PRESERVING LAFAYETTE SQUARE

Hardly anyone now remembers that one day Jackie Kennedy looked out from the safe haven, the elegant plushness of the White House, and decided that she must save Lafayette Square.

Even then, Lafayette Park was full -- not only with marble monuments but also schoolchildren from Iowa, protestors with incomprehensible signs and fervent causes, tourists with cameras, and those unfortunate soles worn out on the rough stones of the paths of life.

Around the square run Madison Place, Jackson Place, H Street and the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue that Thomas Jefferson had cut across the President's Park. On the blocks stood early 19th-century residences, remnants of the time when this was the aristocratic place to live.

Through several presidents, the need for more executive office space had threatened the early houses, leading to plans to replace them with tall office buildings that would cast shadows on the park and the people. Some might say -- though not I -- that Jacqueline Kennedy was concerned with her view from the White House. Lafayette Square was, after all, originally the White House's front lawn.

But a more generous view holds that having put the White House on its way to comfort, order and glory, she was ready to spread out. She, and eventually her husband, agreed to save Lafayette's historic and architecturally splendid 19th-century residential gems: Decatur House, Dolley Madison's House, the other Cosmos Club houses, and, along the Avenue, Blair-Lee Houses and the Renwick Gallery.

As a result, the cause of historic preservation would be given the imprimatur of presidential influence. All her life, Jacqueline Kennedy had grown up in and been a guest in historic houses and thus was respectful of the past. In fact, she was descended from a Frenchman who came over with the Marquis de Lafayette to fight the cause of the American Revolution. So the young preservationist was especially susceptible to the winsome wiles of David Finley, chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, a key member on the White House fine arts committee, a fierce preservationist who lived at Oatlands, a historic estate in the Virginia hunt country, one of her favorite retreats.

Charles Atherton, secretary of the Commission of Fine Arts, which has jurisdiction over buildings and sites around government property and landmarks, agrees with the importance of Jacqueline Kennedy's influence in saving the square, although he cites the work of the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, as well as a sketch by architect Grosvenor Chapman, which appeared in The Washington Post on Dec. 16, 1961. Chapman, in a letter dated January 1993, said the sketch had been given to the Kennedys. "The real force was David Finley," Atherton said. "He was over at the White House at all times, working on the redecoration. He had a lot of prompting from his wife. She was descended from W. W. Corcoran, who built the original Corcoran art gallery (now the Renwick) and had his mansion on H Street.

"Finley was deeply committed to preservation. He helped establish the National Trust in 1949 and the historic Georgetown Act. He always stayed in the background, letting others stand in front."

William Walton, a painter, writer and close friend of the Kennedys, said, "We had all but given up on Lafayette Square, when she told the president and me, 'You can't stop until the bulldozers roll.' She was a very strong lady. Her connections with the arts were so natural and not pretentious. We called in John Carl Warnecke, who understood office space. By making the buildings go back a block, we saved the historic houses on the square."

Walton was appointed chairman of the Commission on Fine Arts not long before Kennedy died and served for eight years.

Warnecke recently asked his staff to put together documents pertaining to the saving of the square. One is a March 6, 1962, letter from Mrs. Kennedy to Bernard L. Boutin, the General Services administrator. In it, she writes that she is enclosing a letter from Finley and goes on to say: "Because of our interest in history and preservation, it really matters a great deal to the president and to myself that this is done well; we have received so much mail on this subject.

"Unfortunately, last summer the president okayed some plans for buildings; he was in a hurry, he doesn't have time to bother himself with details like this, he trusted the advice of a friend. . . and I really don't think it was the right advice. With all he has to do, at least I can spare him some minor problems like this. So, I turn to you for help."

The letter goes on to castigate "a hideous white modern court building," planned for Madison Place and an "unsuitable, violently modern building" planned for Jackson Place. She added that she was enclosing a design for a building she liked. She suggested "a design which is more in keeping with the 19th-century bank on the corner." On the other side, "it is of vital importance that, again, the new building be in the same style as Decatur House on the north and the other old house on the south."

The Kennedys took up the cause of the Renwick Gallery of Art, then called the Old Court of Claims but originally the Corcoran Art Gallery, built by Finley's wife's forebear at Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th Street: "It may look like a Victorian horror, but it is really quite lovely and a precious example of the period of architecture which is fast disappearing. I so strongly feel that the White House should give the example in preserving our nation's past. Now we think of saving old buildings like Mount Vernon and tear down everything in the 19th century -- but in the next hundred years, the 19th century will be of great interest and there will be none of it left, just plain glass skyscrapers."

And she applies a heavy layer of salve: "Bobby says you are the most wonderful head of GSA there ever was or ever will be. I am sure this is true, and I cannot tell hou how much I am counting on you . . . before you know it, everything is ripped down and horrible things put up in their place. I simply panic at the thought of this and decided to make a last-ditch appeal."

Mrs. Kennedy prevailed. Architect Warnecke, who said he had never seen the Chapman sketch until long afterward, was chosen by John F. Kennedy to design the executive office buildings. They step back respectfully from the historic houses on the Square. Jacqueline Kennedy's friends Paul and Rachel ("Bunny") Mellon came to her aid with their Old Dominion Foundation to re-landscape and replant the park.

And so it is, when we walk in Lafayette Square, we should tip a hat to Jacqueline Kennedy.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.