East Wing

I've made a couple of small changes to the East Wing floor plans (first and second) to place the stairs in the right location, altho I'm not certain I have them oriented exactly right.

Election day celebration

Visit the What's New page for an election day extravaganza sourced from Architectural Digest and documenting Bush 2, Reagan, and Kennedy rooms. Some of these images were already posted in inferior form; the AD scans are top quality and just beautiful.

Also: don't forget to vote!

Diagrams

I added a new and improved East Wing first floor. And I've created a page of high-resolution overview diagrams useful as visual aids for, say, a school report like the one Madeline J has to do for her fourth grade class.

New front page - East Wing Lobby

I realized last night that I'd forgotten to change the front page for the month, so I've change it now to a picture of visitors in the East Wing Lobby a couple of years ago.

Semi-secret museum semi-secrets

The addition of pictures to the Sub-Basement page brought up the subject of "semi-secret" WHM pages. These are pages—or even just individual pictures—that you might not be aware of even if your are a fairly thoro visitor to this site. They aren't semi-secret because of any inherent security concern, but merely because they are labeled or are otherwise unexpected.

The horseshoe pitch is right next to the pool (very clear on Pete's 3D rendering). There is a link to it on the main Grounds page, but that part of the map is not colored, so you might not have found it. Same goes for the Andrew Jackson milk trough on the south lawn.

First Lady's Office hall. Just a dude in the hallway outside the First Lady's Offices, available from the EW second floor page. The East Wing Entrance, altho labeled on the EW first floor page, is easy to miss.

A back staircase photo is available from each of the Residence floor pages by clicking on the staircase next to the Family Elevator.

The Pastry Kitchen is on the first floor mezzanine level and available by a link on the oblique diagram.

The arched hall on the third floor is available from an unlabeled link on the third floor page. The mysterious Bathroom 315, near the Family Elevator, is likewise available, marked only with a "B". And the third floor storage rooms under the roof have a page of their own as well, with an unlabeled link.

The West Wing Navy Mess reception desk is represented by an unlabeled photo link in the middle of the hall on the WW ground floor. Not far away is an unlabeled link to the Situation Room entrance, altho this is probably different since the area was remodeled.

The West Wing stair corridor and east entry corridor are available from unlabeled links on the WW first floor page. A little lavatory off the Oval Office Corridor is on its page.

Then there's the Front Page Gallery page, available only from the Site Map page. The Truman Reconstruction page includes a thumbnail of the 1945 WW expansion plan and tiny links to large images of the ground, first, second floor plans, side view and cross section, and a smaller second try at coaxing Congress into paying for it.

White House overview

Pete pointed me to this pic of President's Park on Picasa showing shadowy shapes on the east and west where work on the wings is proceeding, so I cleared up its cloudiness to clarify the clues.

New additions

I added a terrific layout of the second floor of the East Wing created by Pete Sharkey (thanks, Pete!) from materials dating from LBJ, I believe, but probably not changed much since.

I've also begun adding photos that Pete found. The first are a couple from the West Wing. Next will be some from the second floor of the Residence. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Fixed the What's New page. It had become corrupted somehow.

Gizmodo hating on Laura

Gizmodo takes exception to the Bush 2 renovation of the Family Theater in a new article using the Architectural Digest photos.

Solarium and more

Christina has sent along even more terrific photos dug out of Getty Images. I'll post some of the Solarium and others in the next couple of days.

Meanwhile, the WH has pics of the first lady entertaining in her office.

First Lady's gilded cage, Burma remix

The White House has posted a terrific picture of the first lady in her offices, meeting with Burmese representatives. Comparing this to the recent West Wing corridor pic, I see that the room has the same carpet as the West Wing.

Fishin' in the LOC

I went looking thru the Library of Congress collection again and came up with several more photos of a little bit of everything to add to the site. A few are rather unfortunately poor quality (which is why I didn't get them when I first scoured the digital collection last year), but just having them is nice. Maybe the LOC will eventually add high-resolution versions, and it will be easy to go back and get those to replace the crummy ones. Particularly of interest are the floor plans from 1853, which—I realized once I collected them all—document the entire White House at the time. However, the images are too low resolution to read the room labels, unfortunately.

UPDATE: I found the same ground and second floor plans in Seale's WH: Idea, where they are clear enough to read the labels, so I've added them.

2000 Symposium pics

Nick Valenziano (Nix) kindly sent some photos from his visit to the White House Symposium in 2000, which include a couple of rare shots of restrooms as well as a nice one of the China display cases and a really, really nice one of the Family Theater. Thanks, Nick!

Simultaneously, I have begun (on the Ground Floor) adding little maps to each room page—snippets of the floor plan—to help orient the reader about where the doors and windows and fireplaces are in that room.

Ford revisited

I got a 1975 WHHA journal the other day off Ebay and pulled several pics from it to fill out the era of the Nixon decor. It gave me my first good look at the Nixon Blue Room, for one thing, and great pics of the East Wing Garden Room, and West Wing Lobby.

TR renovation

I've posted a page for the TR renovation. I'm still not satisfied with the structure of these pages, tho. I've linked to the major renovations from the Residence page but also from the East Wing and West Wing pages, where they are also relevant, and it seems a little circular.