There are said to be 130 rooms and 400 doors in the White House. Not sure how many of these are secret rooms because officials refuse to comment, but we know there's an emergency subway under the building.
The press room used to be a pool. Franklin Delano Roosevelt liked to swim, he said it relaxes him. Years later, Richard Nixon decided he didn't need a pool and changed it to a press-conference room.
Speaking of pool, President Grant loved the other kind of pool. He ordered to build a room for playing pool between the White House and the Winter Garden, it wasn't a coincidence Grant's wife held parties in the garden.
Theodore Roosevelt named it The White House. He also expanded it.
James Hoban ( the architect who planned the White House) was actually Irish.
Hoban designed the project but it was built by locals... including 5 slaves. There names were Ben, Peter, Harry, Tom and Daniel. They worked 7 days a week with no pay.
Some presidents called it a "lonely place", President Truman called it a "luxurious prison" and Nixon was so lonely he talked to paintings.
There was a library where the Main Diner is now; The smaller diner was an office space before and has furniture from the times of James Monroe presidency.
The movie theater was made in 1942. The first movie shown there was "Birth of a Nation".
Before the President will think about building a border wall, he will have to think about building a higher fence. The fence is almost 7 feet high and has spikes but that turned out to be not enough. In 2014 a man wielding a knife climbed over it and got up to the door before Secret Service stopped him.
Harry S. Truman spent 54 million dollars on renovating the White House after he was taking a bath and the tub broke through the floor to land on a chandelier below. The President managed to jump out of the tub just in time and decide it was definitely time to renovate.
Bill Clinton had a running track built for him in the White House. There are no records of him using it and rumors said he preferred other "physical activities".
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In the 1930's, medical experts around the world claimed warm water bathing was therapeutic and healing to Polio patients. As a result, FDR sought natural springs around the globe.
After much sought after properties, he found a lucrative location in Warm Springs, Georgia.
Since Polio was rampant back then, his retreat became a very popular sight which drew crowds from around the globe in search of healing and relief.
Since FDR was holding office as president and couldn't spend all of his time in Georgia benefiting from these supposed therapeutic pools, he had hundreds of gallons of their natural springs waters transported to a specially constructed private indoor pool in the White House basement.
Years later, President Harry S. Truman conducted the restoration and reconstruction of the White House in 1948. The White House had suffered years of termite, rodent, and mold infestations. It was literally gutted of its wood supports and reinforced with concrete and metal.
There are many sites online with photos and historical documentations. It's really very interesting.
Nixon had nothing to do with turning the pool room into a press room. In fact, after FDR's death, many of the antiques, diplomatic gifts, and decades of artifacts were stored in the pool room during the restoration in the Truman years.
In 1961, First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy was the first person to actually demand sifting through this storage area in an effort to salvage all of the treasures attributed to the White House's history that others had long forgotten or cared about. She had them all restored and preserved in cooperation with the Smithsonian Museum. To this day, if you take a tour of the White House, you can thank her for the preservation of integrity to the antiquity of all the paintings, tapestry's, furniture, china, silver and marble work.
After that first floor back room became vacant President Johnson appointed it for temporary storage of JFK's artifacts and archives until a library was built in his name.
After President Nixon was voted into office after President Johnson, the room had been emptied and lay vacant. Due to its location to circuit breakers, easy access as first-floor location, and exterior parking to visitors, did Nixon appoint its use as a Press Room.
On a side note, FDR did not suffer from the Polio virus. He actually suffered from what's known today as, Guillain-Barre Syndrome.
Warm sulfur springs around the south east United States did nothing to heal the Polio virus. The only people to have benefited from them were the landowners and resort owners.