TUESDAY, JULY 28 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU C3
the White House Historical Asso-
ciation. The WHHA is not in-
volved with exterior renovations,
which are overseen by the Nation-
al Park Service and funded
through private donations.
Whereas many parts of the
White House have been reimag-
ined over the years as different
first ladies have cycled through
its walls, the Rose Garden is one
of the few spaces that has re-
tained a connection to the Ken-
nedys. “I think it’s nice that Mrs.
Trump would honor Mrs. Kenne-
dy in that way and want to care
for the Kennedys’ legacy with
that important garden and to
make sure it’s cared for and
maintained and used properly,”
McLaurin said. (Tuesday is Jac-
queline Kennedy’s birthday,
though the White House news
release did not mention it.)
“It has been my goal from the
very beginning of this project that
the restoration of the Rose Gar-
den is sensitive to the history of
all that has come before, includ-
ing the admirable plan of Bunny
Mellon’s design of 1962,” the first
lady said in remarks Monday at a
meeting of the Committee for the
Preservation of the White House.
As Anita McBride, former chief
of staff to first lady Laura Bush,
points out, August is a typical
time for renovations. The one for
the Rose Garden has been months
in the works and will include
upgrades to improve accessibility
for those with disabilities and
provide “support for audiovisual
and broadcast needs,” according
to the White House announce-
ment. There are also drainage
issues that will reportedly be ad-
dressed.
The first lady has overseen
changes to the Red Room, Blue
Room and bowling alley, among
other spaces. The Rose Garden
announcement echoes one she
made in March, when she re-
leased photographs of herself in
a hard hat, poring over architec-
tural plans for the construction
of a White House Tennis Pavilion
at a time when schools were
beginning to be closed. The Rose
Garden Twitter responses are a
callback to then, when referenc-
es to her as Marie Antoinette
telling her people to eat cake
began circulating on the Inter-
net.
McLaurin said that the Rose
Garden renovation is an attempt
to shore up the administration’s
legacy. “At the end of the day, the
White House belongs to the
American people,” McLaurin
said. “And it’s the responsibility
of every president and first lady
to care for the house on behalf of
the American people and to
leave it for those that follow
them.”
At the same time, Gutin points
out, during the pandemic, Mela-
nia Trump’s messaging has em-
phasized safety, as she has posted
a picture of herself in a mask on
Instagram, telling her followers
to stay vigilant about the virus.
Gutin said a more effective exer-
cise in legacy-building than
spearheading a Rose Garden ren-
ovation would be concentrating
on her Be Best initiative. “There’s
so much with this administra-
tion I don’t understand,” she
said. “I’ve been saying it now for
three and a half years. You see an
action, and you don’t know ex-
actly what the motivation is.”
[email protected]Jura Koncius contributed to this
report.state dinners held during the
Trump administration. (There
have been only eight held in the
Rose Garden since 1962.) It was a
glitzy affair that seemed to signal
the first lady’s reverence for
White House tradition and histo-
ry. A military band played on the
West Wing roof and tables were
set with green and gold. Dover
sole was served and the Clinton
and George W. Bush china used.
The space seems to hold a special
significance for Melania Trump:
It’s where she launched her Be
Best initiative and has celebrated
its anniversary.
Soon after the announcement,
“Marie Antoinette” began trend-
ing on Twitter, with many making
reference to Senate Republicans’
proposal to slash emergency un-
employment benefits, as more
than 40 million Americans have
filed unemployment claims dur-
ing the pandemic.
Announcements of the “signifi-
cant renewal,” as the White House
called it, come on the heels of the
first lady’s first solo, in-person
media appearance since early
March. On Thursday, she attend-
ed a briefing with the Indian
Health Service system to discuss
the safety of Native American
children as part of her Be Best
initiative.
While she has accompanied the
president on occasions such as
Memorial Day and the Fourth of
July and made quiet trips to speak
with women affected by the opi-
oid crisis and to drop off personal
protective equipment for mem-
bers of a Washington fire station,
nothing she has done in the inter-
vening months has had quite the
heft of her pre-pandemic, public-
facing activities — until now. In
March, her first two solo fundrais-
ers for the Trump campaign were
canceled because of the virus.
