Petrolane Gas Company

In 1954, New Orleans architect F. Monroe Labouisse (1911-98) designed a showroom addition for the Petrolane Gas Company, located at 1352 Jefferson Highway in Jefferson, Louisiana.* Tulane University professor Milton G. Scheuermann, Jr. credited this structure with being the impetus for his pursuing a career in the offices of Goldstein, Parham & Labouisse.

The showroom was completed in less than four months, quickly garnering the praise of the Times-Picayune. The Alec F. Leonhardt Construction Company built the suspension structure elevated 7.5' above ground level. Two low-hanging steel arches rising 22' feet supported the 65 x 12' glass display box. Consumers could park their vehicles right underneath the showroom.

Petrolane Gas Company president Louis Abramson, Jr. proudly inaugurated the "one of a kind" showroom with a two-day celebration in October 1954. Executives representing various oil and appliance companies were present for the festivities. Photographers Leon Trice and Charles L. Franck captured images of the elegant building shortly after its completion.

Petrolane was a liquified petroleum gas that could be used to run driers, freezers, heaters, plumbing fixtures, ranges, refrigerators, and washing machines. Such appliances were on display in Labouisse's glass box.



Read more:

"Bold Design Presents Suspended Glass Room." The Times-Picayune 30 May 1954.

"Firm Will Open New Showroom."  The Times-Picayune 1 October 1954.

Milton G. Scheuermann, Jr. Correspondence with Francine Stock. "Modernism : Lost and FOUND!" Regional Modernism :: The New Orleans Archives Blog. 27 July 2009. As viewed 18 November 2014. URL: http://www.regional-modernism.com/2009/07/mystery-solved.html


*Address later changed to 917 Jefferson Highway.

Image above:  F. Monroe Labouisse, architect. Petrolane Gas Company Showroom Addition, 1352 Jefferson Highway, Jefferson, Louisiana. 1954.  F. Monroe Labouisse Office Records, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

NEW! Shell Oil Company Finding Aid

The Southeastern Architectural Archive (SEAA) recently finalized the processing of the Shell Oil Company Collection of Louisiana Plantation Photographs.

The collection consists of professional photographs commissioned by the Shell Oil Company in the late 1960s. They correlate to plantation structures located along the Mississippi River in southeastern Louisiana, which are identified on corresponding maps (earliest map reproduced above).

Read more here.

Image above: Shell Oil Company. Louisiana Plantations Map. Circa 1969. Shell Oil Company/Louisiana Plantation Photographs, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

NEW: The Autotronic Elevator

New Orleans was one of the first cities to boast an Otis Autotronic Elevator.(1) When Benson & Riehl's California Company Building (1111 Tulane Avenue) opened in October 1950, it featured four of the new attendant-less elevators. Not only were they designed to save staffing costs, but the elevators were choreographed so that when one ascended from the first floor, an elevator on the top floor would simultaneously descend to replace it.

The California Company Building inaugurated a post-war commercial office building boom that had followed a two-decade dormancy. Owned by General Enterprises, Inc., the building also included air conditioning, glare-resistant glass, automatic telephone systems, and a two-story-high mechanical plant "penthouse."

(1)The first new office to feature the self-service elevators was the Atlantic Refining Company in Dallas, TX, which opened a few months before the NOLA California Company Building.

Image above: Otis Autotronic--Without Attendant--Elevator, 1950. In The First One Hundred Years: Otis Elevator Company. New York: Otis Elevator Company, 1953. Available in the Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Field Trip: Cloquet, Minnesota

Frank Lloyd Wright designed only one automobile service station (1956-1957), a commission for a Phillips 66 station. The structure is located at the intersection of Highway 33 and Cloquet Avenue in Cloquet, Minnesota. The cantilevered roof shelters a glass-enclosed visitors' waiting/observation room that overlooks the Cloquet River bridge, railroad tracks, and busy intersection. As with many of Wright's buildings, it employs the use of Louisiana cypress. In 1984, the building was listed on the National Register; in 2008, it celebrated its 50th anniversary.

Image above: Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. R.W. Lindholm Service Station (1956-1957; opened October 1958), Cloquet, MN. Fujifilm. K. Rylance 1992.

Firon & Oil

In the late 1950s, the New Orleans-based Industrial Electric, Incorporated was the local dealer of a porcelain enamel product called Firon. Utilizing a base of 16-18 gauge vitreous enameling steel coated with acid-resistant enamel frits and oxides, Firon boasted durability, weather resistance, and easy maintenance. Its popularity was in part due to an increasing demand for color in modern buildings, and it came in a wide array of colors, with varied textures and finishes.

