New Orleans As Divine Feminine

In 1915, New Orleans bungalow architect Morgan Dudley E. Hite (1882-1959) developed a map titled "New Orleans --Center of the World" (shown above). Mayor Martin Behrman's administration liked the map so much, it was used in a full-page advertisement the following year (shown below), accompanied by the passage:

"New Orleans is not content to rest secure and apathetic in her position as the center of the world, the center of world population, the center of world-production, the center of world-navigation.

"That much was done for the City of New Orleans by Nature.

"But to supplement this handsome and generous work of Nature the City of New Orleans is building for the future when the new industrial empire at her door will have been developed; when the wet lands at her door have been reclaimed; when the cut-over pine lands will have been turned to the plow; when the natural resources of her tributary section will have been made to yield the golden tribute of their promise."(1)

(1)"The Eyes of the World Are on New Orleans." Trade Index 28:6 (June 1916); recto of back cover. Louisiana Research Collection, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Draining the East

Fifty-five years ago, a group of New Orleans business leaders assembled at the Roosevelt Hotel to celebrate the preliminary draining of the former St. Maxent [AKA Michoud] Tract. Mrs. Joseph Boston (shown center), a direct descendant of Colonel Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent, ceremoniously pushed a key to inaugurate the Maxent Pumping Station. Hotel guests watched some 60,000 gallons of water/minute moving from nearly 750 acres. By lowering the water table in this manner, developers anticipated residential, commercial, industrial and recreational developments on a mammoth scale.

Image above:  Mrs. Joseph T. Boston of Mobile, Alabama, with her mother, Mrs. J.T. McMahon and various developers. October 1960.  "Draining of Land Starts in New Orleans East Land." Chamber of Commerce News Bulletin XLI:42 (14 October 1960): p.5. Louisiana Research Collection, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Automobile Reefs

In May 1960, the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce News Bulletin reported that its Board was backing an artificial snapper reef plan developed by the West Bank Council:

"The Sports Committee of the West Bank Council reported that such a reef could be constructed at a cost of about $18,000 and would attract fish into the Gulf waters and, consequently, attract large numbers of fishermen and tourists to the area.

"The reef would be constructed of old car bodies laced together with steel cables and anchored approximately 7 1/2 miles from the seaward end of the Freeport Harbor Channel Jetty."(1)

Alabama and Texas had previously created artificial reefs in this manner. In 1959, Florida deployed concrete linings from a demolished causeway to develop one on the southeast corner of Fisher Island Estate. Virginia utilized a combination of motorized vehicles for two reefs: one located near the Thimble Shoals Lighthouse; and one 12 miles off of Cape Henry. South Carolina initiated a 1967 reef with 70 scrapped vehicles, and quickly added three tugboats; two mine sweepers; a drydock; a barge; 30,000 tires and 50 pontoons.(2)

In 2001, New York City Transit officials retired some 714 World's Fair series Redbird subway cars in this fashion. When the new "Redbird Reef" needed expansion seven years later, the Delaware Department of Natural Resources dropped a World War II-era Navy tanker.

(1)"Council Backs Artificial Reef." Chamber of Commerce News Bulletin XLI:22 (27 May 1960).

(2)"Junk Brings Life to Carolina Waters." The Times-Picayune 4 November 1984.

Beautiful Levee (August 1845)

170 years ago, the Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Gazette reported on improvements to New Orleans' water management system. The city's First Municipal District had expended resources towards its levee and streets:

"The First Municipality is vigorously engaged, now that she is clear of debt, in making her Levee the most beautiful in the city, and repairing her streets in splendid style. As she is bounded in front by her two enterprising sister Municipalities, she has commenced draining her swamps in the [illegible] on a grand scale and will reclaim a [great?] territory from the dreary home of the craw-fish and the aligator [sic]. The ancient heart of the city will hereafter extend her streets to the Metairie Ridge and to Lake Pontchartrain."

Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Gazette  12 August 1845; Issue 95. As viewed via 19th Century U.S. Newspapers, 21 August 2015.

New Orleans Public Health (1859)

In the summer of 1859, The Daily Picayune suggested improving the City's public health by raising structures above the ground and covering the earth with concrete or brick:

"Much improvement in the health of New Orleans doubtless might be accomplished by greater attention to the condition of the earth beneath the buildings which are erected. For many years, at least, the cheaply constructed tenant houses have been erected without any attempt to prevent the possibility of pools of water standing most of the season beneath the floors. Even in the heart of the city the floors of the most expensive warehouses and stores are laid within a few inches of the soil, preventing the possibility of any ventilation, and establishing immediately the process of decay.

