White House

The White House in these photographs is not one building. It is a house that has been burned, gutted, extended and rebuilt so many times that the pictures from any two decades show different places wearing the same face.

The British burned it in August 1814 and only the scorched exterior walls survived. James Hoban, who had designed it in the first place, rebuilt it inside those walls. The stone was painted white to cover the burn marks, and the name stuck long before it was official — Theodore Roosevelt only made “White House” the formal title in 1901.

For most of the nineteenth century the west side of the house was covered in glass. A long run of conservatories and greenhouses grew there, and they appear in photograph after photograph — orchid houses, a rose house, a camellia house, all bolted onto the side of the executive mansion. They came down in 1902 when Roosevelt cleared the ground for a small office building he intended as temporary.

That temporary building is the West Wing, and it is still there. The Oval Office came later, built for Taft in 1909 and moved to its present corner in 1934. Before all of that, presidents worked upstairs in the residence, which meant office seekers lined the second-floor hallway waiting to be seen.

The most striking photographs of the house show it with nothing inside. By 1948 the interior was failing — a leg of Margaret Truman’s piano went partway through a floor, and engineers found the whole structure was holding itself up largely out of habit. Everything but the outer walls came out. Photographs from 1950 show bulldozers parked in what had been the State Dining Room and a steel frame rising inside a hollow shell.

The grounds are their own subject. The Easter Egg Roll has run on the South Lawn since 1878, when Congress threw the children off the Capitol grounds and Rutherford Hayes offered his own yard instead. Photographers covered it every year, which produced a long series of pictures of ordinary Washington families standing where tourists now queue.

The photographers themselves are part of why so much survives. Harris & Ewing and the National Photo Company both worked the executive mansion as a daily beat through the 1910s and 1920s, the way a small-town paper covers the courthouse. That is why there are pictures of the North Portico in ordinary weather with nothing happening — somebody was on the clock.

The Dome Was an Argument