NEW! Morgan Whitney Finding Aid

The Southeastern Architectural Archive recently finalized the processing of its Morgan Whitney Louisiana Architecture Photographs. The collection consists of platinum prints created circa 1890-1910.

Morgan Whitney (1869-1913) was a member of the prominent New Orleans banking family, who studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and became an accomplished photographer, still-life painter and musician. An early automobile touring enthusiast, Whitney was able to access the state’s rustic roads to photograph plantations in Ascension, Jefferson, Landry, Natchitoches, Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. James, St. John the Baptist and St. Martin Parishes. He tended to utilize the platinum print process, which was very popular at the turn of the century. His photographic works extensively documented Louisiana’s antebellum buildings and monuments, and some were later incorporated into the Historic American Buildings Survey (Library of Congress) and Tulane University School of Architecture’s Vieux Carré Survey.

Image above: Morgan Whitney, photographer. St. Augustine Roman Catholic Church, 1210 Governor Nicholls Street, New Orleans. Circa 1910. Platinum print. Interior, detail.

At Large in the Archive: Frank's Island Ledger

Tulane University Libraries recently acquired contractor Benjamin Beal's ledger documenting Benjamin Henry Latrobe's ill-fated Lighthouse for the Northeast Pass of the Mississippi River. After the Louisiana Purchase, the United States government appropriated funds to build a grandiose navigational beacon at one of the river's mouths.  Massachusetts sea captain Winslow Lewis was awarded the building contract and sent Benjamin Beal to oversee construction. Latrobe visited the site in April 1819. An early season hurricane battered the island three months later. Lighthouse officials were so concerned by damages that they requested an expert assessment. Major Joseph Jenkins, then constructing the New Orleans Customs House, inspected the site and recommended new construction.  After Congress received Jenkins' report, Winslow Lewis was hired to demolish the tower  and build a new lighthouse according to his own design.  The resultant "Mississippi Light" was first illuminated on 20 March 1823.

Keeping the seasonal workers -- who spent hurricane seasons in Boston -- was no easy task. According to the ledger, some were discharged, some refused duty, some stole a boat and "absconded" and some were too drunk to perform their duties.

Architect and preservationist Samuel Wilson, Jr. (1911-1993) was fascinated by the lighthouse.  In November 1934, Wilson and his fellow Sea Scouts visited the crumbling ruins and took photographs. Later Wilson conducted archival research in Washington, D.C. and developed measured drawings for the structure. His records are included in the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) deposited in the Library of Congress.

Wilson's scrapbook -- retained in the Southeastern Architectural Archive -- records his personal account that was never submitted to HABS:

"Far down North East Pass, once the principal pass of the Mississippi river, now long abandoned, stands an ancient brick tower as abandoned as the pass itself. Strange tales are told of this old ruin by the people of Pilot Town, tales of ghostly figures, uttering piercing shrieks and waving signals of distress from its crumbling top, figures which on closer examination proved to be giant snakes licking out with huge tongues to seize low flying pelicans, to devour them at one gulp as they utter their last agonized cry. Other snakes are said to have been so large that it required ten minutes for their great length to pass the doorway.

"It was to this desolate spot by automobile motor launch and pirogue that the Bienville went in November, 1934, and brought back photographs and data which are now filed in the Library of Congress with the records of the Historic American Buildings Survey. Of course, the fantastic snake stories were proven false, although large snakes hibernating [sic] in inner crevices of the walls. The true story of how this tower came to be here and why and when it was abandoned is as interesting a narrative as any of the wildest tales now told of it in Pilot Town."



Image above:  Benjamin Beal. An Account of the Time Building the Lighthouse on Frank Island, New Orleans. New Orleans.  1818-1823. Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

NEW! Richard Koch Finding Aid

The Southeastern Architectural Archive recently finalized the processing of the Richard Koch Papers and Photographs. The collection consists of photographs, negatives, papers and architectural drawings associated with the personal life and preservation work of New Orleans architect Richard Koch (1889-1971). Papers date from the 1920s-1950s and relate to Koch’s support of various preservation advocacy organizations, including the Vieux Carré Association, the Vieux Carré Commission, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the American Institute of Architects’ Historic Preservation Committee. A majority relate to Koch’s historical reports concerning municipal squares comprising the Vieux Carré. Although the majority of correspondence relate to historic preservation efforts, some letters are personal in nature, and Koch communicated with a wide array of artists, property owners and architects, as well as with extended family in Argentina and Germany. Smaller-scaled sketches representing architectural details are included among Koch’s papers.

