Blair House

Blair House, also known as The President's Guest House, is an official residence in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. The President's Guest House has been called "the world's most exclusive hotel" because it is primarily used as a state guest house to host visiting dignitaries and other guests of the president. Parts of the historic complex have been used for an official residence since the 1940s.

Located just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, it is a complex of four formerly separate homes, Blair House, Lee House, Peter Parker House, and 704 Jackson Place. Major renovations of these 19th-century residences between the 1950s and 1980s joined the homes together. It now has 14 guest bedrooms and at 70,000 square feet (6,500 m²) is larger than the Executive Residence of the White House. Blair House is one of several residences owned by the United States government for use by the president and vice president of the United States; other such residences include the White House, Camp David, One Observatory Circle, the Presidential Townhouse, and Trowbridge House.

President Harry S. Truman and his family lived in the original Blair House from late November 1948, to March 27, 1952, during the White House Reconstruction. Truman survived a 1950 assassination attempt at Blair House. It is one of only seven houses to serve as the presidential residence in the history of the United States, and one of only three along with the White House and The Octagon House that still stand.

Strictly speaking, Blair House refers to one of four existing structures that were merged to form a single building. The U.S. State Department generally uses the name Blair House to refer to the entire facility, saying, "Blair House is the building officially known as the President's Guest House." The General Services Administration refers to the entire complex as the "President's Guest House" and uses the name Blair House to denote the historic Blair House portion of the facility.

Blair House was constructed in 1824; it is the oldest of the four structures that comprise the President's Guest House. The original brick house was built as a private home for Joseph Lovell, eighth surgeon general of the United States Army. It was acquired in 1836 by Francis Preston Blair, a newspaper publisher and influential advisor to President Andrew Jackson, and remained in his family for the following century.

Francis Blair's son Montgomery Blair, who served as Postmaster General in Abraham Lincoln's administration, succeeded his father as resident of Blair House. At a meeting at Blair House on April 18, 1861, Francis Preston Blair Sr. relayed the previous day's offer by Lincoln to Robert E. Lee to command all the Union Forces in the approaching American Civil War. Later that same year, a conference there decided Admiral David Farragut would command an assault on New Orleans.

In 1939, a commemorative marker was placed at Blair House by the United States Department of the Interior, becoming the first building to acquire a federally recognized landmark designation; prior landmarks had been monuments and historic sites other than buildings. It would be formally designated a National Historic Landmark in 1973.

Beginning in 1942, the Blair family began leasing the property to the U.S. government for use by visiting dignitaries; the government purchased the property outright the following December. The move was prompted in part by a request from Eleanor Roosevelt, who found the casual familiarity Winston Churchill displayed during his lengthy war-time stays at the White House sometimes an imposition. On one occasion, Churchill tried to enter Franklin Roosevelt's private apartments at 3:00 a.m. to wake the president for a conversation.