Part I. Who and What Created ?

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Chapter 1

Surveyors and Engineers in New Orleans

“What! Is it expected that for any commercial or profitable purpose boats will ever be able to run up the into the Wabash, Missouri or Red Rivers. One might as well try to bite a slice off the moon.” —Governor La Mothe Cadillac to Louis XIV from Dauphin Island, Alabama, 1714

New Orleans’ French, Spanish, Polish, American, site of the city, and working on the fort at La Balise and Creole surveyors, engineers, and architects toward the foot of the Mississippi River and the were creative, educated individuals. Those who town plan for Nouvelle Orleans. As architect, he arrived at the founding of the city had studied designed the first hospital in New Orleans in 1723 the engravings and texts by sixteenth-century and the maison of the Company of the Indies (with Italian designer and author Sebastiano Serlio and Adrien de Pauger) in New Orleans. seventeenth-century French soldier, architect, and De la Tour’s successor, Adrien de Pauger, had engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban. We can come to from Dieppe, Normandy, discern these are documented influences today by where his father, an attorney, was acquainted looking at the earliest depictions of New Orleans with the Le Moyne family of Dieppe, Normandy, architecture. By the time Frenchman Le Blond de la and Montreal, Nouvelle France (Canada). De Tour was appointed engineer in chief of Louisiana Pauger was employed, through Jean-Baptiste in 1719, he had served in France’s army engineering Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, by the Company corps in Portugal in 1697 under the great Vauban. of the Indies. De Pauger is credited with the From the early French colonial days, when Vieux Carré plan much as we know it today. By Pierre Le Blond de la Tour and Adrien de Pauger extension, he is responsible for the form the city worked to lay out the new Ville de la Nouvelle took up and down river and to Bayou St. John, Orleans, now the Vieux Carré or , since subsequent faubourgs followed de Pauger’s New Orleans’ administrators followed customs set street, block, and lot plans in general. De Pauger by French military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de died in New Orleans in 1726. Vauban, ingénieur du roi (1633-1707). Vauban and Charles de Morand, from Rouen, France, his fortification system not only transformed nine landed and worked first in Biloxi, where he French cities, but also influenced urban development served as assistant surveyor to Le Blond de la in the old and new worlds. Recognized for his Tour. Morand later worked in New Orleans with achievements during his lifetime, he saw his ideas Adrien de Pauger. On his own behalf, Morand about city planning taught in France and observed acquired holdings along the Road to the Bayou St. by the French engineers, surveyors, and architects in Jean (John). There he built brickyards immediately the New World. after 1719, in time for the first shipment of slaves The Crown sent four surveyors and their from Africa to work in the brickyards. assistants to lay out New Orleans. They were called Adrien de Pauger’s official replacement, Ignace voyers de la ville. A Monsieur Perrier died en route. François Broutin, a native of the village of La Bassée Le Blond de la Tour died of yellow fever in October in the Pas de Calais, northern France, arrived from of 1724 after making town plans for Nouveau Natchez in 1726 where he had been commandant. Biloxi and Fort Condé de la Mobile, at the present He served as king’s engineer until his own death in