Image above: Richard Koch, photographer. Chartres Street [619 Congress Street]. Contact prints mounted to index cards. Richard Koch Papers and Photographs, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Changes at Library of Congress

Walker Evans. Movie Theatre on St. Charles Street, New Orleans, Louisiana. 1935 or 1936. Farm Security Administration Image LC-USF342- 001285, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress has recently changed its Prints and Photographs Division On-Line Catalog, which includes images from the Historic American Buildings Survey and the Farm Security Administration/Office of War. The new Interface has more robust search capabilities, and features easy ways to share and save links to selected images.

It also has a new URL:

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/

Sample searches are posted with a Flickr set, http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/sets/72157623631646607/

Link changes have been made on Tulane University Research Guides pages for Architecture and Historic Preservation:

http://libguides.tulane.edu/architecture

http://libguides.tulane.edu/content.php?pid=87072

Digitized Architectural Drawings

For those searching for digital reproductions of architectural drawings, there are a growing number of resources available. Archivision, now accessible by subscription via ARTstor, has been mentioned in an earlier post.  The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division is another important source, especially rich due to its housing the Historic American Buildings Survey.  

The Art Institute of Chicago (web capture shown above) is also a great resource, featuring digital reproductions of works by Burnham & Root, Buckminster Fuller, Bertrand Goldberg, Holabird & Roche, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Granted, they are small in scale, but the digitals may provoke a visit to Chicago.

Mapping Historic Preservation: Proto-HABS in New Orleans

N.C. Curtis. Map of the Garden District. Graphite, pen and ink on paper. 1932. Nathaniel C. Curtis, Sr. Collection. Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

I've mentioned Louisiana's admirable contributions to the HABS program in earlier posts, and recently came across an early twentieth-century attempt to map and record the city's noteworthy structures.

Tulane University architecture professor Nathaniel C. Curtis wrote for the Journal of the American Institute of Architects in 1916:

"The Chapter is at work on a map of the city of sufficient extent to include all the old noteworthy buildings and those with interesting ornamental detail. It is understood that such a map would serve a basis of foundation on which might be built a later series of measured architectural drawings of all the buildings of the city which are worthy of record. In addition to such accurate measured drawings, including plans, elevations, sections, and large-scale details of moldings, iron work and modeled ornament, it is also proposed to acquire a large number of photographs from which half-tones might be made to accompany the line drawings and to prepare a descriptive monograph which would serve to further explain the origin and architectural character of each example. This is a serious undertaking, but one not quite so colossal as would seem to be indicated on its face. As a matter of fact, a number of local architects, several artists and a few historians have, with as much zeal as was at their command, occupied themselves with doing in an occasional sort of way just what the Chapter proposes to do with system and cooperation. All that has been accomplished heretofore in the way of record may be placed at the disposal of the committee for incorporation in the proposed work, and so a considerable saving of time and effort will be effected."

Excerpt from Nathaniel C. Curtis, "The Work of the Louisiana Chapter in Urging the Preservation of the Historic Architecture of New Orleans, and in Seeking to Restore Its Influence in Modern Building," p. 219. Biographical Files, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

ARTstor Collection News Autumn 2008

Image database ARTstor has just announced recent releases of more than 60,000 new images from various print collections: Scala, the Bodleian Library, the Phillips Collection, and the Berlin State Museums.

New collaborations on forthcoming collections include: field photographs/monuments/architecture from the American Institute of Indian Studies, stained glass from the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA) and the National Monuments Record (NMA), medieval stained glass from Madeline Caviness, contemporary architecture in Spain from ART on FILE, the Hal Box and Logan Wagner Collection of Mexican Architecture and Urban Design, the Hartill Archive of Architecture and Allied Arts, the Historic Campus Architecture Project, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), the Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South, and Renaissance and Baroque book illustrations from the Warburg Institute. For more information, click here.

