The White House is Falling Down

Gallery

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A May 1952 photograph of President Truman and his Commission on the Renovation of the Executive Mansion appointed in 1949 to oversee the proposed work on the White House. Left to right: Major General Glen E. Edgerton, Representative McGregor, Senator Kenneth McKellar, Richard E. Dougherty, the president, Mr. Douglas W. Orr, Representative Louis C. Rabaut, Senator Edward Martin.
National Park Service
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The East Room during the final stages of the careful removal of decorative and other parts intended for reuse in 1950.
National Park Service
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This photograph, taken March 7, 1950, shows the cracked wooden support beam that had been underneath Margaret Truman's sitting room on the second floor. Her piano broke through the floor in 1948, after which steel supports were added to reinforce the weakened beam.
White House Collection
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Cracks discovered in the north brick wall of the West Sitting Hall revealed during the engineering inspection in 1948.
Abbie Rowe, National Park Service
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Demolition work in 1950 exposed architect James Hoban’s original plaster cornice beneath the cornice from the 1902 Theodore Roosevelt renovation by McKim, Mead and White.
National Park Service

About this Gallery

"The damned place is haunted, sure as shootin. . . . You and Margie had better come back and protect me before some of these ghosts carry me off." Harry Truman, in a letter to his wife Bess, September 9, 1946

Shortly after moving into the White House, President Truman noticed the telltale signs of a building under serious physical stress. He frequently complained of drafts and unusual popping and creaking noises and joked of ghosts that inhabited the old house. "The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth. I can just imagine old Andy [Jackson] and Teddy [Roosevelt] having an argument over Franklin [Roosevelt]," he wrote to Bess back home in Missouri in June 1945.

Early in 1948, in response to the President Truman's concerns, engineers confirmed that the White House was structurally weak and in danger of collapse. Burned to the exterior walls in 1814, further compromised by the successive additions of indoor plumbing, gas lighting, electric wiring, heating ducts, and major modifications in 1902 and 1927, some said the White House was standing only from the force of habit. The decision was made to move the Trumans across the street into the Blair House for more than three years while the White House underwent a complete reconstruction within its original exterior walls. In December 1949, crews began dismantling the interior.