The White House’s East Wing is now demolished. Here’s what was lost

By Tom Foreman, CNN

(CNN) — Amid the rubble and rancor memorializing where the East Wing of the White House once stood, President Donald Trump and his team are trying to dig out. Public outrage has been piling up over the sudden demolition to make way for the sprawling, golden ballroom he has long craved. Trump says the new construction will be a monument to the country’s greatness, even as his team insists there is nothing unusual in how he is going about it.

“Nearly every single president who has lived in this beautiful White House … has made modernizations and renovations of their own,” insists White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Author Kate Andersen Brower, who has written extensively about The People’s House, agrees with that foundational claim, but also points out a big difference this time: “We have never seen a wrecking ball taken to an entire wing.”

Never mind that Trump has dismissed the East Wing as “a very small building” that was “never thought of as being much.” Brower and plenty of others saw it as a treasure. “I certainly had a lot of reverence for it because it was the first lady’s domain. It’s the only place she has to really call her own,” she said.

Initially a carriage entrance during the term of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, it became the modern East Wing as millions of tourists see it each year — or did — under his distant cousin, President Franklin Roosevelt some 40 years later. The build-out was a practical matter: With World War II raging, an emergency underground bunker had been constructed on the spot and needed the building to hide it.

“So in a sense,” Brower says, “it’s always been a bit of an afterthought, and some people within the White House call it Siberia because … you always want to be as close to the West Wing and the Oval Office as possible, and the East Wing is obviously removed.”

Accordingly, the East Wing has always been considered a seat of soft power — more about social events than the political punch-ups in the West Wing.

The East Wing is where throngs of well-wishers swirled beneath streetlamps in 1911 to wish President William Howard Taft and his wife, Helen, a happy 25th anniversary. It is where President Dwight Eisenhower sat in the private movie theater to watch “High Noon,” where President John F. Kennedy saw “From Russia With Love” just before he was assassinated; where President Richard Nixon — perhaps ironically — saw “The Sting”; and where President Bill Clinton gathered staff and political pals to watch the Super Bowl.

The East Wing is where a photographer in 2009 caught President Barack Obama running playfully down a hall with his dog, Bo. The Portuguese water dog was a gift from Sen. Ted Kennedy, who had endorsed Obama over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. Kennedy would die later that year.

Outside the East Wing windows, Jackie Kennedy once doted over a green expanse of grass bordered with blooming plants and crowned by a pergola drawn up by Chinese American architect I.M. Pei — who would later design the stunning glass pyramid atop the entrance to the Louvre Museum in Paris. Separate from the Rose Garden, which has now been paved over by Trump, and christened the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden by her successor, Lady Bird Johnson, the space hosted weddings, receptions and other events.

The East Wing is also where first lady Melania Trump erected those red Christmas trees in her husband’s first term.

Brower notes of the East Wing, “If you were going to a Christmas party, that’s where you would enter. It was a beautiful space — gorgeous portraits lining the walls of first ladies over the years.”

The East Wing was not totally separated from more dire business. The bunker below — officially called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center — is where Vice President Dick Cheney went during the 9/11 attacks, and where Trump was taken during protests in his first term. President George W. Bush used the East Wing to practice his State of the Union address in 2004.

And in a blend of social and serious matters, civilian visitors passing through the East Wing in 2010 could pause to write cards to service members in overseas conflicts.

To be sure, those closest to Trump do not seem broken up by the destruction of the East Wing. The president had already left a distinct mark on the space by hanging a glaring picture of his face overlaid with an American flag pattern between the portraits of Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton.

The White House says it has taken steps to preserve historic artifacts from the East Wing, and the official chatter is now about the future: about that expansive, expensive, glittering ballroom Trump says will hold close to 1,000 people and will reflect the glory of the country in a way he deems suitable.

He insists private donors will pay for it all. But that won’t keep some longtime admirers of the East Wing from mourning a legacy they say no money could ever buy.

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