The Naval Observatory residence comes with a Victorian house, a telescope, and the second-highest constitutional office in the land. It has now also been upgraded with a Victorian chicken coop, which, we are told, was designed to match the Victorian house. This is either very tasteful or a sign that someone looked at one of the most historically significant official residences in the United States and thought: needs more poultry.
Let us take the premise seriously, because it deserves that. The Naval Observatory is where the Vice President of the United States officially lives, officially thinks, and officially waits. The coop is now where the chickens officially live, officially think, and officially wait. The architectural decision to make the coop match the house means that at least one designer sat down and asked the question: what does a chicken deserve? The answer, apparently, is crown molding.
Dozens of chicks are reportedly now in residence. This is, by any measure, the largest single expansion of the Naval Observatory’s residential population in recent memory, and none of the new residents had to clear a Senate confirmation. The chickens were not asked about their foreign policy views. They were not required to submit financial disclosures. They moved in, they got Victorian architecture, and that was that. One begins to understand the appeal.
The Vice President’s office has not, to my knowledge, clarified whether the chickens hold advisory roles or are purely ceremonial. This is a meaningful distinction. A ceremonial chicken is just a chicken. An advisory chicken attends the stakeholder meetings, which — given that a stakeholder meeting is already a room full of people holding stakes — would only improve things.
What dissolves here is not the coop. The coop is fine. What dissolves is the quiet official logic that surrounds a title like “Vice President of the United States” — the gravity, the motorcades, the residence itself — and discovers that underneath all of it, the most consequential decision made in that house this quarter was: what style of roof looks right on a chicken coop? Victorian, obviously. The chickens have standards.