Photographers atop the Washington Monument, reopened after the shutdown, document an empty hole where the East Wing used to be.

The Washington Monument reopened to tourists on Veterans Day, after forty-three days of shutdown closure. The first photograph wired around the world from the top of the obelisk that morning showed, in the foreground, a flat brown rectangle of cleared earth where the East Wing of the White House had stood since 1902. Demolition had begun on October 20. By November 11 the rubble was mostly gone. A few skip loaders were still working the perimeter. The First Lady’s office, the social secretary’s office, the calligraphy office, the East Garden, and the East Colonnade were no longer features of the property.

In their place will rise a ninety-thousand-square-foot glass-walled ballroom. The President has said publicly that the East Room is too small. The new structure is roughly five times the square footage of the wing it replaces. The reported cost has migrated from two hundred million to three hundred and fifty, depending on which day the press shop is asked. The funding source is described as private. The donor list has not been published. The historic preservation review was bypassed.

This is the second White House construction project in three months that has proceeded without going through the National Capital Planning Commission. The first was the Rose Garden patio. The pattern is becoming the policy.

A serious country preserves the symbolic property of its government independently of the preferences of its current occupant, because the country, not the occupant, owns the building. The East Wing was not the President’s wing. It was the country’s wing. It was the wing presidents and first ladies have used since Theodore Roosevelt added it. It is now a hole in the ground, and the hole is to be filled with a ballroom funded by donors whose names do not appear on the White House website.

Calmly documenting the decline.