"A soil which constantly is saturated with water, or which is loose and spongy, containing much inorganic matter is much less favorable to health than that which is dry, porous or gravelly. The former, made under the heat of a torrid sun, will constantly emit exhalations of a noxious character, and it should be the subject of architects to neutralize or obviate, by the manner of building, the natural moisture of such localities.

"This is the nature of the soil of New Orleans, and the general flatness of the surface of the ground on which it is built increases the danger and the necessity of measures to remove it. When good drainage cannot be effected, the earth beneath all edifices built here should not only be raised above the general level, but it should be entirely covered with solid concrete. This alone will prevent constant exhalations in the summer time of impure air, and a speedy decay of the wood in the neighborhood of the foundation. How much a change in the old mode of building would improve public health those alone can fully appreciate who have visited habitations whose lower floors rest on the earth beneath even the present level of the streets. The mouldiness of the walls, the damp, sickly odor which pervades them, and the impossibility of cleanliness, will instantly be perceived. Yet whole streets are constructed with this entire disregard of all sanitary ideas.

"We are so glad to see some indication of the recognition of the necessity of elevating the floors of our edifices, and preparing solid impermeable foundations. The splendid commercial temples lately erected on Carondelet Street, and the later structures on Camp, as well as many others in different quarters of the city, are at least two feet above the level of the sidewalk, while the whole area over which they have been built, has been covered with brick and grouted.

"The most cursory examination of these buildings will show how much more attractive, as places of business, they are than those whose floors are embedded in the earth. It is also true that much less damage will result to goods of a perishable nature in our climate in the former than in the latter class of buildings.

"It is the true policy, then, not only as a means of improving public health, but enhancing the value of improved property to adopt the later style of building, of which we have cited several examples.

"This change in the mode of buildings is so important that we cannot but regard it worthy of some legislation on the part of the Council. Certainly it is quite as necessary to regard what concerns the health of the city as that which has reference to the lines of the streets."


Excerpt from:

"Improvement in Building."  The Daily Picayune 20 August 1859. As viewed in ProQuest Civil War Era Database.

NOLA Benchmarks

In 1910, the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board established a new system of permanent benchmarks that replaced a temporary one. The older system had consisted of 6" galvanized iron boat spikes driven horizontally into the city's trees at a height 30" above the ground. This system proved perishable and the board decided to establish permanent benches consisting of granite monuments weighing approximately 200 pounds that were set into larger blocks of concrete.

Assistant engineer C.B. Adams spearheaded the modernization, selecting sites in public squares, major thoroughfares and parks. All elevations indicated on the benchmarks referenced Cairo Datum taken from the old Metairie Ridge Stone, which had been set in 1869 on the lake side of the Rampart Street neutral ground on the lower side of Canal Street.

New Orleans surveyor Guy Seghers retained the board's publication, Pocket Edition of System of Permanent Bench Marks for the City of New Orleans (31 December 1910) and revised it as certain benchmarks were voided or if elevations significantly changed. Benchmark 46-B, set April 1910 in the drainage pumping station at the intersection of Florida and Jourdan Avenues, originally recorded an elevation of 24.217, but Seghers noted a corrected elevation of 22.55.

Seghers' Pocket Edition includes a complete inventory of all the 1910 benchmarks, as well as a locator map.


Map and Regulation Bench Mark above from:  Pocket Edition of System of Permanent Bench Marks for the City of New Orleans (31 December 1910). New Orleans: Sewerage and Water Board, 1910. Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

New Orleans=Number One

Last  year we posted information about New Orleans architect Thomas Sully's suggestion for filling Lake Pontchartrain.

We recently came across a 1966 proposal for reducing the Mississippi River from the Garden District to the Industrial Canal. Engineer Simeon O. Coxe, Jr. of B.M. Dornblatt & Associates developed the ambitious plan as a means of "eliminating all the physical barriers preventing the progress of New Orleans towards the goal of becoming NEW ORLEANS = NUMBER ONE."

