So during the weeks that [President] Arthur lived in General Butler's old home he generally came to the Executive Mansion every evening after dinner, and made a thorough inspection of the offices and state apartments and living rooms above them. Night after night he would go from room to room ... giving orders to change this and that according to his own taste.(Chester Alan Arthur)(Editorial)(Brief article)

William Henry Crook, Memories of the White House: The Home Life of Our Presidents from Lincoln to Roosevelt, comp. and ed. Henry Rood (1911)

When James A. Garfield died some eighty days after he was wounded by an assassin's bullet in 1881, Chester Alan Arthur became president of the United States. Born in the Vermont farming community of Fairfield, the son of a Baptist minister, he graduated from Union College and taught school before moving to New York, where he was admitted to the bar in 1854 and entered politics. Six feet, two inches tall, heavily built but well proportioned, he looked the part of a president. A dandy in dress and a gourmand at the table, he carried himself with impressive dignity that earned him the sobriquet "Gentleman Boss." His biographer Thomas C. Reeves observed that Arthur lived in "the world of expensive Havana cigars, Tiffany silver, fine carriages, and grand balls; the 'real' world where men manipulated, plotted, and stole for power and prestige and ...