Architecture Grad Students, Leeds Iron Works, and the PRC

We are meeting with incoming Master of Preservation Studies students from the Tulane School of Architecture today, and wanted to share some of the items we brought out to show them the scope of different types of documents, artifacts, and books they might expect to use in their own research projects in SEAA.

Included are original Gallier and Turpin 1850 watercolor drawings from our Sylvester Labrot Collection for the Leeds Iron Foundry building, located at 923 Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans, currently the headquarters of the Preservation Resource Center. We also pulled original photos from our Frank H. Boatner Collection of Louisiana Architecture Photographs, Louisiana Landmarks Society Records and Collection, and our Miscellaneous Photographs. To show how the building related to its 19th century neighborhood, we included the 1876 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, which was recently digitized and is included in the Tulane University Digital Library (TUDL). And to give the students a sense of what the Leeds company produced, we included cast iron decorative details salvaged from demolished New Orleans buildings.

    

   

Architecture of Place Class Visit

Last week we did an instruction session, tour of SEAA's current exhibit "The Modernism of Albert C. Ledner", and a tour of our stacks for Professor Laura Blokker's Architecture of Place class. We showed the students examples of what they might use in SEAA by presenting materials documenting the demolished French Opera (1859-1919) in New Orleans. We showed the class an original 1859 watercolor perspective drawing by Marie Adrien Persac for the architect of the building, James Gallier, Jr., an 1876 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map to give them an idea of the opera's neighborhood in it's heyday, drawings dating from the 1920s to document the opera not long after it was destroyed by fire in 1919, and drawings for various proposals to rebuild it in the 1940s through the 1960s. We included photographs and prints from the late-19th to the early-20th centuries, and photos from the fire of 1919.