Closed for Repairs

The big house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue looked deserted. The windows, shorn of their rich hangings, had a vacant look about them, and on the White House gates there were neat, white wooden signs: CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC. Inside the mansion, a sander went to work in the East Room, smoothing away pits and scars on the quartered-oak parquet floor. By week's end the floor was ready for filling and waxing. This week a crew of maintenance men will move in to fix the floors, touch up the paneling in the State Dining Room, and dry-clean the soiled draperies and damask wall coverings in the Red, Green and Blue Rooms. By Sept. 30, the old mansion will be gleaming again.

Although the White House was virtually rebuilt in 1949-52 at a cost of $5,800,000, the new repairs are necessary and routine: since the mansion was reopened in April 1952, some 3,039,220 tourists have inspected it. The public is admitted five days a week between 10 a.m. and noon, and despite the brief visiting hours, tourists troop through at the rate of 3,000 a day (sometimes more than twice that in the spring, when Washington's tourism is at a peak). Inevitably, the floors have been scarred by more than 6,000,000 heels, and the hangings and wall coverings have been soiled by those who could not resist the urge to touch. The repairs--handled by White House maintenance men--are necessary every two years, and were arranged this summer to coincide with the President's vacation in Colorado.

Despite the damage inflicted, the public is well-behaved in the White House. No one has attempted to carry off souvenirs, according to members of the police detail who chaperone the public through its roped-off route, and few question the President's right to the privacy of his own bedroom. In Andrew Jackson's day, the public had free access to all parts of the White House. According to one account of Jackson's Inauguration Day: "High and low, old and young, black and white, poured in one solid column into this spacious mansion. Here was the corpulent epicure grunting and sweating for breath--the dandy wishing he had no toes--and the office seeker." On Jackson's first Inauguration Day, more than 20,000 people poured in, breaking thousands of dollars worth of furniture and crockery, raiding the pantry, spilling punch on the carpets, standing on the chairs, and overwhelming President Jackson, who finally fled for his life out the back door.

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