Photo courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library
The Fords walk the Nixons to the presidential helicopter on the White House South Lawn Aug. 9, 1974.
Gerald R. Ford took the oath of office as the 38th president of the United States on Aug. 9, 1974, hours after Richard Nixon's resignation took effect. The White House, however, was not ready for him. The Nixons had left in a rush, and so the new president did what he had done for nearly two decades: he went home to 514 Crown View Drive in Alexandria's Clover neighborhood.
He stayed there for 10 days, driving into Washington each morning down I-395 with a police escort ahead of him and a press van behind.
The night before
Photo courtesy of Gerald R. Ford, Jr. Presidential Library
The Fords talk with neighbors in Alexandria.
The vigil started the day before the oath. When Nixon announced his resignation on the evening of Aug. 8, crowds gathered in front of the Ford house. The Alexandria Police Department closed Crown View Drive to traffic. A stand of microphones went up on the lawn. Neighbors drifted out to join the reporters and photographers already camped there, and everyone settled in to wait.
The wait was long enough that the neighborhood absorbed the press corps. Louise Abbruzzese, who lived across the street, opened her house to reporters — telephone, television, bathroom. Her husband, Peter, carried a pitcher of martinis out to the garage so the press had somewhere dry to stand in the rain.
The reporters later thanked the family with a plaque for that garage. It reads: "First press room of President Gerald R. Ford, August 8, 1974."
Ten days as the president's address
Photo courtesy of Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library
Gerald Ford and son Steven cut the grass at their home in Alexandria.
Ford was sworn in the next day. That night, friends came to the Crown View Drive house for an informal dinner; a couple of White House staff came over to help cook and clean up.
Two days later, the Fords went to Sunday services at Immanuel Church-on-the-Hill on Seminary Road, where the sermon addressed the work of picking up the broken pieces of the presidency Ford had just inherited.
Then came the commute. For the first 10 days of his term, the president of the United States merged onto I-395 from Alexandria, reading his morning papers in the back of a limousine that traveled in the bus and carpool lane, trailed by a Secret Service wagon and a van of reporters. Motorists waved.
The house itself had already been adapted. When Ford became vice president in December 1973 — after Spiro Agnew's resignation — the family stayed put rather than move to the Naval Observatory. The Secret Service converted the garage into a command post, bulletproof glass went into the master bedroom windows, phone lines multiplied, and steel rods were sunk under the driveway so it could carry an armored limousine.
On Aug. 19, 1974, the White House was ready, and the Fords moved out of Alexandria for good.
Twenty-three years in Alexandria
Photo courtesy of Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library
Ford family at their Alexandria, Va. home.
The Fords were not weekenders. They arrived in 1951, during Ford's second term representing Michigan in Congress, and rented in Parkfairfax — the same garden-apartment community where a young Richard Nixon had also rented. They moved into the newly built Crown View Drive house in 1955 and added a backyard pool a few years later.
Three of the four Ford children went through Alexandria City Public Schools and graduated from T.C. Williams High School. Future Alexandria mayor William D. Euille was a classmate of the two oldest Ford sons, Mike and Jack, and has described Ford turning up at the school as a parent, a speaker in government classes, and a booster at games. In 1974, as vice president, Ford gave the T.C. Williams commencement address the year his son Steven was a student there.
Neighbors remembered the ordinary things: the splash of the morning swim, the lawn getting mowed, the family dog in the pool.
Betty Ford later wrote that leaving the White House in 1977 was far less of a wrench for her than leaving the house in Alexandria had been.
What's still here
The house at 514 Crown View Drive was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985 — one of very few in the country recognized for a president's suburban middle-class home rather than a birthplace or estate. It is a private residence, not a museum, and there is nothing to see from the curb but a well-kept street.
There are places Alexandrians can actually visit:
- President Gerald R. Ford Park, the open space at 1422–1426 Janney's Lane at the southeast corner of North Quaker Lane, named after a citizen committee spent most of 2007 weighing how the city should remember him.
- President Ford Lane, the adjacent street off Janney's Lane, renamed at the same time.
- The George Washington Masonic National Memorial, where Ford returned as president in February 1975 for the unveiling of a bronze medallion and plaque now in the auditorium. A football from the 1935 East-West Shrine Game, signed by the Michigan lineman who played in it, is also on display.
When Ford died in December 2006 at 93, his funeral plans — written years earlier — routed the motorcade through Alexandria on its way from Andrews to the Capitol. Hundreds of people lined Washington Street on the evening of Dec. 30 to watch it pass.
He had told the Alexandria Police Association at a picnic in September 1974 that the family had no intention of selling the house. "We are going to come back there," he said. "I don't know how soon."
They never did move back. But for 10 days in August 1974, Alexandria didn't need him to — the city already had the president.
