Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2009 - (Page 38) Francis Pennino, then assistant pastor of St. Joseph Church, faced the possibility that St. Joseph Church would be sold and razed in the face of LSU expansion. A parking lot replaced a Robert Palestine-designed convent but the church survived. At its peak is a massive Celtic Cross, manufactured by an Evangelical Protestant, Ludwig Eichhorn, my great-uncle, a lifelong neighborhood resident whose descendants include the Barth family of Carnival float builders. Ludwig’s father, Robert, my great-grandfather, once lived on Gasquet Street (now Cleveland Avenue) and was one of its earliest homeowners. A successful metalsmith, Robert Eichhorn once lived in the same block as Franco-American artist/architect Marie Adrien Persac. Architects Theodore E. Giraud and Thomas Lewis, also lived nearby. Individually and as a partnership, Giraud and Lewis were involved in design of a large number of local churches built during the German and Irish immigration booms of the 1840s and 1850s. They also built, in 1853, Parson Theodore Clapp’s Unitarian Church. It was Giraud who designed the original St. Joseph Church, dedicated in the mid 1840s, which once stood on the site of the present-day Tulane University Medical Center. Quickly outgrown by its predominantly Irish congregation, it was replaced by the current St. Joseph Church. In the 1890s, the original church was given a new name and a new mission when, as St. Katherine, it reached out to congregants of African-American and AmericanIndian heritage. Other architects and architectural firms known to have been active in the neighborhoods above Claiborne and below Broad included James and William Freret, Little & Middlemiss, Charles L. Hillger, Albert Deitel, and brothers Henry and Benjamin Howard. Architect, naturalist and sensational novelist Ludwig Von Reizenstein once lived on Gasquet (now Cleveland), just below Broad Street while architect Julius Koch resided on South Miro Street. Building contracts show that a now-obscure architect or builder named James Johnson was, during the 1850s, very active in the neighborhoods at the rear of the Second Municipality, building modest homes as well as more upscale residences. In 1857, he built for John McGuire a home on Gasquet Street between Derbigny and Roman. The cost was a then-impressive $2,100. The next year, the Madison School rose at the corner of Palmyra and South Johnson. Credited to William Freret but designed in part by Robert Mills Lusher, a formally-trained architect better-remembered as an educator, the all-girls’ school would grow to boast the city’s largest public school enrollment before burning to the ground in a July 1878 fire Gasquet Street residents Christian Scharpe and Adrien Persac were among many Lower Mid-City residents who worked for some of the New Orleans’ finest lithographers; both are known to have been employed by Benedict Simon. 38 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2009 THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION
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