White House Lives : History: The Carters sunbathed on its roof. Roosevelt’s children roller-skated on its floors. Residents recall problems, perks of their days in the presidential mansion.

Harry S. Truman called it a “glamorous prison.” To Gerald R. Ford it was “the best public housing I’ve ever seen.” Mary Todd Lincoln referred to it as “that Whited Sepulcher.”

The White House, which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year, has been the home of 39 Presidents and their families since John Adams moved in. The original mansion took eight years to build. When his wife, Abigail, arrived in November, 1800, with her eight servants to become its first chatelaine, she found a house that bore little resemblance to the executive mansion of today. In a letter, she complained that the main staircase had not been built yet and that the meager supply of firewood had been used to dry the plaster walls.

“It is an establishment big enough to need 30 servants to run it properly. There is a great unfinished audience room (the East Room) I make a drying room of, to hang up the clothes in.”

Almost two centuries later, First Lady Barbara Bush tells a vastly different tale.

“Thanks to Nancy Reagan, those private quarters are perfectly beautiful,” she writes. “In fact, because of her work, this is the only old house that George and I have ever moved into . . . where everything works.”

Nancy Reagan herself would describe the White House with awe. “There’s a feeling of wonderment,” the former first lady recalled. “Are you really in this beautiful house where so many have lived before you, so much history has been made?”

In Reagan’s memoirs, “My Turn,” she details perquisites that made it feel like a palace. It was, her son Ron concluded, “an eight-star hotel.”

But living there can have its bittersweet moments, according to some former first families. Betty Ford recalled feelings of loneliness after years in an Alexandria, Va., neighborhood.

“You also feel very much that you are in that proverbial fishbowl everybody talks about,” she said.

Luci Baines Johnson, who was 16 when her father, Lyndon, became President after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, recalls those days with emotion. “For me, it was the best of times and the worst of times, but it’s a march through history and there’s not a moment you live there that you are able to be oblivious to that.”

Congress passed the Residence Act in 1790 authorizing a house for the President. The cornerstone of the executive mansion--which no one has been able to locate during the current renovation--was laid Oct. 13, 1792.

In the years between the family of the second President, who lived there for only four months, and the Bushes, who are about to begin their fourth year, the White House has been sacked and burned, gutted, extended, modified, improved, renovated and redecorated.

“The White House is the first of the great public buildings of Washington,” said historian William Seale. “George Washington’s concept of a capital city was visionary. The government was highly experimental yet it flourished. It is the model for the Western world. . . . You can’t deny its power.”

The main house, designed by James Hoban, now covers 55,000 square feet on four floors, not including basements and wings. There are 130 rooms, give or take a few broom closets. Those most often seen by the public and visitors are the Blue, Red, Green and East reception rooms on the main floor and the Oval Office in the West Wing.

The living quarters consist of five rooms on the second floor designated for private use--the West Sitting Hall, a dining room, a dressing room, one bedroom and a sitting room--plus the third floor, which by 1927 had added six bedrooms and three sitting rooms.

There is no constitutional requirement that the President live in the White House, according to Seale. Grover Cleveland disliked it so much that he and his wife lived elsewhere--in Northwest Washington--as much as they could until his second term of office ended in 1897.

“All the Presidents’ wives hated to leave,” wrote J. B. West, White House chief usher who served first ladies from 1941 until his departure in 1969. “They appreciated the services and status that went with their role, no matter how much they yearned to be out of the spotlight. . . . “

In her memoir, “First Lady From Plains,” Rosalynn Carter remembered how her family found privacy on the White House roof, where they sunbathed.

“There’s no place to hide, no place to stomp your feet,” Luci Johnson said. “Harry Truman was chastised for building the Truman balcony but he said he did it because he wanted to have a place to sit alone with his wife.” As a teen-ager, she said, she courted in the third-floor solarium. So did other Presidents’ children.

Over the years the White House has seen 10 weddings and seven deaths involving immediate presidential family members (plus a skeleton embedded in the walls found during a 1902 renovation, according to Seale), a number of births, illnesses, courtships and affairs.

Everyday life tended to be chronicled in letters, diaries, memoirs and biographies.

