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Plans for taller White House fence raise questions of appearance

 
A handout photo shows a rendering of the proposed new fence around the White House. Nearly two years after an armed man climbed over the existing 7-foot-tall fence, the Secret Service is moving to design and build a taller, stronger security perimeter.
A handout photo shows a rendering of the proposed new fence around the White House. Nearly two years after an armed man climbed over the existing 7-foot-tall fence, the Secret Service is moving to design and build a taller, stronger security perimeter.
Published May 30, 2016

WASHINGTON — Michael Jordan, the basketball star, was famous for being able to jump 48 inches into the air, putting the top of his head 10 1/2 feet off the ground, well above the basket's rim.

If the Secret Service has its way, the new security fence around the White House will be about 3 1/2 feet higher than that.

Nearly two years after an armed man climbed over the existing 7-foot fence around 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and ran through the front door of the White House, the Secret Service is moving aggressively to design and build a taller, stronger security perimeter. Visitors to Washington could soon see a 14-foot barrier ringing the president's home.

Pressure to move quickly is intense; fence jumping at the White House has become a regular occurrence. Two people jumped the barrier last month, including one who had stolen a woman's purse and was hoping for a clean getaway. There was a jumper the day after Thanksgiving last year. And in 2014, officers tackled a man who had scaled the fence and run onto the North Lawn.

But before a new fence can go up, the Secret Service needs to obtain approval from two federal boards in a process that is filled with sensitivities surrounding historical preservation, aesthetics and security. In a city used to delicate politicking, the question of what the new White House fence should look like is expected to be difficult.

"We're trying to find that balance of security, but also keep the historic nature of the White House and keep it open for the public," Joseph Clancy, the director of the Secret Service, said in an interview. "The public doesn't want to come to the White House and see a wall where you can't actually see it."

In recent weeks, officials at the Secret Service have presented their thinking: a fence that looks similar to the existing one, with spear-tip finials atop vertical black iron pickets that are twice as thick, closer together and nearly twice as tall as the current ones.

During appearances before the United States Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission, officials at the Secret Service and the National Park Service, which is also working on the fence project, said they had to find a way to keep people from penetrating the barriers to the 18-acre White House complex, where the president works and the first family lives.

"This is an immediate need," Thomas Dougherty, the chief strategy officer for the Secret Service, told members of the planning commission at an informational meeting last month. "The current fence is currently deficient. It is not, now, a modern alternative to security. We want to move on to a stronger, higher fence."

Dougherty told commission members that the new fence should have anticlimb and antiblast features as well as "early detection" abilities. Sketches provided to the commission by the Secret Service show security sensors at 30-foot intervals atop the fence.

But the images presented by the Secret Service raise questions: Will visitors still be able to see the White House clearly? Will the new fence make taking pictures difficult? Will the "people's house" look like a stronghold, set apart from those that it serves?

L. Preston Bryant Jr., the chairman of the planning commission, said he supported the idea of a 14-foot fence as a necessary security measure. But he also expressed hope that the final design for the fence would remain elegant and simple, like the building it protects.

"I don't want our federal facilities to be fortresses," Bryant said in an interview. "We have tens of millions of people from around the world who visit Washington, D.C., every year. We want them to see that our federal facilities and our government are open, transparent. We want to impress upon them the theme of freedom."

Eric Shaw, the director of the office of planning for the District of Columbia, said during the planning commission meeting that the proposed fence "looked a little heavy," and he questioned comparisons made by the Secret Service to similar fences, like the one around Buckingham Palace, the London home for the British monarchy.

"It looked like the White House was kind of behind bars," Shaw said of the renderings of the new fence. "It felt like we were sort of almost encasing the White House, in a way."

He added: "In the seat of democracy, it's always weird to look at Buckingham Palace. The whole idea, in the end, is it's actually a house; it's not a palace."

Members of the fine arts commission, which is charged with protecting the aesthetics around federal property in Washington, expressed similar concerns.

Alex Krieger, one of the commission's members, noted that the thicker pickets in the proposed fence could "result in an overall visual impact that is more extreme than what was presented in the photographic simulations," according to minutes of the meeting provided by the organization. He also noted the "historical progression of increasing fence heights around the White House" and suggested that the trend had been toward less attractive fences.

Thomas Jefferson had a small post-and-rail fence erected around the White House in 1801, according to the White House Historical Association, and a "low and heavy wrought-iron fence" went up along the north front of the building 30 years later. But it was not until the early 1920s that a taller fence circled the building.

Clancy said the Secret Service was committed to building something new that maintained the look of past fences. He said that was why it had largely rejected putting in glass or plexiglass panels, like those that might be found at a zoo or a sports arena.

"You also have to think of the aesthetics — how would that look in front of the White House?" he said. "The fence is traditional. It's what they have had for 100 years, and whatever we put in place here is going to be here another 100 years, so I think most are settled on the fence as the best way."

Because the project is in its preliminary design stage, no final cost has been determined, a spokeswoman for the Secret Service said.

The Secret Service will appear again before the two commissions this summer, and final approval for the fence could come this fall. The current schedule calls for construction of the fence to begin in 2018.