![]() The first VP to actually live there was Walter Mondale under Jimmy Carter and ever since, no VP has turned it down. His family however did donate millions of dollars of furnishings to the house. The house formally opened as the vice presidential residence in September 1975, but Vice President Nelson Rockefeller never actually moved in, preferring to remain at his larger private home address instead and use Number One Observatory Circle for entertaining purposes. A total of $2,6 million has been spent on renovations since 1974. Seven Vice Presidents later, while it’s still legally the “temporary” residence four decades, everyone has pretty much accepted that Congress isn’t building a new VP residence anytime soon. Since an official residence still hadn’t been built, in 1974, the Admiral’s House at Number One Observatory Circle became the official residence. None of this sat well with the public and the minor scandal over the VP’s residence led to an immediate change of plans. (Fun fact: Agnew also pled no contest plea to criminal charges of tax evasion following his resignation). When Nixon’s VP, Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973, he had only lived in his house for three months, but was able to sell it for a large profit thanks to all the government-paid upgrades, which included extensions to the property as well as a new driveway. ![]() So instead of building one from scratch, as a temporary solution, the Secret Service began paying for expensive security upgrades to the private homes of Vice-Presidents, which seemed like an okay idea until President Nixon’s reign. Kennedy assassination, Congress decided the VP needed an official residence in 1966, designating “approximately ten acres at the United States Naval Observatory” to build one. The only problem was finding the funding for such a project in the midst of the Vietnam War. It was the home of the Chief of Naval Operations until 1974 when Congress actually passed a law that rendered the house the “official temporary residence of the Vice-President of the United States”– yes officially, it’s the temporary residence, despite it having served as the home of every vice president for the past 40 years.īefore that time, the Vice President lived in his own home, but following the John F. So let’s take a look around at the VP’s digs…īuilt in 1893, the three-story Queen Anne style brick house is located on the northeast grounds of the U.S. Well, today another of my childhood assumptions was thwarted when I learned the true home address of the Vice President of the United States: Number One Observatory Circle. I guess I always assumed the Vice President of the United States was shacked up in the White House along with the President, occupying a couple rooms somewhere at the back of the house, nothing too fancy of course, occasionally running into the leader of the free world in the west wing kitchen while grabbing a late-night glass of milk.
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