Why hasn the Presidents House been rebuilt?
Until recently, not enough was known about the building to even consider rebuilding it and we still don’t know enough of the details to faithfully reproduce the house. A team under the WPA studied the house in the 1930s, but its research and the supposed scale model that was built were so inept as to be worthless. The most disappointing part of the WPA project is that had the researchers done their jobs and gotten things right, it’s likely that the main house would have been rebuilt between two of its original walls and upon most of its original foundations. Instead, in the 1950s, the surviving walls were demolished and the foundations truncated to 4 feet below street level. The idea of recreating historical buildings is out of fashion. Recent thinking is that recreating a building can distort history as much as doing nothing can doom it to obscurity.
