When New York State voters elected a new governor in November, many probably assumed that George E. Pataki would move his family into the gabled Queen Anne Executive Mansion perched high on a hill above the Hudson in Albany-the one that 29 governors have lived in, that Nelson A. Rockefeller restored after a devastating fire on the first floor in 1961, where Alfred E. Smith once kept monkeys, donkeys, a bear and a goat named Heliotrope.
They were wrong.
After his inauguation this month, the lone Pataki plans to use the mansion as a sort of 40-room bachelor pad, commuting back and forth to Garrison, where his family will continue living in its elegant $700,000 Victorian home.
According to Zenia Mucha, a transition team spokeswoman, Pataki’s four school-age children will finish out the school year and then the family “will make a determination” about whether to move to the mansion.
Gov. Christie Whitman of New Jersey resides in her state’s executive mansion-sort of.
Drumthwacket is the official governor’s mansion in Princeton. Governor Whitman usually spends two to four nights weekly at the mansion, having said that she prefers spending time at Pontefract, her 237-acre family farm.
Although they are not the first governors of their states to choose not to reside full time at their designated dwellings, their part-time residency points to a tiny chink in the mansion wall. Behind their polite facades, with their vast parade of white columns, governors’ mansions are undergoing an identity crisis of sorts, within a grand, historic tradition.
While they remain culturally and historically vibrant, right down to their galleries of First Lady portraits, in many states their status as icons has diminished.
“They inescapably reflect the tenor of a place,” said William Seale, a historian who has served as a restoration consultant on five mansions and written extensively on the White House. “But their symbolic presence is precarious.”
So much so that in Idaho, the Legislature has shelved plans to build a new $1.5 million governor’s mansion, deeding the land instead to the city of Boise for use as open range.
Gov. Cecil D. Andrus, who spent his first term at the old governor’s residence (since sold) and part of his current term vetoing proposals for a new one, choosing to live in his own house, said he favored a modest housing allowance rather than an “antiquated notion.”
“I didn’t expect to be carried around on a satin pillow and given a nice house to live in,” said the 63-year-old governor, whose political image benefited from his mowing his own lawn, hauling his own garbage and in general being a self-described “cheapskate.”
“When we need money for children,” added Andrus, who is retiring, “we shouldn’t be spending dough glorifying a position that really isn’t worth it.”
(His successor, Phil Batt, has temporarily rented a two-bedroom apartment in Boise.)
Governors’ residences vary wildly from state to state. In Kentucky, the Beaux-Arts mansion is modeled on the Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette’s villa near the Palace of Versailles; in North Dakota, the governor lives in a humble ranch house full of Baker furniture, circa 1959.
The styles range all over the world and the ages: Victorian helter-skelter, hacienda wannabe, nouvelle Georgia plantation, Beaver Cleaver suburban. The interiors favor the Jackie Kennedy look, full of rare antiques, but Roger Branigan, the late governor of Indiana, struck a chord with other governors when he compared his cobweb-filled quarters to a “second-rate mausoleum.”
In California, there were so many rats in the original Victorian governor’s mansion in Sacramento that Bernice Brown, the wife of Gov. Edmund G. Brown Sr., reportedly requisitioned a cat from the State Buildings and Grounds Department.
Even the word “mansion” is relative. Drumthwacket-the name is Celtic for “wooded hill”-is palatial even by Princeton standards and has been appraised at $11 million. The governor’s house in Concord, N.H., built in 1836, was found to be the least valuable, at $80,800, in the last national survey of governor’s residences, undertaken in 1990 by the National Association of State Facilities Administrators. At 3,500 square feet, it is so small by gubernatorial standards that Gov. Steve Merrill commutes from his home in Manchester, 18 miles away.
Only half the mansions were built specifically to house governors; the rest are converted private homes that public-spirited citizens (or in some cases political cronies) bequeathed or purchased. About half date from the 19th century. Virginia’s stately Georgian house is the oldest in continuous use, built in 1813.
Perks that existed in some states and territories before the formation of the union, the mansions were originally meant to give inspiring testimony to the principles of the state. In Mississippi, for example, state law required the governor’s house in Jackson to “adhere to plain republican simplicity.” Well, maybe simplicity is in the eye of the beholder, as Money magazine pointed out last year when it cited the 22,800-square-foot Greek Revival mansion as the country’s most lavish, with an estimated value of $16.6 million.