The Rose Garden announce-
ment is coming at a time when
President Trump is under a bar-
rage of scrutiny, notes Myra
Gutin, author of “The President’s
Partner: The First Lady in the
Twentieth Century.” Federal offi-
cers are using military tactics
against protesters in Portland,
Ore.; the country’s coronavirus
death toll is approaching 150,000
with no abatement of infections
in sight; and nearly every major
poll shows him down in the presi-
dential race by significant digits.
“While it’s a traditional first
lady action to pay attention to the
Rose Garden and other aspects of
the White House, and I’m not
belittling them by any means, it
does strike me as a diversion, yet
again,” said Gutin, a professor of
communication at Rider Univer-
sity in New Jersey. Gutin pointed
out that the plans for the Rose
Garden renovations have been in
the works for months.
“The timing is a little suspect,”
Gutin went on, “that this is com-
ing out right now, during all the
negative press the administra-
tion is getting — I don’t know,
maybe it takes him away from
the bad press for a few minutes.”
While the garden was started
in 1913 by Woodrow Wilson’s first
wife, Ellen Wilson, it wasn’t used
as the grand staging ground for
events that it is today until the
Kennedy administration. “Those
steps on the west end where the
president will come out and stand
and speak, that was John Kenne-
dy’s idea to put those steps out
there to create a little stage,” said
Stewart McLaurin, president ofROSE GARDEN FROM C1First lady announces the
Rose Garden will return
to how it looked in 1962
ers who popularized ball pits,
they might move on to more
hygienic ways to recapture their
youths. Christine Tran Ferguson,
34, has more than 300,000 fol-
lowers on her fashion and travel
Instagram, and she says she won’t
be visiting any ball pits when they
reopen.
She thinks a beautifully de-
signed swing would be a good
replacement: great for pretty Ins-
tagram poses, and “you can just
wipe it down and sanitize it easi-
ly.”
[email protected]genic bacteria and 1 opportunis-
tic pathogenic yeast.” (That’s
bad.) McDonald’s ball pits have a
reputation for churning up gross
little discoveries, such as used
bandages and dirty diapers. The
Building Museum’s “Beach” swal-
lowed people’s shoes, wallets,
sunglasses and cash, and for a few
people, it was an unfortunate
source of conjunctivitis, or pink-
eye. There’s a running joke on
social media that the novel coro-
navirus originated not from a bat,
but in the depths of a Chuck E.
Cheese ball pit.
Ball pits are frivolous, but fun
is essential. And for kids, some-
day, there will be an opportunity
to dive back in — whether it’s at
home (you can buy a personal
$231 faux-marble velvet mini-ball
pit, the perfect aesthetic for an
aspiring child influencer) or,
eventually, in a safe public envi-
ronment. But for adult children,
perhaps they’re a little over-
played. Every Instagram museum
has a ball pit now, and everyone’s
ball-pit selfie looks the same.
They’ve become a visual cliche.
“I think we’ll survive as a civili-
zation without ball pits,” Raynor
says.
As for the Instagram influenc-contain an antibacterial agent in
the plastic. “I would contend that
— in a pre-covid world, and espe-
cially in a post-covid world — that
we have the cleanest ball pit on
the planet,” says Jeff Lind, Color
Factory’s chief executive.
But antibacterial is not anti -
viral. And reassurances and fre-
quent cleanings may not be
enough. Raynor, the public health
professor, says he thinks it would
be pretty embarrassing for some-
one who contracts the corona -
virus to have to admit to a contact
tracer that they had been playing
in a ball pit during a pandemic.
“It’s something that’s not nec-
essary, and it’s kind of pointless,”
he says. “Why take the risk at this
point in time?”
What about at a later point in
time? Will anyone see ball pits the
same way? The thing to remem-
ber is that even before there was a
wildly contagious virus stalking
humanity, ball pits had a reputa-
tion for being rainbow-colored
kiddie petri dishes of bacteria.
