WASHINGTON – President Harry Truman knew it was time to gut the White House when the leg of a black Baldwin grand piano broke through the floor of his daughter Margaret’s sitting room.
The president joked in a letter to his daughter that it would have surprised his wife’s gathering of the Daughters of the American Revolution if he had crashed through the ceiling in his marble bathtub.
“Would have gotten a headline to say the least don’t you think?” Truman wrote.
Truman moved across Pennsylvania Avenue into the Blair House, which is now reserved for visiting dignitaries, from 1948 to 1952 while construction crews gutted and renovated the aging presidential residence. Modern materials such as steel and concrete strengthened the original wood-and-brick building.
That Truman-era renovation changed the historic structure more than a damaging fire during the War of 1812 or President Donald Trump’s demolition of the East Wing. Controversy followed each major – and even minor – overhaul in more than two centuries since the original building was completed in 1800. President Thomas Jefferson’s colonnades, Truman’s namesake balcony and even Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden were each criticized for their cost or for tampering with history.