21 1751. Bernard de Verges, who had been Le Blond swamps, and military fortifications that figured de la Tour’s draftsman, became engineer in chief in the British advance toward New Orleans were following Broutin’s death. De Verges, a native of essential to the successful American campaign. Béarn, in the Pyrenees of southwest France, spent Indeed, Lafon was a major cartographer, much of his career at the foot of the Mississippi delineating the first comprehensive map of lower River at La Balise, where the ships arrived. He Louisiana in 1806 for Gov. W. C. C. Claiborne and died in 1766 and was replaced by the French-born members of the legislature. Claiborne knew Lafon’s engineer Hypolite Amelot. A native of central talent, because in 1804, Lafon had resurveyed and France, Amelot was a lieutenant in the regiment of prepared plats for all the private land claims issued Grassins in 1750 when he was sent to Louisiana. by France and Spain in the province of Louisiana In 1759, he received the coveted Cross of St. Louis and l’Isle d’Orleans. and took the official inventory of the Vieux Carré Lafon continued to be active in the development when it was turned over to the Spanish Bourbons of lower Louisiana. He laid out most of the Lower in 1763. Subsequently, he died at sea. Garden District beginning in 1806. About the Carlos Laveau Trudeau, of French and Canadian same time, William Donaldson of New Orleans background, became surveyor general of Spanish hired Lafon to survey lots and produce the town Louisiana from the 1770s on. Trudeau refused plan for what is now Donaldsonville, Louisiana, to turn over his records and documentations of in St. James Parish on the Mississippi River. land grants to the Americans at the time of the Lafon’s conception of Donaldsonville, like that Louisiana Purchase in 1803. His assistant, then of his plans for American New Orleans, is quite successor, Vincente Sebastiano Pintado took the sophisticated and exciting. He died in 1820 after papers and surveys in his possession with him reassociating himself with the Lafitte brothers at when, in 1805, he became surveyor general of Barataria and Galveston Island. Pensacola in Spanish-owned Florida. Trudeau French architect Jean-Hyacinthe Laclotte, like died in 1816; Vincente Pintado died in Havana Barthélémy Lafon, was quite creative with his in 1829. Many of his records were transferred to subdivision assignments. In 1807, he described Havana, capital of Spanish-owned Cuba, and his plan for “Quartier de Plaisance, Plan of the occasional administrative capital of both New Plantation of Mr. Joseph Wiltz at 2½ miles above the Orleans and Florida. Others of his papers are city, [d]ivided into lots spacious enough . . . to there preserved in the American State Papers and at the establish Country Houses, Road-side Inns, Gardens, Louisiana State Museum. etc.” His survey work has not been considered as Surveyor, architect, and engineer Barthélémy important as his work as an architect with Arsène Lafon, a native of Villepinte, France, may have Lacarrière Latour. They worked on 638 Royal, the arrived in New Orleans during the Spanish Lemonnier House, and 619 Bourbon, the 1810-1812 colonial period since he is credited with designing Fouché House. Laclotte probably designed the Girod the 1795 house at 617 Chartres. Lafon was in Saint- (Napoleon) House at 500-506 Chartres. Improbable Domingue in 1802 when he left for Havana because as it may seem, French architects Claude Gurlie and of the slave uprising. He was soon involved in Joseph Guillot designed the atelier of Latour and bringing refugees from Saint-Domingue and Laclotte at 625-627 Dauphine. Havana to New Orleans in his own ship, and he Laclotte was a third-generation French developed a reputation as a corsair. Working with architect/engineer and is well known for his privateers Jean and Pierre Lafitte at Barataria, painting of the Battle of New Orleans at Chalmette, he also obtained a large land grant where Bayou for which he volunteered as an engineer in the Lafourche meets the Mississippi River. Known First Louisiana Militia. He had his drawing as a competent architect, builder, cartographer, published in France as an aquatint engraving, and and engineer in New Orleans, he none the less it sold briskly in the United States and England. was bringing in prizes with his corsair La Misère After working in New Orleans until 1821, Laclotte in 1813 and 1814 and was indicted for taking two returned to his birthplace, Bordeaux, where he Spanish vessels illegally in 1814. Active service continued to work as an architect. under Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Arsène Lacarrière Latour (1778-1839), from Orleans removed the indictments from his record. Aurillac, an old Gallo-Roman town originally Lafon’s maps for Jackson of the lakes, bayous, called Orlhac in the province of Auvergne, came

