flat terrace decks.
• Latrobe to Lenthall, September 26, 1803, Correspondence of Latrobe , ed. van Horne and Formwalt, 1:325.
• This was at nassau Hall, Princeton. The claim might be exaggerated. See Correspondence of Latrobe , ed. van Horne and Formwalt, 2:86n2.
• At Monticello the gutter joists directed water into a gutter system that fed cis- terns. At Poplar Forest and at the University of virginia the gutters simply dripped water onto the ground.
• Jefferson used v-shaped gutters at Monticello, and both v- and U-shaped gut- ters at Poplar Forest and the University of virginia.
• Jefferson to Latrobe, May 23, 1803, Microfiche Papers of Latrobe , ed. Carter and Jeffrey.
• Jefferson to Arthur Brockenbrough, September 1, 1819, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., DLC51. In 1825, when asked by his slave joiner John Hemings whether he wanted to put tin over the serrat- ed roof on the main house at Poplar Forest, Jefferson replied that tin “would be a useless expense, because shingles will turn the water as well, and it would be no guard against fire as a plank floor is to be laid over them.” Jefferson to John Hemings, August 17, 1825, Jefferson Papers, Coolidge Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, record group 12. The Poplar Forest wing’s first 1814 serrated roof joists rotted by 1824, and Jefferson commented to a friend that a new method, presumably a U-shaped gutter like that used at the University of virginia, would be an improvement, perhaps because a U- shaped insert could replace any rot in the future. Jefferson to F. R. Hassler, December 3, 1825, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, DLC55.
• A Jefferson drawing of the section of zigzag roof construction over the student rooms at the University of virginia shows a curved metal plate that protrudes like a tongue to direct water away from the end of the gutter rather than drip- ping down the surface. This method was used in the Poplar Forest reconstruc- tion. In his first-century B.C. architectural treatise vitruvius mentions that lion- head scuppers on ancient temples used protruding tongues for a better drip edge. At the Poplar Forest wing, Jefferson installed a ground drain system on the south side of the wing to direct the dripping water away from the building and toward his plantings and garden to the south.
• See various historic structure reports by Mesick Cohen Waite and Mesick Cohen Wilson Baker Architects on various pavilions at the University of virginia.
• Latrobe to James Madison, March 28, 1812, Correspondence of Latrobe , ed. van Horne and Formwalt, 3:271.
• Jefferson to Latrobe, April 22, 1805, Microfiche Papers of Latrobe , ed. Carter and Jeffrey.
• Latrobe to Christian I. Latrobe, June 5, 1805, ibid.
• Latrobe to Lenthall, May 4, 1805, Correspondence of Latrobe , ed. van Horne and Formwalt, 2:62.
• Jefferson to Latrobe, May 11, 1805, ibid., 2:67–68.
• Jefferson to John Wales Eppes, July 16, 1814, quoted in Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book, 1766 –1826, with Relevant Extracts from His Other Writings , ed. Edwin Morris M. Betts (1944; reprint, Charlottesville, va.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1985), 534.
• Latrobe to Lenthall, July 8–9, 1805, Microfiche Papers of Latrobe , ed. Carter and Jeffrey.
• This is the opinion of Latrobe scholars Snadon and Fazio, Domestic Architecture of Latrobe, and Mills scholar Pamela Scott.
• These dimensions are written on the original drawing.
• Different scholars have remarked on this drawing and consider the landscape designs to be Jefferson’s even though this drawing is not in his hand. C. Allan Brown first commented on the similarity of Jefferson’s design for the White House ornamental landscape with that of Poplar Forest. C. Allan Brown, “Poplar Forest: The Mathematics of an Ideal villa,” Journal of Garden History 10, no. 2 (1990): 117–39.
• Jefferson to Latrobe, May 11, 1805, Correspondence of Latrobe , ed. van Horne and Formwalt, 2:67–68.
• Message from the President of the United States Communicating a Report of the Surveyor of the Public Buildings at the City of Washington, on the Subject of the Said Buildings, December 15, 1806 (Washington, D.C.: A. & G. Printers, 1806).
• Jefferson to Latrobe, August 5, 1807, Microfiche Papers of Latrobe , ed. Carter and Jeffrey.
• Report of the Committee Appointed to Ascertain the Expenditures and Probable Estimates in Relations to the Public Buildings in the City of Washington, December 21, 1808, available at loc.gov.
• These photographs are in the office of the Curator, The White House, Washington, D.C.
• Restoration of the White House. Message of the President of the United States Transmitting the Report of the Architects (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing office, 1903), copy in the office of the Curator, The White House.
• Report of the Committee, December 21, 1808, 11.
• Report of the Surveyor of the Public Buildings of the United States to the President of the United States, December 11, 1809, 5, available at loc.gov. This report mentions funds expended in the year for “construction of the carriage house.”
• “United States Treasury Department,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 262 (March 1872):481–98; Cohen and Brownell, Architectural Drawings of Latrobe , 2:491–92. The definitive architectural history of the Treasury Department is a forthcoming publication by Pamela Scott. I am greatly indebt- ed to her for allowing me to read a draft chapter entitled “‘Bemoaning My Cock Sparrow’”: The Treasury Fireproof, 1804–1808.” In this and other ways Scott displayed the generous colleague trait for which she is so well known.
• Quoted in Scott,”‘Bemoaning My Cock Sparrow.’” See also Correspondence of Latrobe , ed. van Horne and Formwalt, 2:34. The most extensive published work to date that treats the Treasury fireproof building is Cohen and Brownell, Architectural Drawings of Latrobe , 2:491–96.
• Latrobe to Lenthall, May 17, 1803, Correspondence of Latrobe , ed. van Horne and Formwalt, 2:66n1.
• Latrobe to Albert Gallatin, quoted in ibid., 2:64–65n1.
• Latrobe to Gallatin, october 17, 1806, ibid., 2:275.
