Coliseum Square: A New Orleans renaissance

Magazine Antiques, April, 2001 by William Nathaniel Banks

[It] is carpeted with close smooth grass, and planted with luxuriant trees. It is more than one fourth mile long, and four or five hundred feet wide, surrounded with beautiful houses, and gardens filled with the choicest flowers, roses blooming all the year round, and at this particular season the air is almost oppressive with the luscious fragrance of the orange bloom and the different species of Jessamine, especially the "Grand Duke" and "Arabian." Then at night we are entertained by the song of the "Southern nightingale" among the beautiful trees....All the children of the neighborhood with their nurses [GRAPHIC EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]c. and some of larger growth, too, gather on the Square in the evenings, and form the liveliest and prettiest groups imaginable, playing at different games, jumping the rope, and chasing one another among the sweet clover blooms. [1]

The architect Thomas Kelah Wharton, who lived on Coliseum Square during its most prosperous years, composed this beguiling description of the funnel-shaped park that demarcates the square in a letter to his sister in May 1855.

Coliseum Square is the centerpiece of the section of New Orleans that lies between the hurly-burly of the business district and the genteel splendor of the Garden District. The architect and architectural historian Samuel Wilson Jr. (1911--1993) dubbed it the Lower Garden District. In 1962, when Wilson coined the useful neologism, the square was little more than a slum. Writing in 1971, the preservationist Ray Samuel (1915--1990) predicted that if unprotected the district would "disappear as a viewable, historically and architecturally interesting section of New Orleans." [2] The restoration of the handsome houses surrounding the square in the years since Samuel's dire prognostication is a heartening instance of a glorious architectural and sociological renaissance.

In 1806 the deputy surveyor of Orleans parish, Barthelemy Lafon (1769-- 1820), who had come to New Orleans from France in 1790, began planning the new faubourg that is now called the Lower Garden District. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, with the Mississippi River open to free trade, the landowners upriver from the Vieux Carre realized that the old quarter dominated by the Spanish and French could not contain the hordes of Americans who were now flooding the city, and they retained Lafon to subdivide their property to create an American suburb. Lafon was an engineer, an architect, and a sometime privateer in league with the notorious Lafitte brothers, Pierre (1779-1844) and Jean (1782-1854), as well as a surveyor. He devised a sophisticated plan, which he elaborated over the course of several years, featuring tree-lined canals, fountains, churches, markets, a grand classical school, and a coliseum. Unfortunately, few of the features of this grandiose scheme were realized, although the grid pattern he i mposed, ingeniously accommodating the curves of the river, still defines the district. Some of the Greek names that Lafon, an ardent classicist, gave to the streets and squares persist; the muses Polymnia, Euterpe, and Terpsichore poetically identify streets leading into Coliseum Square.

A few years before Wharton rented a cottage on the square in 1851 (see Pl. VIII), several stately classical houses had set the architectural tone of the neighborhood. In 1847 Hugh Wilson, a commission merchant, built a house on Coliseum Street (Pl. I) across the square from the house that Wharton rented. Two years later Frederick Rodewald, a banker, built a similar house next door to Wilson's (see Pls. V, VI). Both houses are emphatically vertical, two-story, side-hall town houses of plastered brick. The double galleries are wood. The fluted columns at Wilson's house are Doric on the ground floor and Ionic on the second floor, while at Rodewald's house they are Ionic below and Corinthian above.

The frame cottage that Wharton rented on Camp Street was more modest than the houses of most of his neighbors. Although it had only three rooms he lived there contentedly for a decade with his wife Emily (1835-1932), their son Thomas Prescott (1852-1910), and Emily's mother and younger sister. Wharton, who was born in England, was an architect, a teacher, a superb draftsman and, according to his adoring wife, "a man of culture, refinement...a Christian gentleman of the highest type." [3] For fourteen years, from 1848 to 1862, Wharton helped supervise the construction of the monumental new Custom House, which had been designed in 1847 in the neoclassical style by Alexander Thompson Wood (1799-1854).

Beginning in December 1853 and continuing almost until the time of his death in May 1862, Wharton kept a fascinating journal, illustrated with his precise drawings (see Fig. 1), in which he recorded the weather and such calamitous events as fires, hurricanes, floods, and epidemics, and described in detail his work at the Custom House and on various architectural commissions, as well as his frequent excursions to concerts, operas, art galleries, and galas, to the circus with his son and, on most Sundays, with his family to church.