The question of relevance predates the latest crop of governors. Six states-Idaho, Rhode Island, Arizona, Massachusetts, Vermont and California-don’t have state-owned governors’ mansions at all. Even when a governor doesn’t have to travel far to the office, political mileage can be still be gained from the absence of a mansion.
In Massachusetts, for instance, Michael S. Dukakis put his modest life style and support for public transportation on display by taking the trolley for his daily 15-minute commute when he was governor.
In December, Gov. George F. Allen Jr. of Virginia may have made political hay by dismissing five executive mansion employees, including two maids, a laundry worker and a handyman.
The Allens have said they expect everyone, including their two children, to make his own bed. (“Jeopardy” question: How many states currently employ prison inmates as staff members?
Answer: At least five, although Nevada discontinued the practice after one drove off with the governor’s car).
If the mansions are overlooked today-or rejected-it is in part because of the decline in consciousness of state history in general, which flourished in the 1920’s, when many mansions were still new, and in part because of the growing national obsession with Washington, according to David Glassberg, the director of the public history program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
To Thad Beyle, a historian of state government and politics at the University of North Carolina, the shift also echoes changes in the way government operates.
“You used to have to go to Raleigh and sit down and talk” with the legislators, he said. With the advent of faxes, computers and cellular phones, he said, “we don’t need people sitting face to face in rooms anymore.”
Add to this the arrival of younger governors-among the 19 governors-elect, the average age is 50, compared with 55 for sitting governors-and practical considerations come into play, he noted. In museum settings, he said, “you can’t picture your kids playing Frisbee in the living room.”
In the case of affluent governors, including Pataki and Whitman, there is also the issue of potentially “trading down” one’s living space, he said. Still, he noted that “a governor’s mansion is a neutral place, the people’s place.”
“A person’s home is not neutral,” he said. “It’s difficult to pursuade inner-city legislators you understand their problems when you’re entertaining them at your beautiful country home.”
But as with everything in politics, governors’ residences aren’t exactly neutral. They are always built on rich political soil, as former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. of California proved when he took to his famous mattress in a rented apartment, forsaking the new eight-bedroom, 11,000-square-foot mansion.
Dismissing the palatial home built by friends of Ronald Reagan as a “Taj Mahal,” he suggested, perhaps only half in jest, that it be turned into a halfway house for reformed lobbyists.
The lowest point in mansion lore probably came in January 1983, when Deukemejian, a Republican who had just been elected governor of California, wound up spending his first weeks in office at a downtown Holiday Inn, the Taj Mahal having been sold out from under him by a Democratic Legislature.
The current governor, Pete Wilson, lives in a suburban-style ranch house surrounded by eucalyptus and juniper, owned by the Governor’s Residence Foundation, a private group with Republican ties, with maintenance and operating costs covered by the state.
It is a house “like thousands of other ranch houses in California,” observed Doug Willis, a California political writer, but because of the state’s budget crisis, “building a new one would have all the wrong symbolism.”
Tinkering with an old one does too, as Hilda Mae Snoops found out when she set about remodeling the historic governor’s residence in Annapolis, Md., sending the political dust bunnies flying.
Snoops, the longtime companion of Gov. William Donald Schaefer, spent $1.9 million between 1987 and 1991 in repair and redecoration of the mansion-adding things like a 12-foot-high three-tiered bronze fountain decorated with Maryland flora and fauna-and shocked critics by threatening to sell off antique rugs because they had holes in them.
Critics disparaged the beige paint and silky wall coverings, calling her taste “blue, bland and boring,” preferring the historically correct restoration carried out by the previous First Lady, Patricia Hughes.
Zelig Robinson, a lawyer for the Governor’s Mansion Foundation, a group that paid for part of the redecoration, summed it all up: “A lot of people had taste different from Hilda Mae Snoops.”
At her first Annapolis news conference this month, Frances Glendening, the First Lady-to-be, demonstrated that she had learned her lesson: She would not extensively redecorate the mansion, she said, and would dutifully practice historic preservation.