• For this story, see Scott, “‘Bemoaning My Cock Sparrow.’”
• Latrobe to Gallatin, August 20, 1807, and Latrobe to Lenthall, november 21, 1807, Correspondence of Latrobe , ed. van Horne and Formwalt, 2:470, 497.
• Latrobe to Lenthall, December 31, 1806, Correspondence of Latrobe , ed. van Horne and Formwalt, 2:346–48.
• Quoted in ibid., 2:321n.25.
• See ibid., 2:347–48n.1.
• This author looked diligently for any evidence to support the existence of the east middle pavilion, especially in the unpublished Latrobe letters on micro- fiche, and found none. This was a period when Latrobe and Jefferson were using the polygraph machine that produced copies of their letters sent; there is a full record of correspondence sent as well as that received for these years, including sequentially numbered letters to Jefferson and Lenthall, and no gaps exist in this correspondence to suggest any loss of letters regarding the pavil- ions. The Baroness Hyde de neuville’s drawing of 1820 or 1821 shows the east end of the east White House wing in ruinous condition and the west end of the
• Treasury fireproof in the same condition. It does not imply that the gap between them is the missing pavilion. The drawing is far from accurate, showing wings that are out of proportion with the actual space between the White House and its flanking buildings. Likewise, the west wing is shown halfway to the War Department, when it was in reality only one-quarter of the way. The number of arched windows is also incorrect on the wings, leading one to conclude that it is fanciful in addition to whatever truth it shows in other buildings. It is possible that the ruinous end of the Treasury fireproof shows its conversion in 1820 from the burned ruins into a smaller structure that served as a toolshed.
• Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, May 13, 1797, quoted in Richard B. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson (new York: oxford University Press, 2005), 158.
• Report of the Surveyor of the Public Buildings of the United States to the President of the United States, December 11, 1809, 5, 8–9, available on the web at Early American Imprints, II, Shaw and Shoemaker, 1801–19.
• See Travis McDonald, “The Private villa Retreat of Thomas Jefferson,” White House History , no. 18 (spring 2006): 4–23. See also Brown, “Poplar Forest.”
• William Seale, The White House Garden (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 1996), 30–31.
• C. M. Harris, “The Politics of Public Buildings: William Thornton and President’s Square,” White House History no. 3 (Spring 1998): 46–59.
• The Report of the Committee on the Public Buildings, January 7, 1819, stated: “The offices to the President’s house are so small, and inconvenient, as to induce the committee to recommend an addition to be made to the office west of said house.” In his December 28, 1818, report to Samuel Lane, commission- er of public buildings, James Hoban provided the estimate for “extending the Colonnade Building, West of the President’s House, 60 feet, to admit of Stables, Carriage House, Granary, &c.” Both reports are available on the web at Early American Imprints, II, Shaw and Shoemaker, 1801–19.
• Report of the Committee on the Public Buildings, January 7, 1819.
• Seale, President’s House , 171, mentions that Hoban was again brought back to the White House in 1829 during Andrew Jackson’s term to consider a revised or new coach house and stables on the end of the west wing. This idea was dis- missed in favor of a new stables farther removed from the house on the west.
• The West Wing in size and location actually gives a good indication of the scale of the intended middle pavilions, as does the East Wing addition.
• See William B. Bushong, “Lorenzo Simmons Winslow: Architect of the White House, 1933–1952,” White House History , no. 5 (Spring 1999): 23–32.
• The Truman renovation photographs are in the office of the Curator, The White House.
• Quoted in Seale, White House, 172.
• Restoration of the White House, Message of the President of the United States Transmitting the Report of the Architects , 20. This obscure reference to Jefferson as an architect might be one of the first public acknowledgments, as Kimball’s monumental monograph that revealed Jefferson’s rich architectural contributions would not come out until 1916.
• John F. Kennedy, April 29, 1962, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum website, www.kennedylibrary.org.
• Seale, President’s House , x.

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I am distributing this under a Creative Commons License  – you can distribute, share, and display this, but you must attribute it, you may not edit it, and you may not use it for commercial purposes.

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Merry Christmas. Please click on the cover below to see the Guide. If you get an error message, please update your version of Adobe Acrobat Reader . And thanks to those submitting errata in the comments.

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The Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB) is located next to the West Wing, and houses a majority of offices for White House staff. Originally built for the State, War, and Navy Departments between 1871 and 1888, the EEOB is an impressive building that commands a unique position in both our national history and architectural heritage.

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Since 1960 it has been used as the Vice President's Ceremonial Office with the exception of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, because Lyndon Johnson did not give up the office when he became President after the Kennedy assassination.

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West Rotunda

Located on the 17th Street, center corridor side of the EEOB, the West Rotunda was designed for the Department of War by Richard Ezdorf, chief draftsman for the Supervising Architect of the Treasury; completed in 1888.

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President Richard Nixon was the most avid of the presidential bowlers, spending as many as four hours at a time rolling games.

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