Terra Cotta

Architectural terracotta was very popular with New Orleans architects. After the Civil War, notices for the material proliferated in local publications. Earliest mentions largely related to roofing materials. In July 1873, B.J. West and Thomas S. Elder placed an advertisement for their Patent Roofing Tile Company in The Daily Picayune (shown above).

Frederic Codman Ford (1856-1922) became a local agent for the Chicago-based Northwestern Terra Cotta Company. His clients included Allison Owen, Collins C. Diboll, Thomas Sully, Emile Weil, Moise Goldstein, Rathbone DeBuys, Favrot & Livaudais, Andry & Bendernagel and Toledano & Wogan.  Architects requesting the company's red, brown and buff terracotta received shipments via the Illinois Central Railroad.

In the early twentieth century, terracotta designs by architects proliferated in the pages of The Brickbuilder, a trade journal founded in Boston.

Notable published designs by New Orleans architects are included below. See if you can find them on buildings in the Crescent City and Opelousas.

Records of the Northwestern Terra Cotta Company are located at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. 

In 1906, the Ludowici Roofing Tile Company (also based in Chicago) established an office and warehouse in New Orleans due to the large amount of material that it was shipping to Panama. Ludowici's traveling sales representative J.D. Duffy was reassigned to the permanent position.(1) The bunglow community at Derby Place (Third Municipal District) utilized the company's tiles. Architect-clients included Walter Cook Keenan (1881-1970), who specified the tiles for the Jones Residence at 20 Neron Place (1923) and his apartment building at Carrollton Avenue and Green Street. Ludowici roofing was adopted for the Hugh L. White residence in Columbia, Mississippi and the Charles Ledet residence in Houma, Louisiana.(2)

The Southeastern Architectural Archive maintains a number of Ludowici catalogs, now digitized via the Internet Archive's Building Technology Heritage Library. 

Other architectural terracotta suppliers who maintained a New Orleans presence include the following:

St. Louis Terra Cotta Co. (St. Louis), Frank Bethune, agent. 808 Perdido Street (1919).

Federal Terra Cotta Co. (New York), J.T. Mann & Company, agents. 909 Union Street (1919).

Atlantic Terra Cotta Co. (New York), Ole K. Olsen, agent. 822 Perdido Street (1920).

[See Building Review (1913-1922) for listings of local agents for various architectural trade concerns].

New Orleans structures with notable terracotta include:

Pere Marquette (817 Common Street)  -- American Terra Cotta & Ceramic Company 

Maison Blanche (901 Canal Street)  -- Atlantic Terra Cotta Company

American Bank & Trust Company (200 Carondelet Street) -- Federal Terra Cotta Company

Louisiana Supreme Court building (400 Royal Street) -- Atlantic Terra Cotta Company

Lyons building (224 Camp Street) -- Northwestern Terra Cotta Company

Morris building (600 Canal Street) -- Northwestern Terra Cotta Company

Tulane building (211 Camp Street) -- Northwestern Terra Cotta Company

Grunewald Caterers (926-28 Canal Street) -- Northwestern Terra Cotta Company

(1)"Another Northern Firm Establishing Offices." The Times-Picayune 1 January 1906. 

(2)"New Orleans Greatest Tile Center: Roofs May Rival Old World Cities." The Times-Picayune 23 May 1926.

Images above:

Top four:  Advertisements, The Daily Picayune. 23 July 1872; 30 March 1887; 19 September 1888; The Times-Picayune 1 September 1903.

Bottom seven:  All from The Brickbuilder (1901-1910). Architects, from top to bottom:  Andry & Bendernagel; Diboll, Owen & Goldstein; Favrot & Livaudais; Favrot & Livaudais; Toledano & Wogan; Toledano & Wogan; Toledano & Wogan.

CDC Image Database

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) may seem an odd resource for historic images of buildings, but one finds all sorts of interesting things housed in its Public Health Information Library (PHIL). For example, the database includes images (photographs and a plan of the complex) of the Leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana. The interface also provides very detailed metadata:

"Photographed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the Harvard University campus, by Harvard University, Dept. of Environmental Health and Safety entomologist/ environmental biologist, Dr. Gary Alpert, this image depicted a mature “Bald-faced” hornet, Dolichovespula maculata, nest, which had been built by its colony up under the cornice of a museum building, abutting the capital of a Corinthian column. Bald-faced hornets are common in both wooded and urban areas in New England. Queens start a new nest each spring after the weather warms up in late April or May.

D. maculata create large arboreal nests with a thin paper outer layer, and can be recognized by their black and white color markings, especially the white areas on their face. The queen finds loose bark, and other paper strips to start a small nest into which she places her eggs. She adds saliva to the paper bark and forms a smooth carton. When painted wood is used to make carton, you can see the color on the outside of the carton nest. These large wasps will sting when defending their nest, or when defending themselves against perceived harm. Stings from these insects can induce anaphylactic shock in susceptible individuals, and therefore, control of their populations need be left to professional control specialists. They are widespread across the United States. See PHIL 9814, for a close-up of a queen hornet, and 9816 for another image revealing structural details of an initial nest." [Image above photographed 2006 by Dr. Gary Alpert].

For those interested in diseases and pathogens associated with natural disasters such as hurricanes, the PHIL site is also an excellent resource.

Utilitas & Venustas

After reading Elizabeth Royte's Garbage Land recently, I have been thinking about ways in which refuse has been used in new ways. The Oxford (Oxfordshire, United Kingdom) City Museum collection includes a portion of early municipal paving that made use of slaughterhouse waste, oxen bones, primarily vertebrae (detail, shown above left).

Then one finds much later (stylized) appropriations of the visual form of the vertebrae sections, as ornamentation in Oxford, such as those seen on the engaged columns at the entrance to Queen's College (shown below).

Of course, other animal discards were employed for the building trade. The protein collagen, derived from fish, animal bone and skin, was utilized in baroque-era Poland as the binding compound in faux-marble stucco. In New Orleans and elsewhere in the United States, old plasterwork frequently contains horse hair as additional reinforcement. To read the National Park Service Preservation Brief on repairing historic flat plaster walls and ceilings, click here.


Aunt Aggie's Bone Yard in Lake City, Florida was a popular tourist attraction for families in the early twentieth century. Aggie Jones (died 1918) was a former slave who created this natural history and botanical garden on property she and her family purchased after emancipation. Bones supported by wires were used to create archways and trellises ornamenting a white sand pathway. The garden was demolished after her death, and a school now stands on the site.

Dr. Paula Lee has edited a new interdisciplinary book addressing 19th-century slaughterhouses, titled Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse (U New Hampshire Press, 2008). Lindgren Johnson's chapter, "To 'Admit All Cattle without Distinction': Reconstructing Slaughter in the Slaughterhouse Cases and the New Orleans Crescent City Slaughterhouse" will be especially of interest to readers here.

Oxford images above taken 07.2007 by K. Rylance. Aunt Aggie's Boneyard, c. 1915 from Images of Florida's Black History/Florida Memory Project of the State Archives of Florida. Click here for more.