Sewer gas
Today's post is just a very interesting tidbit I found when conducting research for a piece for #GRIT – about how, in the 19th century, the White House had a sewer gas problem so severe that Chester A. Arthur, the 21st US president, refused to move in there until it had been cleared up. According to Thomas Reeves' biography, he stayed in the house of Senator John P. Jones, cofounder of the town of Santa Monica, California, until then. I found this detail in a review article by James Whorton, a medical historian at the University of Washington, published in the Western Journal of Medicine in 2001.
His successor, Chester Arthur, refused to move into the White House, having been made nervous by authoritative statements that, until its plumbing was reconstructed to eliminate sewer gas, “the White House will be behind our better class of tenement-houses.” Arthur even went so far as to lobby Congress to tear down the White House and erect a sewer gas-proof replica in its stead, but though the Senate approved $300,000 for the project, the House of Representatives would not concur, and the new President had to settle for a plumbing overhaul of the old building.
