1651 Pennsylvania Avenue is the White House guest house where Yeltsin learned to order pizza
Tourists often walk by the four-story townhouse across the street from the White House without even a glance.
But 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue has such a colourful history that in these hyper-partisan final weeks before voters elect the next US president, Republicans and Democrats gathered this week to celebrate it.
It’s Blair House, the official guest home for visiting heads of state. The place where overnight guests have included Queen Elizabeth II, Emperor Akihito, Charles de Gaulle, Francois Mitterrand and Vladimir Putin.
We joined a celebration of Blair House, built 200 years ago, which started in the 117-room residence that is far grander than it looks from the street.
The daylong commemoration then moved to the White House where President Joe Biden shook hands with Republicans who did not vote for him, before ending at the nearby State Department where Hillary Clinton made people laugh.
“I remember Boris Yeltsin left the state dinner at the White House, went to the Blair House, and within 20 minutes he was calling for a pizza,” Clinton said, recounting that 1994 evening when the Secret Service informed her husband, President Bill Clinton, that the Russian president was “standing in the street outside of Blair House waiting for the Domino’s guy”.
Rex Tillerson, as Republican as Clinton is a Democrat, chuckled as he listened beside her. It was that kind of night. There was no talk of Tillerson being named Secretary of State by Donald Trump, who sank Clinton’s bid to be the first female president.
Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, just thanked Tillerson, a former CEO of ExxonMobil, for his generous donations – including the massive wool rug in the room where we dined on Maryland crab and wagyu beef.
There were about 150 guests including trustees of the nonpartisan foundation that raised money to upgrade Blair House. The old building needed a refresh. After all, it had a reputation as “the world’s most exclusive hotel”.
Built in 1824 as a private home, it quickly began hosting then-president Andrew Jackson’s “Kitchen Cabinet”. Many presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, walked over there to hold private conversations.
But it was Winston Churchill who ushered in its modern era.
In late 1941, during World War II, Churchill was staying in the White House private quarters on a visit with Franklin Roosevelt. After midnight, and while wearing his nightshirt and holding a cigar, the British prime minister ran into Eleanor Roosevelt as he paced the hallways. The first lady told her husband it was time to find visiting world leaders another place to stay.
“Eleanor Roosevelt felt that Churchill was taking the special relationship we enjoyed with Britain just a bit too far,” joked CNN anchor Chris Wallace at the dinner. Just a few months after Churchill’s visit, the US government bought Blair House and made it the official residence for visiting dignitaries.
“The story of our country and its place in the world has been written within Blair House’s walls,” Blinken said, mentioning that Harry Truman, a Democrat, convened his cabinet there before making the decision to enter the Korean War and that Richard Nixon, a Republican, negotiated nuclear arms détente there with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
Blair House has a certain “if these walls could talk” quality. Gahl Burt, White House social secretary under President Ronald Reagan, recalled how one head of state arrived with huge bags of dirty laundry brought from his home country. He was a repeat visitor, she said, without divulging his name but adding, “I guess it was just a way to get his laundry done for free”.
Then there were the sons of Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat. They went on a Washington shopping spree buying 20 boats, 20 washing machines and 20 dryers. “I didn’t have a place to store them,” Burt said. They were ultimately loaded onto a plane bound for Egypt, but Blair House did accommodate the 2,500 pairs of jeans they bought.
Since 1977, when president-elect Jimmy Carter slept there, the incoming US president has stayed at Blair House the night before taking the oath of office and moving into the White House. It’s another bipartisan tradition.
So it bothered some people in 2017 when Trump said he didn’t want to stay there, preferring to the hotel he owned at the time that was just a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue. Though Trump had not been in Blair House, Trump had heard from Keith Schiller, his longtime aide, that its rooms were “small”.
Bigger means better to Trump, who just about every day describes things he likes as “big” – big crowds, big tax cuts, big walls. Blair House is actually larger than the private quarters in the White House, but many of the rooms are originals from the 19th century, more cozy than grand.
At the last minute, under pressure from the Secret Service, Trump agreed to stay at Blair House for one night, with his kids and grandchildren. His daughter Ivanka brought sheets from the Trump hotel for the overnight stay, “to feel more at home”. Trump signed the guest book as Barack Obama and other presidents-elect had before him.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential now running against Trump, knows Blair House very well. During renovations at the official residence of the vice president in 2021, she and her husband bunked there.
Since the days when cows kept out back at Blair House supplied fresh milk to the president, a few more Republican presidents have been elected than Democrats (19 to 15).
An unspoken message at the recent festivities was that whichever presidential candidate loses this November, they can look at history – and the Blair House guest book – and see that their party will be back.