Researchers from the University
of North Georgia studied ball pits
in physical therapy clinics a few
years ago and found “consider-
able microbial colonization,...
including 8 opportunistic patho-infection, “we talk about the
three C’s,” says Peter Raynor, a
professor at the University of
Minnesota School of Public
Health. “Closed spaces, crowded
places, close contact.” Ball pits
have all three.
Are they essential? Hardly.
That’s kind of what makes them
fun. But needless to say, the ma-
jority of ball pits in the United
States are closed right now, and
nobody’s in a huge hurry to re-
open them. They’re listed in
Phase 4 for Massachusetts, and
they weren’t included in the rec-
reational facilities permitted to
reopen in California. Tennessee
reopening guidelines call ball pits
“areas where social distancing is
difficult or impossible to main-
tain” and require they be off
limits to visitors.
That has been catastrophic for
the ball-pit industry, says Jim
Sitton, president of 21st Century
Products, which manufactures
ball-pit balls.
“Covid has pretty much shut
our business down for the mo-
ment,” Sitton says. “If the indus-
try comes back, hopefully we’ll be
around to see that happen.”
McDonald’s has closed its Play-
Places. Ikea’s children’s play area,
Smaland, “will remain closed at
this time as an added safety mea-
sure,” says an Ikea spokeswoman.
“We are unable to comment about
the future of ball pits at this time.”
At the Lane, a family social
club in D.C.’s Ivy City neighbor-
hood, founders Molly Nizhnikov
and Rachel Lubin packed up the
balls from their ball pit earlier
this month. Their business is
open for private events and sum-
mer camps. “We’re not going to
address the idea of whether or
not there will be a ball pit when
we come back until we know
what the rest of the world will
look like,” Lubin says.
It’s not just kids who are going
without. Among adults, ball pits
have undergone a resurgence as
millennials’ nostalgia and fond-
ness for Instagram have found
them flocking to highly stylized
photo traps, such as the Color
Factory or the Museum of Ice
Cream. There’s always a ball pit,
or some variation (a pool of plas-
tic sprinkles at the Museum of Ice
Cream, a vat of foam marshmal-
lows at Candytopia) — irresistible
to ’90s babies who spent child-
hood birthday parties luxuriating
in the ball pits at Chuck E. Cheese
or Discovery Zone. In 2015, the
National Building Museum’s im-
mersive indoor summer exhibi-
tion, “The Beach,” included a
monochromatic ball pit that
evoked a gigantic bubble bath.
Families and young adults alike
swarmed the exhibition and
broke the museum’s visitor re-
cord.
“They bring out this joyful
childishness,” says Beth Wolfe, a
yoga instructor who taught class-
es at the Building Museum. “I
would see women holding hands
like, ‘One, two, three, jump!’ like
you would at a pool party when
you were 10.” (Would she go in
one now? “It’s unthinkable.”)
Those days are now disappear-
ing over the horizon of our new
germaphobic era. The overseers
of ball pits have been thinking
about what it would take to make
people feel safe wading back in.
A publicist for the Museum of
Ice Cream shared diagrams for a
new version of the sprinkle pool,
revamped for the coronavirus
age: Instead of a slide dumping
germ-carrying guests directly
into the sprinkles, the museum is
going to build small, easily clean-
able islands in the middle, so
people can get in the pool without
touching the sprinkles.
T he Color Factory washes its
balls in a ball-pit washing ma-
chine (yes, those exist) and when
it reopens, there will be addition-
al safety factors. The exhibit will
limit capacity and require masks
and sanitizing before and after
people enter the pit. Cleaning
normally would happen behind
the scenes, but the factory will
make the sanitizing process more
visible to put people at ease. It
will also use machines to deploy a
disinfectant “fog” on the balls,
similar to the kind that airlines
use to sterilize airplane cabins.
And its balls, which are pur-
chased from Sitton’s company,
BALL PITS FROM C1
Ball pits were gross even before the pandemic
SARAH KATE PRICE/COLOR FACTORY
An employee at the Color Factory, an immersive, Instagrammable attraction in New York City that
features rooms full of colorful installations, uses a machine to clean the ball pit.CALLA KESSLER/THE WASHINGTON POST
In 2018, the National Building Museum's summer exhibition included “The Beach,” which had a
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