The White House & Lafayette Square: The President's Stage

Why is it significant?

Stand at the northern iron fence along Pennsylvania Avenue, looking across the green lawn at the stately neoclassical portico of The White House at sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand at the northern iron fence along Pennsylvania Avenue, looking across the green lawn at the stately neoclassical portico of The White House at sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue. Designed by Irish-born architect James Hoban and constructed from white Aquia Creek sandstone, this has been the executive mansion and workplace of every American president since John Adams moved in in eighteen hundred.

In August eighteen fourteen, during the War of eighteen twelve, invading British troops captured Washington and set the interior of the White House ablaze. Legend long claimed the mansion was painted white to hide the charred smoke stains, though in truth the porous sandstone had been whitewashed with lime paint from the day it was constructed to protect it from freezing winter moisture.

Turn around to face Lafayette Square: named in honor of the French hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, this public square has served as the frontline stage of American democracy. Here, suffragettes marched for the right to vote in nineteen seventeen, anti-war demonstrators protested Vietnam, and civil rights marches challenged the conscience of the nation.

Head south back to the Mall toward the red sandstone towers of the Smithsonian Castle.