Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2009 - (Page 43) as successor to the highly successful Thomas H. Shields firm. Douglas is said to have been the first New Orleanian printer to transfer engravings from copper plates to lithographic stone. It is he who designed the city’s municipal seal. The son of wedded musical lithographers, Palmyra Street resident Frederick Wehrmann pursued the family trade. He had spent much of his youth in his parents’ Chartres Street home, which the family shared with Swedish artist Charles Briton, who designed Comus’ 1873 satirical tableau “The Origin of the Species” which depicted as Darwinian creatures political figures of the day. The memory of the artistic and musical heritage of this orphaned neighborhood faded with time and the area’s changing fortunes. Whether because of the Great Depression or as a result of the 1927 flood, by the late 1930s, used-car lots began to appear where mansions once stood along Canal Street. The early 1950s brought the promise of urban renewal as Tulane Avenue was repackaged as the “Miracle Mile.” A bus line replaced the Tulane streetcar as houses and small businesses vanished, replaced with empty promises of a modern avenue lined with skyscrapers. In late 1952, the City and the Housing Authority of New Orleans announced plans to eliminate “slum” housing in the area bounded by S. Claiborne Avenue, S. Broad Street, Poydras Street and Tulane Avenue. Utilizing federal slum-remediation funds, the area was to be re-imagined as an exclusively commercial and industrial zone. Led by Judge James Comiskey, the 500member Owners and Tenants Association protested the unrepresented expropriation and rezoning. Soon, however, Claiborne Towers (later known as the Plaza Suites Hotel) was under construction in 1950. Houses demolished in this once upscale residential block included that of Reconstruction-era lieutenant governor Oscar C. Dunn. industrial properties replaced houses and families left in disgust, many of them departing for the suburbs, never to return. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw massive biomedical expansion between Tulane Avenue and Poydras Street as the LSU Health Sciences Center was erected and original Hotel Dieu was replaced with a newer facility that later became University Hospital. Surrounding both were acres of surface parking and vacant lots, some of which remain undeveloped to the present day. Nick Persich, a Mid-City pharmacist then living at 2011 Perdido Street, posed the following in a November 1952 letter to the editor of the New Orleans States: “ Let any honest-hearted and fair-minded citizen visit this section and then ask this question: Aren’t there hundreds of thousands of square feet of area lying almost unused in the business and industrial districts? Why not use them first and then, when our city’s growth is such that all other space has been used up, then, and only then, the argument that our area is needed for the progress of our city will be sensible, logical, honest, and acceptable to us ” LCV M.L. Eichhorn is a Reference Assistant at The Historic New Orleans Collection. Spring 2009/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 43 THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION
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