Curtis and Davis utilized stippled cream, blue-gray and blue semi-matte Firon for their Pan-American Motor Hotel (1957), August Perez, Jr. incorporated Blue No. 53 Firon for his Blue Plate Foods Plant (1941), and Katz & Besthoff commissioned a purple color theme for one of its drug store/soda fountains. Firon proved quite popular amongst oil companies; American, Esso, Gulf, Phillips, Shell, Standard and Texaco all used the architectural porcelain.

Images above: Industrial Electric, Inc. Brochures, Box 60, Freret & Wolf Office Records, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Hurricanes, Oil & Architecture

In February 1967, Morgan City architect Lloyd J. Guillory (born 1925) addressed the coastal region's new modernist architecture that was increasingly made possible by oil wealth:

"Architecture has always been affected by various external forces beyond the control of the architect, and here in the region of the newly formed Coastal Section of the A.I.A. there are two such forces -- oil and hurricanes. They present a challenge, either singularly or together, to test the imagination and mettle of any practicing architect. Although the oil industry has had no direct influence on architecture, as far as this writer can determine, the affluence which accompanied this remarkable industry has indeed affected our profession in this area. It has enabled us to design and erect structures which never could have been built without such wealth, as is evidenced by the Morgan City Auditorium, the largest in the country for a community of its size.

The building boom which accompanied the oil industry has also produced an unbelievable number of bad buildings, as usually occurs in any booming area. Here 'pre-fab steel' is by far the largest culprit. The lack of adequate zoning restrictions and inadequate master planning is also profusely in evidence. But, these factors make the role of the architect more necessary and definitely more challenging.

The other major force, hurricanes, had a rather negligible influence on architecture prior to hurricanes Hilda and Besty. But, after these two 150 mile per hour monsters slammed into the coast in a period of eleven months, the results dictated the future of this area in a dramatic way. The fear which accompanied these great natural disasters caused a mass exodus unequalled in modern history. We found, to our dismay, that the dangers and discomfort of these evacuations were almost as bad as staying behind to face the winds. The inadequacies of the highway system to evacuate such a large mass and the uncertainties of lodging accommodations in other cities presented great discomforts and dangers themselves. It became dramatically apparent during Betsy that with only one highway running east and west, as it does in Morgan City, there is no right way to run and be assured you are going away from the storm. If you wait long enough to make sure, you have waited too long. I mention this only to emphasize that here the architect enters into a strange and unusual role as the man responsible for the answer to this monumental problem. "

To read more, see his article "The New Architecture of Coastal Louisiana" in Louisiana Architect 6 (February 1967): pp. 9-11. The journal is available in the Louisiana Research Collection, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Documenting the Gulf Coast

As reported by John Leland for The New York Times 2 June 2010:

MOBILE, Ala. — The beaches were still open; the restaurants were still serving shrimp. Fishermen were still casting for whiting off the white sandy shores. And ads on television still proclaimed the region open for business.

But as the oil slick made its way inexorably here toward the barrier islands at the mouth of Mobile Bay, with forecasts for a swath from Mississippi to the beaches of Pensacola, Fla., sometime this week, the mood was of the last days.

“You guys are our first line of defense,” Casi Callaway, executive director of Mobile Baykeeper , a preservation group, told about 50 volunteers gathered in a room filled to capacity. “Your job is to document what we have here that’s beautiful. BP will have to make it right.”

They had come to train as volunteer field observers, taking photographs and notes on the conditions of the shoreline before the oil arrived. Now, suddenly there was an urgency to their preparations. Over the weekend, isolated tar balls had washed ashore on nearby Dauphin Island, interrupting a busy beach holiday. “It’s starting,” Ms. Callaway said. “The first groups today took beautiful pictures of the western shore of Mobile Bay. But there are fish kills everywhere. One of our friends was on Dauphin Island when the tar ball washed up. Her 12-year-old daughter just started crying.”

Until a few days ago, some people here had hoped, perhaps unrealistically, that the winds and currents would move the oil away from Alabama’s coastal islands, where fishing and tourism dominate the local economy.

“I had townspeople calling me and saying it’s not coming here,” said Grace Tyson, who runs Tyson Realty on Dauphin Island, shaking her head. “It’s like with the hurricanes. They’re predicted but then they don’t arrive. People said, ‘Take my condo off the market.’ ”

Business is down by more than 75 percent, she said. And with the latest forecast, she added, “I’d say closer to one hundred.”

The area had gotten a few tar balls in early May but no steady flow. Beaches filled for the Memorial Day weekend.

