That Time When The White House Was Condemned, Gutted, and Sold as Souviniers

The Hidden White House: Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America’s Most Famous Residence by Robert Klara was is about the 1949-53 rebuilding of the president's mansion, revealing its secrets while offering an interesting view of President Truman's character.

It was fascinating to learn that the building was literally falling apart because earlier restorations had left original beams that had been burned in the 1812 fire! Over the years, modernization to add heating, gas, electric, and plumbing cut into beams and retaining walls. The original footing was never meant to hold the expanding house. The house, after all, was built in a swamp.

President Truman and his family moved into a haunted house, footsteps and noises heard at night. Actually, it was the wood expanding and contracting with temperature changes. And when the president moved his huge desk and books into his study, a few visitors more stressed the floor beams. Truman and his daughter Margaret had their pianos sitting side by side for family musicals. It was all too much for the old house to handle.

It was time to check things out, a fifty-year check up as it were since it was last remodeled under President Teddy Roosevelt.

The structure was found to be so bad that the building had to be gutted to the sandstone outer walls! And even they were falling apart in places.

Meantime, the economy was adjusting from WWII and the Korean conflict was beginning. Getting money out of Congress was a battle, and so was every decision down to the wallpaper. The original wood trim, windows, fireplaces, and wood panels were sent into storage but proved too costly to restore; it was cheaper to make new. Sovineer relics were sold to raise money. And tons of the house were repurposed at other federal buildings--and sent to the dump.

President Truman and his family were relegated to Blair House, which proved insecure when an assassination attempt caused the death of several guards. He drove the security people mad by insisting on walking to work every day.

The president pushed to get the work done quickly, hoping to live a year in the new house. But haste made waste--and mistakes. Three years and $5.8 million later, the house was finished. The sewing room lacked electric outlets. Only four rooms were refitted with their original interiors. Everyone was finding fault.
Eleanor Roosevelt pronounced that the house looked like a Sheridan hotel! The mass-produced furniture was all that could be afforded. No wonder Jackie Kennedy pressed to restore the decor to original pieces.

There is nothing worse than a job coming with a house. You never know what you are going to get. As a clergy wife, for me it was parsonages that flooded, had cockroaches and mice, rattling drafty windows, iced over closets in winter, water that turned whites orange, and an antique pink refrigerator.

For the Trumans, there were rats, worn out carpets and furniture and drapes, and a house in danger of collapse. Plus three years in temporary housing that was inadequate in every way. I had it better.

I enjoyed learning about the people involved and the history and process of the rebuilding. It was an enjoyable read.

I received an ebook as a gift.

https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-hidden-white-house-the-truman-renovation-1948-1952

Storybook Style: America's Whimsical Homes of the 1920s

Storybook Style: American Whimsical Homes of the 1920s by Arrol Gellner and Douglas Keister is a delightful pictorial history of fantasy homes influenced by Old European rural homes.

The 1920s Period Revival styles included Mediterranean, Normandy, Tudor, and Spanish styles, and the relatively rarer Storybook.

I had not realized that the architectural style I have long admired had a name, or that it's roots date to WWI when soldiers returned from the European front with a love of the rural, rustic houses and Medieval structures they had seen: the quaint cobblestone cottage with thatched roof, the half-timbered Tudor house, the shingled roof, and rolled eaves and seawave rooflines.

In my neighborhood there is a house that I have admired, built in the 1920s when a rail line came into our suburban town, allowing workers in Detroit to live in what became the never ending suburbs of Oakland County, MI.

The Clawson Historical Center has identified the house as a Montgomery Ward 'kit house' called The Cranford from the late 1920s. It is described as a "Tudor revival and “storybook” style home" that "combines several varied architectural features, including a gambrel roof, dormers, Tudor peaks and faux stucco and half-timber."

from  Clawson Historical Museum

There are several Cranford homes in our 2 square mile city.

The authors follow the evolution of the style, from "Backstory" to "Opening Act;" how Hollywood "movie people" adopted the fantasy period styles for their homes; the legendary development of Hollywoodland; and how the fad for Period houses made its way across the country.

The history of period styles dates to the 'picturesque' fad of the 18th c which revived Medieval, Classical, and Gothic styles. This is when people built fake 'ruins,' homes that looked like castles, and the construction of fabulous public buildings like the Brighton Pavilion with its exotic Indian/Chinese/Saracenic influences.

In the 19th c, Victorians rebelled against Industrialization in a movement reviving hand craftsmanship, resulting in the Arts and Crafts movement. Art Noveau briefly ruled, with its naturalistic designs and artistry.

The Craftsman style became popular and led to the Bungalow. My great-grandfather and his sons built Bungalow homes in Tonawanda, NY in the 1920s.

Bungalow built by y grandfather John Becker in Tonawanda, NY

Another Becker bungalow in Tonawanda

The Philadelphia Centennial Exposition was the roots of the Colonial Revival which ascended in the 1920s and continued through the Bicentennial. My parents and grandparents all decorated in the Colonial style.

circa 1930 greeting card features a Storybook
cottage with a dovecote and thatched roof

The Storybook Style was the most fantastic period style of them all. The photographs show the wide variety of interpretation. The more misshapen, bizarre, and odd the design the more it pleased!

