Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop

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Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop
National Register of Historic Places
National Historic Landmark
Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop
Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop (Louisiana)
Paris plan pointer b jms.svg
location 941 Bourbon Street , New Orleans , Louisiana
Coordinates 29 ° 57 '38.7 "  N , 90 ° 3' 50"  W Coordinates: 29 ° 57 '38.7 "  N , 90 ° 3' 50"  W.
Built 18th century
Architectural style French colonial style
NRHP number 70000255
The NRHP added April 15, 1970

Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop is a built in the 18th century building ( cottage ) in French colonial style in Bourbon Street in the French Quarter , the historic old town of New Orleans , Louisiana . Listed as a National Historic Landmark on the National Register of Historic Places since April 15, 1970 , the listed building now serves as a bar .

description

The one-story building is located on the southwest corner where Bourbon Street and St. Philip Street meet, and has a rectangular footprint of 37 ′ 8½ " (11.5 m) by 30 ′ 5½" (9.3 m).

The walls are made using the briquette-entre-poteaux method ( French for "brick-between-posts"), in which the cavities between the posts and cross connections that are driven into the ground are filled with small, soft bricks and then plastered to protect against rain were. The lime plaster has been partially removed today and reveals the cypress wood posts used and the bricks. The south-east front facing Bourbon Street has a window and three doors that are evenly spaced. At times, there was a post-applied canopy of corrugated iron over the right half of the front. The northeast front facing St. Philip Street has a door and window.

The steeply rising hipped roof with roof tiles cover and has on the long fronts and two on the short fronts in each case a dormer . In the middle of the southeast side of the roof there is a brick chimney.

Inside, the building once consisted of four rooms of equal size, with the rooms facing St. Philip Street serving as a sales room and the other two as the owner's living quarters. For the operation of a bar, the interior division of four rooms was removed in favor of a large room. The hearths have been replaced by chimneys. A narrow, winding staircase, added later in the northern corner of the house, led to the extended roof structure , which was divided into two equally sized rooms.

history

Legend has it that the building was once owned by the French privateer Jean and Pierre Lafitte is said to have found that under the guise of a blacksmith (English blacksmith ) Here smuggling and slave trade are said to have operated.

The records for the property date back to 1722. The first notarized record is from October 8, 1773. Marìa Catalina La Roche, wife of Pierre Revoil, gave the property to Bartholome Robert in exchange for a property and a house in the Saint Exit Louis Street. From then on it remained in the possession of the Roberts family, and in 1781 the property and house were transferred to Robert's sister Marguerite. In 1833 Marguerite Robert, widow of the merchant Simon Duraché, who was called Castillion, sold it to the widow of the doctor Christian Miltenberger. From the existing records from this period it is not apparent that it was ever in the possession of the Lafitte brothers or anyone associated with them.

The exact year of construction is not known, but most sources date it to 1772. The architectural style known as Creole cottage was in use between 1720 and 1845 and the dominant architectural style along the American Gulf Coast from 1790 to 1840. The briquette entre poteaux process used was developed from around 1770. It was one of the few buildings from this period that survived the great New Orleans fires of 1788 and 1794. Most of the buildings built after the fires were built in the Spanish colonial style.

In the 1940s Tom Caplinger leased the building and opened Café Lafitte here , which developed into a popular gay meeting place in the early 1950s. In 1953 the property was sold due to unclear ownership and Caplinger opened Café Lafitte in Exile a few blocks away at 901 Bourbon Street . The building was then used as a pub and still houses Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop Bar .

swell

Official documents

literature

  • New Orleans City Guide . Written and compiled by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration for the City of New Orleans (=  American Guide Series ). Houghton, Mifflin Company, Boston 1938, p. 148, 248 (English, archive.org [accessed April 14, 2017]).
  • Italo William Ricciuti: New Orleans and its Environs . The Domestic Architecture 1728-1870. Photographs by Rudolf Hertzberg. With an Introduction by Talbot Falkner Hamlin. William Helburn, New York 1938 (English, archive.org [accessed April 14, 2017] specifically panels 1, 118 and 199).
  • Roulhac Toledano: The National Trust Guide to New Orleans . The Definitive Guide to Architectural and Cultural Treasures. John Wiley & Sons, New York 1996, ISBN 0-471-14404-5 , pp. 19-20 (English).
  • Jim Fraiser: The French Quarter of New Orleans . Photography by West Freeman. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2003, ISBN 1-57806-524-0 , pp. 12-13 (English).
  • Stanley Clisby Arthur: Old New Orleans . A History of the Vieux Carré, Its Ancient and Historical Buildings. Heritage Books, Westminster, Maryland 2007, ISBN 978-0-7884-2722-0 , pp. 239–241 (English, facsimile reprint of the 1936 edition).
  • Mitchell Newton-Matza (Ed.): Historic Sites and Landmarks that Shaped America . From Acoma Pueblo to Ground Zero. Volume 1: A – M. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara 2016, ISBN 978-1-4408-4547-5 , pp. 217 (English).

Web links

Commons : Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Listing of National Historic Landmarks by State: Louisiana. National Park Service , accessed August 3, 2019.