On the coastal island of Gulf Shores, some residents who had seen tar balls near their property said that their neighbors had told them not to talk about it. Ms. Callaway said that after she had appeared on television to talk about the tar balls on Dauphin Island, she, too, had received angry responses from locals. “I had people telling me, thanks a lot, you killed our tourist season.”

Then, on the eve of the opening of red snapper season, a major event here, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expanded the boundaries of federal waters closed to fishing and the state department of public health closed the oyster beds.

“We have teams in place to clean up all that’s coming in,” said Jeff Collier, the mayor of Dauphin Island. “But this is foreign to us. I worry about our ability to keep on keeping on. I like to think that we will get less than New Orleans, but who knows? It could get that bad.”

Fishermen and businesses have already put in claims with BP and the state for lost revenue, though the big losses are still to come, said Jeanine Stewart, an owner of Burris’ Farmers Market in Loxley, where sales “bottomed out” almost immediately after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon on April 20, but had crept back up since.

“The big thing businesses want to talk about is government supplements or BP claims,” Ms. Stewart said. “They’ve advised all of us to file claims.”

At the market, the television is turned to news, and Ms. Stewart calls people in to watch whenever there is an update on the spill. “It’s that much on our minds,” she said. “We’re still lying in wait. We still have that hope.”

But for Betty Edwards, that hope was dwindling. Mrs. Edwards and her husband have owned homes on Dauphin Island since 1978, and returned even after two were destroyed by Hurricane Frederick and Hurricane Katrina. She said she was still eating local seafood five days a week. “Everyone’s really scared,” she said.

“My mother is sick and I should be with her,” she said. “I said, ‘I’m going to stay here until it’s all closed.’ It could a couple days. But it’s when, not if.”

At the training session for volunteer field observers, Jon DeJean said she felt helpless, in part because she felt BP and government agencies were not telling the whole truth about the spill. “I was angry from the start,” Ms. DeJean said, “but the frustration is growing. For weeks I’ve been feeling powerless and helpless. I feel coming here is at least a step in the right direction. It gives me the feeling of doing something.”

But Tim Helland, a kayak fisherman, acknowledged that there was not much the observers — or anyone — could do.

“We’re going to patrol the beaches, and we’ll know exactly when it comes,” he said. “But it’s still coming. I’m 62. I may not be fishing where I fish ever again.”

Paved with Good Intentions

In the early twentieth century, American and European cities sought economical, durable, hygienic, and noise-buffering materials for paving streets and pedestrian walkways. San Francisco was one of the first to introduce treated wood block pavers, which were laid on California Street in 1898. New York followed soon thereafter, its Metropolitan Street Railway Company experimenting with treated wood paving along Hudson Street in 1902. British and French civil engineers adopted the new material for paving the heavily trafficked Regent Street and the Champs-Élysées (image above).

What was this new wonder paver? Creosoted wood block. The Southern Pine Association (SPA) produced creosoted yellow pine block pavements and sold them internationally:

"The claim for Creosoted Yellow Pine Block Pavement is that it is the most durable, the most economically maintained, the least noisy, the most sanitary, and the least injurious to horses, of any pavement in existence."(1)

In New Orleans, headquarters to the SPA, creosoted wood blocks were used for the Gas Light Company's courtyard paving as early as 1878. R.E. Slade, the company manager, provided a testimonial for SPA's 1915 advertising brochure:

"First, the Yellow Pine Blocks in question were laid in either 1878 or 1879; second, the pavement has never been repaired for wear, but the blocks have been taken up and relaid in numerous spots owing to the changes in the piping which ran underneath them."(2)

Creosote, a coal tar product, had largely been used to treat wood for railroad ties and plank roads. Its adoption for block pavers was predicated on a belief that it was easier to maintain, noiseless, more durable than granite and that it had antiseptic properties due to its high percentage of phenol and naphthalene. An earlier experiment, using wood creosote (rather than coal tar) as a preservative, was invented in Boston by Samuel Nicolson. Read about his experiments here.

One wonders, where it all went? Time Out Chicago has documented some extant wood pavers near Lincoln Park. The Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area was once considered the largest user in the nation, noted for its creosoted yellow pine-paved expanses on Cathedral Hill. . .

Sylvester Labrot, Sr. was a New Orleans industrialist who owned a large creosote works. When he died in February 1935, he left a vast fortune of some $87 million to his two sons, Sylvester Jr. and William.

Picture above: Southern Pine Association. What the Cities Say about Creosoted Wood Block Pavements: The Opinions of Civil Engineers, Paving Experts, Street Commissioners & Citizens' Leagues with a Comment by the United States Government. New Orleans, [1915].

(1) p. [3] of above cited publication.

(2) p. 9 of the same.