The Witch's House was built for Willat Studios in 1920 as a set for silent films, including Hansel and Gretel. One of the producers moved it to Beverly Hills and made it into his home.

The style influenced home design across the nation. Sears offered a medieval influenced English cottage with "catslide roof and rubble-tome trim" in its 1931 catalog. The Montgomery Ward Cranford kit house is a very domesticated nod to the style.

The book includes Michigan's Bartholomew's Boulder Park in Charlevoix, created by Earl Young. Born in Mancelona, Michigan Young studied at University of Michigan for a year before dropping out and going into real estate. His twelve stone houses were built in the late 1920s after the peak of the Storybook style, but are influenced by trips to Europe.

Photo by my dad of a "Mushroom House" in Charlevoix, MI

He also built ''mushroom houses' in 1952, and seven homes in downtown Charlevoix including the Half House in 1947. He used local fieldstone and cedar shingled roofs.

Another Michigan mention is Henry Ford's purchase of stone cottages for Greenfield Village in the 1920s. He had wanted Arlington Row, but was rejected and instead bought a 1600s cottage from near Chedworth. The cottage is one of my favorite parts of the Village.

Cottswald Cottage at Greenfield Village

1600s Cottswald farm at Greenfield Village

pigeon house, 1600s farm at Greenfield Village

Storybook Style was such fun to read, with plentiful color photographs.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Storybook Style
by Arrol Gellner, Douglas Keister
Schiffer Publications
July 2017
$34.99 hardcover
308 color and b/w images | 176 pp
ISBN13: 9780764353086

Detroit City

When I was a little girl my grandparents moved from Tonawanda, NY to the Detroit suburbs. Several times Mom and I took a train from Buffalo to visit them. A few years later my family followed them, and my New York state grandmother would come by train to visit. Dad and I would go to Detroit to meet her at the Michigan Central Train Station. I remember walking through the vast empty concourse while Dad told the story of the decline of the trains, how in the old days the halls were crowded and bustling with activity. I could see it all in my mind, and over fifty years later I still remember Dad weaving that tale of a by-gone age.



Today the hundred-year-old train station has sat empty for twenty-five years, falling to ruin and stripped by scrappers. A changing world, a changing economy has left Detroit one more victim to the decline of the Rust Belt cities that were once the base of American industry. Gone are the jobs, the workers, and the money--and the glamorous movie theaters and dance halls and many storied department stores. Detroit has become the poster child for all the cities whose shining star has set.

For Christmas I received a copy of Lost Detroit: Stories Behind the Motor Cities Majestic Ruins by Dan Austin and photos by Sean Doerr.

Most of the buildings in the book I had never seen. My family sometimes went to Belle Isle to the aquarium or to just watch the freighters go down river. Or we'd go to a museum, or to see a parade. Even though my dad worked in an auto plant in the city, test driving new cars and knew the city we rarely went downtown as a family. But Dan Austin's words and Sean Doerr's photographs brought to life those ruined buildings the way my dad's story did fifty years ago. This book tells stories that should be remembered. http://detroit.blogs.time.com/2010/09/15/finding-lost-detroit-among-the-ruins/

These grand architectural gems still bear pockets of dazzling artistry: painted ceilings, towering columns, carved stones and mosaics that illuminate their past glory. I wish I had seen these buildings in their heyday. Some photos from the book appear in this news article from the Detroit Free Press.

I first noticed architecture after we moved to Philadelphia, for that city was alive and thriving when we arrived in 1974  just before the Bicentennial celebration. We visited Independence Hall and the 18th c houses in Fairmont Park, walked the Benjamin Franklin Parkway from Robert Indiana's Love statue to the temple on the hill called the Philadelphia Museum of Art, strolled through Society Hill and Elfreth's Alley which is the oldest homes in America, shopped in the grand department stores, John Wanamaker, Strawbridge and Clothier, Lit Brothers. It was there I learned how architecture could teach us history. Like the Egyptian motifs popular after the discovery of King Tut's tomb and of course the classical Greek influence on the early republic's government buildings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Philadelphia has a good overview of important Philly landmarks.

The fascination we have with urban decay is perplexing. Perhaps it is related to the same motive that makes our society so fascinated by the end of the world scenarios, vampire or alien take-overs destroying earth, or even asteroid collision or global warming climate change ending civilization as we know it.

Empires rise and fall. History has not provided us with one civilization that has lasted even through written historical memory, which is just a blimp on the timeline of the universe.



I am reminded of Thomas Cole's "Course of Empire" series of paintings tracing a civilization from "savage" to pastoral to empire to destruction and decay. The last image is "Desolation."  What remains bespeaks a lost a lost glory, a lone column amongst ruined arches.Oddly, Cole thought the pastoral the ideal culmination of a society and many envision Detroit's empty spaces to be turned into farmland and gardens. The new open spaces within cities are called "Urban Prairies".

We plan to retire to the Detroit suburbs. And I find myself aligning an identity to that city, hoping for its future, hoping that Detroit chooses better leaders and makes wiser decisions. For I remember the awe of coming out of the Windsor Tunnel and driving up Woodward Avenue, seeing the tall buildings and later the mult-leveled expressways, the vast thriving city. The city that provided my dad work that supported our family and allowed him a comfortable retirement.