22 to America as an engineer on Gen. Donatien during the Napoleonic era. When the monarchy Rochambeau’s staff during the American was restored, the Legion of Honor recipient Revolution. Then he worked in Saint-Domingue, fled to New Orleans in 1817. Buisson rebuilt the sailing to New Orleans in 1803 under the auspices Custom House of Benjamin Henry Latrobe in of diplomat and Sen. Edward Livingston. He 1819. He laid out plantations upriver between became municipal engineer and was engaged the Garden District and Carrollton that became by Elias Beauregard to survey town lots in Faubourg St. Joseph and Rickerville, Hurstville, Baton Rouge around 1806. He fought alongside and Bloomingdale (later gathered into Jefferson Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans City), among other surveying projects. Working from December to January of 1814 to 1815, and as architect, engineer, and surveyor, he eventually he wrote the Historical Memoir of the War in West became the official Jefferson Parish surveyor. Florida and Louisiana in 1814-15, which included Jacques Tanesse, a noted architect; Charles extensive cartographic work. It was published Bougerol and J. A. Bougerol; Louis Bringier; and in Philadelphia in 1816. (West Florida included Charles Zimpel, as post-Louisiana Purchase survey- parishes now in eastern Louisiana.) ors, cartographers, and architects, contributed to Latour designed a number of major buildings in the development and subdivision of land behind the French Quarter, and he had an atelier in New the city. These include a continuation of Faubourg Orleans at 625-627 Dauphine with architect/surveyor Tremé, called Mid-City and Faubourg St. John, and Jean-Hyacinthe Laclotte. He also worked in Cuba. the downriver Creole subdivisions and faubourgs as Representing Spain, Latour traveled up the Arkansas well as American upriver developments that were River on an eight-month, 1,500-mile expedition. He absorbed into the city of Lafayette and Carrollton. reported to Havana, writing Spaniard Luís Onís (the They are well represented in the Notarial Archives Onís Adams Treaty settled the boundary between with archival drawings or building contracts and American Louisiana and Spanish Texas) that a maps and surveys. holding action was all Spain could hope for to limit Joseph Pilié was the voyer de la ville for much westward expansion of Anglo-Americans to Santa Fe of the nineteenth century. He came to New and then to Spanish California. Orleans from Saint-Domingue because of the Nicolas de Finiels, an engineer from France who revolution that created Haiti. Contracting to work trained there, sailed to America with the French for Barthélémy Lafon for two years, he was paid forces who fought in the Revolutionary War. Since sixteen dollars a month and food and lodging. he was a monarchist, he left Philadelphia in 1797 to After laying out Faubourg Nouvelle Marigny in enter the Spanish military in the upper Louisiana 1809, adjacent and bayou-wards from Faubourg Territory in St. Louis. After working throughout Marigny, he was appointed city surveyor in 1818. Spanish Louisiana, including New Orleans, he left Pilié remained in the position until 1836 when Louisiana with the evacuating Spanish officers in the New Orleans was divided into three separate Louisiana Purchase period and went to Pensacola municipalities at which time he was appointed in 1806, like Vincente Pintado. As engineer in chief city surveyor of the Second Municipality until of west Florida, he directed fortification works 1844. His son, Louis H. Pilié, became surveyor of at Mobile and Pensacola. De Finiels wrote “An the consolidated municipality of New Orleans in Account of Upper Louisiana” during the last years 1856. He prepared maps for the numerous sale of of the Spanish regime. properties willed to New Orleans and Baltimore French and Spanish military schools provided by John McDonogh in 1850 before his 1886 death. formal training for most of these military engineers Louis Pilie’s son, Edgar Pilié, born in 1844, fought who were also cartographers, voyers de la ville or in the Army of Tennessee during the Civil War. arpenteurs (surveyors), architects, builders, and Afterwards, he practiced as a surveyor in the artists. French-born Pierre-François Olivier de private sector. When he died in 1912, the entire Vezin, a planter below the city in St. Bernard Parish, family’s surveying archives were acquired by the was surveyor and keeper of the king’s highways Louisiana Abstract Company and are now at The under the French and a member of the Spanish Historic New Orleans Collection. Cabildo during the Spanish colonial period. Although they made plans and subdivisions Benjamin Buisson, born in 1783, trained as an for the entire city of New Orleans, these French- artillery officer at l’Ecole Polytechnique in Paris speaking surveyors usually lived in the Vieux

23 Carré or the Creole suburbs. Another Frenchman, hundred French feet on each side, about 320 feet Claude Jules Allou d’Hémécourt, born in France American measure. Streets in the French Quarter in 1819, came to New Orleans in 1831 with his measured about twenty-two feet wide (American parents and siblings. Both he and his father, Jean measure), with sidewalks eight feet wide on each Charles Allou d’Hémécourt, practiced as civil side of the street, according to New Orleans architect engineers and land surveyors in New Orleans in Malcolm Heard and urban planner William H. Lucy the 1830s and 1840s. Jules d’Hémécourt surveyed of the University of Virginia. The squares closest the entire city of New Orleans in 1857 for to the river had sides that were longer parallel to Mayor Charles Waterman. At that time, the city the river, about 350 feet (American measure). Lot extended from Toledano Street south and east to frontages averaged about sixty French feet front Fisherman’s Canal below Jackson Barracks. (64 feet American measure). Depths ran from 120 Valery Sulakowski, an exile from Poland to 150 French feet. Over time, a sixty-foot frontage because of their wars and revolutions, arrived could be divided into two thirty-foot lots or even in New Orleans in 1851 at the age of twenty-six. four fifteen-foot lots. The narrowest lots accounted Working as architect, engineer, and surveyor, he for the innovation of the two-bay, single Creole became the official Jefferson Parish surveyor. He cottage and the two-bay, hall-less shotgun, as well also worked at the Federal Land Office in New as some narrow two-bay, two-story houses and Orleans as engineer and surveyor. During the some rare two-bay camelback houses. Civil War, he was commissioned a colonel in the The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Fourteenth Louisiana Volunteers. Afterwards, he surveyor’s work included marking off and worked for the state land office throughout the laying out new streets, canals, and levees. They swamps of Louisiana. devised solutions for environmental problems William H. Williams, after arriving in New so that the neighborhoods could work. They Orleans in 1845, succeeded Benjamin Buisson decided on proper slopes for the drainage ditches as Jefferson Parish surveyor. Both men were that carried storm water runoff from the city considered architects also. Williams was also into the marais or cyprières (swamps), and later official surveyor for the city of Carrollton. A native into canals that drained the swamp by means of of Cincinnati, Ohio, he arrived in New Orleans steam-driven draining machines or pumps. when he was twenty-eight years old, already Archival drawings and maps provide evidence trained as surveyor and civil engineer. regarding how much of what the surveyors Well into the nineteenth century, New Orleans did created the character of New Orleans French and Creole surveyors, engineers, and neighborhoods. They were attentive to the need architects continued to use the pieds (French for occasional wider openings in the street grid, feet), toises, and arpents that comprised France’s as well as to the need for ease of access to each seventeenth-century measuring system. One French neighborhood section. Their response was to pied is a bit longer than an American foot (1.066 feet). create the wider avenues, such as Champs Elysées Surveyors used the toise as a unit of length equal (Elysian Fields), Rampart, Esplanade, Canal, to six French feet, 6.394 feet American measure, or Melpomene, Louisiana, St. Charles, and others. 1.949 meters. These thoroughfares were divided streets with An arpent could be defined in one of two ways: “neutral grounds,” or median strips. Archival as a linear measure equal to 180 French feet (192 drawings show that these grand concourses were feet American measure), or as a square having all conceived of as landscaped promenades, filled 180 French feet on each side. A square arpent is with single and double rows of trees (usually live about 0.84 acres. The arpent survived in Canada oaks today). The thirty-foot-wide neutral grounds and in lower Louisiana well into the nineteenth were flanked on either side by twenty-four-foot- century. French and Creole surveyors, engineers, wide streets. The neutral ground often provided and architects sometimes continued to use French space for railroad, then later, streetcar tracks. feet, toises, and arpents in their work on archival Before it was understood that small bodies of water drawings. Some drawings by French and Creole harbor mosquitoes that cause yellow fever, canals surveyors specify “American Measure.” Others with fountains encircled by walkways and basins simply use the French measure. were part of the landscape designed by surveyors. Crescent City squares generally measured three The plantations that were subdivided to create