Coxe's land reclamation bid centered on the Mississippi River rather than Lake Pontchartrain, in the interest of creating 2,000 acres of real estate development sites. He felt that dredging a new Mississippi River channel from the River Bend towards the Gulf of Mexico would obviate the need for levees, railroads and warehouse buildings from Napoleon Avenue to the Ninth Ward. The area could then be utilized for modern hotels, apartment buildings, office buildings and parkways.

Coxe supported the restoration of the New Orleans riverfront circa 1790.  By blocking much of the Mississippi, he felt that the river could be brought to sea level along Jackson Square, and that a proposed Riverfront Expressway could be built along the Algiers side.

To read more, see:  "Directions." Vieux Carre Courier 3:26 (11 November 1966), pp. 4-5. Louisiana Research Collection, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

"Seasonal Will & Changing Moods"

In August 1918, the locally-published trade paper Building Review featured a story on the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal (AKA Industrial Canal). Morgan Dudley E. Hite (1882-1959), the newspaper's editor, summarized the excavation and piling work, volume of building materials, proposed water containment and anticipated completion date. His editorial also included his bird's eye view of the new canal, which is reproduced above. Hite was among those who envisioned the canal as a great advance:

"It has been objected that New Orleans 'has too much water' at her doors. The Inner Harbor-Navigation Canal Marks the beginning of the putting to use of this water in a scientific way, a proper placing and control of it, instead of as heretofore being subject to uncontrollable seasonal will and changing moods. Conservation at its best!

"When completed, this canal will rank with the half-dozen greater world canals -- only three now existing having a depth as great as the New Orleans undertaking -- the Panama, Suez and Kiel. Depth of sill-clearance of the locks is a test of the canal's greatness and importance -- the New Orleans lock will have 30 feet over the sill. It is by far the single greatest factor of port development yet undertaken by the Port Commissioners of New Orleans, and the engineering study of its economic factor destines it to be one of the nation's great and most highly co-ordinated industrial regions of the future, with every facility of modern commerce, transport by rail, river, canal, lake and ocean; for raw and finished product; banking facilities and a location in the heart of the South's greatest labor market."

The triplet buildings (4400 Dauphine Street) in the foreground space were completed under the  direction of the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps in 1919.  The Board of Commissioners, Port of New Orleans, leased two of the buildings after World War I. The Board also subleased spaces to individual commercial ventures. The property reverted to the U.S. War Department during World War II and the name of the complex was changed to the New Orleans Port of Embarkation. After the war, the structures were known as the New Orleans Army Terminal, and in 1966 the Navy assumed custody, renaming them as the Naval Support Activity. In 1973, administrative changes within the Navy resulted in significant alterations to the exterior and the surrounding site. These were undertaken by associated architects Waldemar S. Nelson; Nolan, Holcombe, Apatini & Seghers; Nolan, Norman & Nolan; James P. Oubre and August Perez & Associates. On 3 July 1975, the buildings were dedicated as the F. Edward Hebert Defense Complex. In October 2013, the City of New Orleans acquired the complex.

Morgan D.E. Hite, editor. "Details of Construction." Building Review (August 1918): pp. 20-21. Louisiana Research Collection, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

See also: "Dedication Ceremony: F. Edward Hebert Defense Complex." Brochure. 1975. Project No. 1279. William T. Nolan Office Records, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Barataria and Lafourche Canal 1911

Barataria and Lafourche Canal: Locks on Mississippi River, Opposite New Orleans, LA.  New Orleans: 1911.  Martin Shepard Office Records, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Rising Waters

20 June 2010. An unidentified photographer recently took these images of the Devils Lake, North Dakota area. During the 1930s & 1940s (when my grandmother was a child), Devils Lake was a barren salt flat. Since 1993, the water level has risen some 25 feet, more than doubling the lake's parameters, as can discerned from a succession of Landsat images. Geologists have projected that this pattern will continue for a century, and federal, state, and local leaders are attempting to develop a series of solutions for the affected communities (1). The smoke one sees in the center image is a property being burnt by its owners; the submerged trees reflect placement of other rural properties prior to inundation. The Spirit Lake Casino, owned by the Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux bands and shown in the bottom photograph, once boasted a shoreline location; now it has become an island.

(1)F. Larry Leistritz et al. "Regional Impacts of Water Management Alternatives: The Case of Devils Lake, North Dakota, USA." The Journal of Environmental Management 66 (2002): 465-473.

Images: Top: Old U.S. Highway 281; Center: Eagle Bend; Bottom: Spirit Lake Casino.