Seale said, “That’s why John Quincy Adams’ or Polk’s or Lady Bird Johnson’s or Mrs. Taft’s diaries are such incredible records of what happened. It’s personal and very different from an autobiography written with an audience in mind.”

Seale described the house at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as “basically an English country house.” Discussing the changes over nearly two centuries, he observed, “We moved so fast in the 19th Century that you see American life and customs reshaping the inside of the house while the exterior remains more or less the same.”

While early Presidents frequently had large extended families living in the White House and numerous children, smaller arrangements have generally become the rule.

In fact, in her book “Simply Barbara,” Washington Post reporter Donnie Radcliffe writes that Nancy Reagan had advised Barbara Bush not to have her children live in the White House. Reagan recently denied she had offered such advice, but in any case, the Bushes’ five children and 12 grandchildren visit but do not live in.

For children, the experience seems to have been mixed. The sons of Abraham Lincoln regarded the mansion as akin to a prison. When he was 7, Tad aggravated visitors by pulling their beards. He once stood in a window above his father at a military review waving a Confederate flag, according to Seale.

Teddy Roosevelt’s six children roller-skated on the wooden floors, slid down the banisters and walked up the carpeted stairs on stilts, according to chief usher Ike Hoover’s “Forty-Two Years in the White House.”

“I roller-skated on the marble floors in the walkway between the East and West wings,” Susan Ford Bales said in an interview.

But looking back, Luci Johnson said, “I’d have given anything for someone--a peer--to tell me how to learn to avoid mistakes. There was none.”

Almost every chronicler offers a glimpse of how expensive it is to live in the White House. In her memoir, Nancy Reagan expressed surprise the first family would be charged for every meal they and their personal guests ate in the private quarters and all personal expenses.

Jacqueline Kennedy expressed shock when the bills for her first month’s champagne and caviar parties were presented.

West remembered that Mamie Eisenhower, whose husband was not wealthy, read the newspapers for food ads and personally called store managers and sent the Secret Service to take advantage of special sales.

Woodrow Wilson went around turning off the lights. Jimmy Carter turned the heat down when the price of oil skyrocketed.

Public records show that bachelor President James Buchanan’s niece and hostess, Harriet Lane, got rid of the fine French furniture ordered 40 years earlier by James Monroe. Eventually, former White House curator Clement Conger bought the pieces back.

“The Nixons wanted it to be the most beautiful house in America,” said Conger, “and we did it. It still is except for the damage done by Ted Graber. He put in modern sofas.” Graber redecorated for Nancy Reagan.

Since Abigail Adams arrived with eight of them, the White House has been filled with servants. A number of Presidents born in the South, including James Madison and Jefferson, had house slaves. However, by 1850 pressure from abolitionists persuaded the Taylors to restrict the slaves to the family quarters, according to an aide’s letter.

Today, White House curator Rex Scouten lists 96 people on the executive appropriation payroll.

For nearly two centuries the presidential mansion has been the center of official entertainment. Gone are the days when “Old Hickory” Jackson could open the doors of the White House and invite the public to come in for cheese and crackers, as reported in the Washington City Chronicle. In two hours a 1,400-pound Cheddar was consumed.

Presidential families have always sought ways to entertain on a more intimate scale as well.

Mamie Eisenhower entertained her canasta-playing friends upstairs. The Hardings invited friends up to their bedroom or the library where they kept bottles during Prohibition, as recounted in a Secret Service agent’s book. They rationalized that while it wasn’t right (or legal) to serve liquor in the state rooms, they might follow their personal standards in the private quarters.

In addition to the usual dogs and cats, the presidential residence has also harbored some unusual pets. The alligator of the Marquis de Lafayette parked in the East Room when he visited John Quincy Adams, wrote Margaret Truman in “White House Pets.”

Jefferson’s mockingbird sang along when the President played his violin. William McKinley’s parrot squawked, “Look at all the pretty girls” and whistled “Yankee Doodle.”

When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her children returned for the first time after the assassination to see the portraits of the late President and herself as first lady, the family spent several hours with the Nixons.

President Nixon told Caroline, then 13, and John Kennedy Jr., 10, that they would have good luck if they touched the Lincoln Bed. In her memoirs, Julie Nixon Eisenhower describes how the former first lady wrote the Nixons, “The day I always dreaded turned out to be one of the most precious ones I have spent with my children.”