Soon after Harry S. Truman ascended to the presidency in April 1945, he and his family moved into the White House and discovered that “America’s most famous residence” was literally falling apart. What began as annoying creaky floors and mysterious ghost-like sounds would later give way to more serious incidents.

Demolition began in late 1949 without fanfare (perimeter fencing was used to hide construction from the public). Steel shoring and debris was passed through openings in the left-intact facade.
National Archives (Abbie Rowe, National Park Service). Feb. 27, 1950 Demolition began in late 1949 without fanfare (perimeter fencing was used to hide construction from the public). Steel shoring and debris was passed through openings in the left-intact facade.

According to presidential historian Michael Beschloss, writing for The New York Times: “One day, while President Harry S. Truman took a bath upstairs, a great Blue Room chandelier threatened to crash down on his wife, Bess, and her guests from the Daughters of the American Revolution. The president later joked that he might have unexpectedly dropped through the ceiling naked on the ladies below, and he confessed that the incident made him nervous. The upstairs floor, he noted, ‘sagged and moved like a ship at sea.’”

Truman’s White House Renovation (1948 to 1952)

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Then, in 1948, one of the legs of first daughter Margaret Truman’s piano broke through rotting floorboards in her second-floor sitting room and caused ceiling plaster to fall in the Family Dining Room below. A team of architects and engineers was summoned to secretly inspect the structure. Truman knew the image of a collapsing White House was an apt metaphor for his plummeting approval ratings. He therefore didn’t want to publicize the sorry state of the building while running for re-election that year.

The inspectors determined that portions of the mansion were in imminent danger of collapse. As a result, the first family was moved to nearby Blair House for their safety, and thus began the Trumans’ three-year odyssey as displaced tenants. The first family wouldn’t return “home” until March 1952.

The restoration included leaving the historical structure’s facade intact, while completely gutting its interior. Within the remaining exterior shell, a steel superstructure “of skyscraper strength” was built above a new labyrinthine basement, which included a top-secret fallout shelter (the Soviet Union surprised the West by denoting its first atomic bomb in late summer 1949). The underground bunker’s “Cold War change order” as well as rising material and labor costs (the Korean War began in June 25, 1950, and put the U.S. economy in an inflationary period) led to schedule delays and further secrecy regarding the project (for more photos about the renovation, click on the slideshow “Truman's White House Renovation (1948 to 1952)”, left).

A good reference on this era is “The Hidden White House: Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America’s Most Famous Residence” (St. Martin’s Press, 2013). In it, author Robert Klara sheds light on what may be the most complex and politically sensitive home-improvement project in American history.

Klara notes that, “The logistics of construction were complex; it was described as needing to ‘balance a stone house in the sky’ while new foundations were dug beneath its walls.” Here, the mansion’s exterior walls were “underpinned” by new concrete piers and the interior was removed (the underpinning and steel shoring allowed earth-moving equipment to dig a new basement within the gutted shell). By mid-1950, roughly 1.1 million cubic feet of open space was created as a result.
National Archives (Abbie Rowe, National Park Service). May 17, 1950 Klara notes that, “The logistics of construction were complex; it was described as needing to ‘balance a stone house in the sky’ while new foundations were dug beneath its walls.” Here, the mansion’s exterior walls were “underpinned” by new concrete piers and the interior was removed (the underpinning and steel shoring allowed earth-moving equipment to dig a new basement within the gutted shell). By mid-1950, roughly 1.1 million cubic feet of open space was created as a result.