Unbuilding: Rubble

In her first visit to New Orleans in 1974, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for the New York Times Ada Louise Huxtable described a "demolition derby" underway in the Central Business District (CBD):

"Rows of Greek Revival commercial buildings, of the kind New York ruthlessly demolished in lower Manhattan in the 1960's still stand, often enhanced by the iron filigree galleries added from the 1850s on. But many are gone and more are being knocked down almost daily, as are the later Italianate, Renaissance and cast-iron structures nearby, that make up the 19th century commercial city."¹

At the time Huxtable was writing, the French Quarter had been spared an earlier threat, in large part due to the creation of the Vieux Carré Commission. The 1930's New Orleans of architect- photographer Richard Koch had witnessed a tendency towards what Los Angeles Times writer Christopher Reynolds has called erase-atecture. Koch recorded some of these demolitions while conducting work for the Louisiana Historic American Buildings (HABS) program. The photograph reproduced here depicts an unidentified man at the site of the just-razed Office of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company (former Old Morgan Building aka William Brand House), 331 Magazine Street. Over the course of its lifespan, the building originated as a private residence, was redeveloped to serve the purposes of banking, and finally housed a succession of two railroad companies before it was demolished in the autumn of 1938. The Works Progress Administration reported on September 14: "The Old Morgan Building, Magazine & Natchez Alley has been torn down to its foundations. Negro laborers are now scraping and stacking the bricks. . . [which] are a bright vermillion, and because of their being covered with cement have retained a brilliant hue."²

Jeff Byles' Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition (New York: Harmony Books, 2005). [TSA Library TH 447.B95 2005] is a cultural history of rubble-making. Describing demolition as a particularly American approach to urban renewal, Byles nonetheless presents European programs such as Baron Haussmann's percée/arterization of Paris alongside the razing of New York's Penn Station and the clearing of vast tracts of housing in Detroit and Los Angeles. This is a very generalized book, and those who seek an in-depth analysis of "Demolition for Progress" will find it lacking. For those interested in the current demolition of housing projects in New Orleans, Byles' chapter 7 discussion of the Captain W.O. Pruitt Homes and the L. Igoe Apartments in St. Louis will be provocative.



Demolition-as-Spectacle: More than 4,000 pounds of dynamite and 21 miles of detonating cord were used to raze Seattle's Kingdome in March, 2000. [gwrash youtube video].

¹"Outside Eyes Turn to CBD Demolition," The New Orleans States-Item 23 April 1974 (Lifestyle Section B) page 1.Box 4, Tulane School of Architecture Records Collection, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

²Report dated 14 September 1938, Louisiana Works Progress Administration Collection, The State Library of Louisiana.

[Photographs above: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Architecture Critic Ada Louise Huxtable, LIFE 1974 (available via http://images.google.com/hosted/life and Richard Koch, 331 Magazine Street, autumn 1938. Richard Koch Drawings and Photographs Collection, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries].

Richard Koch (1889-1971)

Richard Koch was a New Orleans-born Tulane University football letterman and architecture graduate (class of 1910). After continuing his studies in Paris and serving apprenticeships in New York and Boston, Koch returned to his birthplace. Appointed in 1933 as District Officer for the Works Progress Administration's Louisiana Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Koch toured the state documenting its architecture in photographs, measured drawings and written reports. The fruits of his labor may be viewed in the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Division; his photographs and negatives in the Southeastern Architectural Archive. His personal papers reside in the Historic New Orleans Collection.

The SEAA's Richard Koch Collection consists of over 5,000 individual photographic works, covering much of the Mississippi River delta, including sites in rural Mississippi and Louisiana, as well as the city of New Orleans. The vast majority of the photographs date from the 1930s, although Koch continued his photographic work into the mid-1960s.

The photograph shown here was taken in June 1936 of a woman leaning on a cast-iron railing at 1441 Magazine Street. Cast-iron architectural ornament proliferated in late 19th-century New Orleans, and could/can be found on tombs, fences, cornices, verandas, columns, lintels, and railings such as this. Typically, the New Orleans cast iron work was painted to simulate the appearance of bronze or in a bright greenish hue. The rose trellis pattern was a popular one in the city.

Want to read more?

Ann Masson and Lydia Schmalz's Cast Iron and the Crescent City (1995) in the Special Collections Division's Louisiana Collection.

John G. Waite, "The Maintenance and Repair of Architectural Cast Iron." National Park Service Preservation Brief 27 (October 1991). Click here.

[Photograph: Richard Koch, 1441 Magazine Street, June 1936. Richard Koch Collection, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries].