Colbert just made a joke about passing the keys of the White House to the democrates and it got me wondering.
Does the White House have locks on its doors and who would have the keys?
My WAG is that the answer depends on which door you’re talking about. That’s a big house, and there are lots of different places, with different degrees of security and open access. I’m sure many places are very private and off-limits, while others are part of the public tour.
Why wouldn’t the POTUS and First Lady have the keys to there own private living area. It’s not like the Secret Service wouldn’t a copy just in case. Also, nothing says they have to lock them if they don’t feel like it.
I’m pretty sure the front door doesn’t need a key. If it gets abandoned and the British decide to come knocking and burn it down a lock wouldn’t do much good.
Well when you have armed Marines standing next to the doors, why would you have a lock?
They probably do as its probably cheaper to buy a door with a lock on it. Kinda like how drive thru ATMs have been set up for the blind
My WAG is yes, for the same reason Sheetz does. 
I remember reading somewhere about a First Daughter (Amy Carter, IIRC) throwing a tantrum and locking a bedroom door on the Secret Service.
For what it’s worth, No. 10 Downing Street in London doesn’t have a key hole and can only be opened from the inside. There’s always some dude around to open the door. Hey, it’s in Wikipedia , so it must be true.
A recent GQ thread on this subject had no conclusive answer.
Key to the White House?
I would expect so. They have locks on the doors at Denny’s…
ETA: The above is admitted by the poster as a WAG. I make no claims that it is an assertion regarding the presence or absence of locks on the exterior doors at the Presidential abode.
A 24 hour business has locks for a lot of reasons. They are needed for when the place closes for repairs or any of a host of other reasons, like a failed health inspection.
The White House was built a long time ago and they didn’t run down to the home depot to buy the door. It may have some sort of skelton type key.
Thanks for the link** Arnold Winkelried**, my search powers do suck.
Gerald Ford somehow got himself locked out.
I remember reading in the paper, many years ago, so I don’t have a cite (I searched the archives of the Los Angeles Times, where I read it, but couldn’t find anything) that some local Denny’s restaurants in the area (Orange County, California) had decided to close for Christmas day for the first time ever and that several of them had needed to call in a locksmith to install a lock on the door.
Are those types of keys usually red?
I remember when they started doing that. The article noted that a lot of Dennys did have locks on the doors which were used when the places were being built but not since then - so they had locks but nobody knew where the keys were, it had been decades since they were needed.
I think I remember seeing several doors capable of being locked at the White House when I toured it in late 2000. It’s a big complex - there are probably hundreds of doors throughout it. When Lincoln was President, the White House usher had a master key and it was passed from usher to usher over the years. Probably just symbolic nowadays, though.
Thanks for the confirmation, proving to my fellow Dopers that I’m not crazy.
Speaking of symbolic, when you visit the Nixon Library ( http://www.nixonlibraryfoundation.org ), one of the exhibits is a display case containing “keys of the city” to places that Mr. Nixon visited (I can’t remember any specific city but the ones displayed were mostly large american cities like Chicago or Philadelphia). I wonder what door those keys opened? And do cities still do that?
My dream is to one day be presented with “the key to the city” when I go somewhere.
Sometimes a bank will close up a branch, pull the ATM out and slap it in at a new branch.
Sometimes the same ATM just gets put back in at a walk-up location, facing outward from the exterior wall of the bank branch.
Plus, these guys:
might go through the ATM lane.