Fire Trap

At virtually every whistle stop during his campaign tours, President Harry Truman humorously asked the voters to re-elect him because "then I won't be troubled with the housing problem." By last week it had become apparent that re-election wasn't going to solve the problem, even for Harry Truman. An engineering survey of the 150-year-old White House showed that it was little better than a fire trap, so weakened by age and by stresses set up as a result of haphazard patching and alteration that it could not be made safe without major repairs.

As a result, the White House social season was canceled, and the President prepared to move out of the executive mansion on his return from Key West. He would begin his second term in office in historic Blair House,* a 124-year-old, four-story yellow stucco house on Pennsylvania Avenue, which the State Department bought six years ago to house distinguished visitors from abroad. Cheek by jowl with it is Lee House, which the President will also take over. Workmen are already cutting out a connecting doorway.

"By Force of Habit." Despite periodic warnings, the White House has been slowly falling to pieces for years. The wood construction of the first floor had been replaced with concrete and steel during Teddy Roosevelt's administration. The third floor had been similarly rebuilt in 1927. But the timbers of the second floor, where Presidents and their families live, had been left unchanged -- a fact which prompted Franklin Roosevelt to install a canvas chute, down which he could have plummeted to the lawn, if fire broke out.

It was not until last winter, when Harry Truman noticed that the movement of crowds in the Blue Room made the crystal chandelier jingle ominously, that any really thoroughgoing inspection was made. Then horrified engineers found the second floor beams so weakened that they limited the occupancy of the presidential study to 15 at a time. engineers' study has Since then the turned up dozens of other weaknesses.

The second floor, said Public Buildings Commissioner W. Englebert Reynolds, stays up only "by force of habit." Some of its beams carry ten times their normal stress. The marble grand staircase is in danger of collapse. The heavy (70 Ibs. to the square foot) frescoed ceiling of the East Room has a six-inch sag, had to be shored up with timbers to prevent its caving in.

Inch by Inch. The work of surveying the mansion, went slowly because for big sections of the house there were no blueprints. To locate old beams, test old brick, discover where generations of workmen had installed gas lines, electric wiring and plumbing, investigators were probing into walls, chipping off plaster, going over everything inch by inch.

Last week it seemed likely that the President would not be able to move back into the White House until next fall. The best guess as to the cost of reconstruction, under the supervision of White House Architect Lorenzo Winslow: from $750,000 to $1,250,000.

* As he had begun his first, living there while Mrs. Roosevelt moved out of the White House.

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