24 new faubourgs, or suburbs, up and downriver restorer, contractor, or carpenter knows. New were wedge shaped. Since the river was the Orleans has had craftsmen through the centuries essential highway, each plantation had to possess that know how to look as well as how to frontage on the Mississippi or another river or build and repair. From the earliest slaves and bayou with eventual access to the Gulf of Mexico. hommes de couleur libre (free men of color) both Obviously, the riverbank was the most expensive from Africa and from Saint-Domingue, there land. Some plantations possessed no more than have been builders who have handed down two arpents (384 feet American measure) along the the traditional ways and building traditions. water. All river-fronting properties extended in Similarly, the ensuing waves of Irish, German, depth to the cypress swamps, or cyprières, usually Anglo-American, and, later, Cajun and Sicilian about forty arpents (7,673 feet). Away from the craftsmen knew how to tackle New Orleans water, the plantations widened; the total size of a buildings: look around and do them the way plantation was not regulated, so the greater part they have always been done. So, New Orleans of a property was held away from the riverfront. has tradition and repeated customs in its This made the plantations wedge shaped as they building inventory, and the toute ensemble is more widened toward the cypress swamps. coherent than elsewhere in the United States. Nineteenth-century archival drawings presented Most universal new styles that spread across here reveal Spanish building types and traditions America didn’t invade New Orleans until after built onto the French customs and footprints. When World War I. And those new innovations weren’t the French, Spanish, and Creole building inventory numerous until well after World War II. and urban planning methods are added to the urban There was no need to develop or try to apply the planning and architectural and building work of concept of New Urbanism for New Orleans—it Irish, Scottish, German, and English immigrants and started there in 1718. Through floods, hurricanes, new Anglo-Americans through the 1850s, archival and fires, the city was infilled and rebuilt with the drawings reveal that New Orleans is the United same vigor and taste with which it began. New States’ most architecturally diverse and unusual city. Orleans is a constant celebration of architecture, The archival drawings, observed collectively an unending parade of vibrant buildings. with a study of the men who executed them, These archival drawings bolster the case reveal the huge amount of knowledge and talent for preserving New Orleans by retaining as that went into the plan of New Orleans and the neighborhoods its traditional street, square, architectural inventory creating a city that is more block, and plot plans shown in the drawings. original and complex than is generally realized. The building types must be preserved along Archival drawings as well as a drive through with public and institutional buildings, such the city, indicate that repetition of house type, as Charity Hospital, that represent the city’s block after block, street after street, is the key culture and triumph. The artistic renderings in to New Orleans’ appearance. Diversity of style the archives are as valuable as the houses and within that repetition of type is rich, because there buildings they represent, because the drawings are vast varieties of styles presented along the make possible informed preservation of New facades. The repetition of type and styles make Orleans building inventory with appropriate walking and driving through the city a daily infill. Each group of buildings in their faubourg excitement and pleasure. is the nexus of people and place, something of A drive through the neighborhoods, however, great value, indeed, loved by all. may not reveal what every architect, renovator,

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