Correspondence Between George R. Brown and President Harry S. Truman

January 20, 1948 Dear Mr. Brown: I can't tell you how very much I appreciated your good letter of January seventeenth, I knew about the difficulty Andrew Jackson had with the Pennsylvania Avenue front of The White House and they had almost exactly the same trouble when they put the new columns on the south porch, The old columns were very narrow and did not in anyway go with The White House as a whole. For the last few years they have had awnings on the south porch which covered up the windows and put the beautiful columns out of proportion. The awnings were also exceedingly dirty and were impossible to keep clean. Every year we had to buy a new set of awnings at Seven Hundred and Eighty Dollars and all together it took about Two Thousand Dollars a year to keep them up. In my walks in the morning when I'd approach The White House from the south the dirty awnings obstructed the view of those beautiful columas on the south porch and I tried to think out a remedy for the situation. I called in the Fine Arts Commission and they informed me that if an outstanding architect made a suggestion for the remedy they would approve it. I talked to Mr. Delano, who had been a member of the Fine Arts Commission, and he immediately fell in with the suggestion which I made for a portico, as all these old southern mansions have in cases of this sort, so arranged that the awnings would be out of sight when not in use. When the job is finished everybody will like it. The Chairman of the Fine Arts Commission told me that the Commission would be glad to go along with the architect's decision. When Mr. Delano approved my suggestion, the Chairman of the Commission then wrote me Commission had never thought he would. that TRONAH the of RECORDS SERVICE" to CONTING to