Finding Lost New Orleans

by Judith Zwolak

Special thanks to Gary Van Zante of the Southeastern Architectural Archive for use of the Lilienthal photographs

New Orleans, 1867. Bienville would be proud.

Nearly 150 years after the French-Canadian explorer settled on the banks of the Mississippi River, the city is a bustling metropolis of 200,000 people.

Its setting is striking. The St. Charles Hotel sits proudly in the center of the town's "American sector." Bayou St. John is a scene of rural, bucolic beauty. Steamboats chug along the Mississippi River's bustling shoreline.

Industry and commerce fuel the city's economic engine. Cotton mills, brickworks and boiler factories employ thousands throughout the area. Gasworks light the streets at night, and the French and Poydras markets offer an abundance of wholesale and retail goods.

The city's residents also enjoy a variety of social services, religious offerings and entertainment venues. Widows' and orphans' asylums, hospitals, fire departments, churches and synagogues are among the city's prominent institutions. The French Opera House, New German Theatre and Fairgrounds racetrack provide a variety of amusements.

With all this to offer, who wouldn't want to live in the Crescent City?

Although it was only two years after the end of the Civil War and New Orleans was fast losing its river-based trade to the cities in the North on the transcontinental railroad, the 1867 New Orleans City Councilmen were the consummate boosters. To encourage immigration and investment in New Orleans and Louisiana, they hired the city's premier photographer, Theodore Lilienthal, to create a photographic survey of the area. The photos, displayed for the first and only time at the Paris Exposition of 1867 and presented to French emperor Napoleon III, are a systematic study designed to present New Orleans at its best and encourage "the capitalist, the artist, the artisan and the mechanic and laborer" to move to the city.

If the collection of 150 photographs elicited an overwhelming urge to pack up family and belongings and make a new life in the Crescent City, then Lilienthal and his benefactors had done their jobs.

The photos, some of the first ever taken in New Orleans, are also a gold mine to present-day historians of New Orleans, the South and 19th-century urban life.

Making them all the more intriguing is their novelty. No one alive today knew they existed until five years ago. This fall, all 126 remaining photos from the collection were on display for the first time in the United States--and the first time anywhere in more than a century--in a joint exhibition at Tulane's Newcomb Art Gallery and the New Orleans Museum of Art that ran through Nov. 19.

What Photos?

Little did Gary Van Zante know that a 1995 telephone call from Hans Peter Mathis, director of the Napoleon Museum in Arenberg, Switzerland, would start a five-year project resulting in his designing an international exhibition and writing a book on a largely unknown photographic collection.

Van Zante, curator of Tulane's Southeastern Architectural Archive in Joseph Merrick Jones Hall and an expert on print and photographic representations of New Orleans, recalls feeling nonplussed as he listened to the description of New Orleans photographs that the Swiss curator had unearthed.

Van Zante's interest grew as he methodically pieced together the story behind the unique set of prints and the photographer who created them.

The tale begins in 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War and a challenging time for the residents of New Orleans. The city was in the midst of Reconstruction and struggling to revive markets that existed before the war, particularly river-based commerce and the cotton trade with Europe.

"The city was surpassed by the great industrial cities of the North and railroad centers like St. Louis," Van Zante says. "The city was losing commerce and trade."

The 18-member City Council of New Orleans decided proactive measures were needed to increase investment in the area and encourage European immigrants to view the Crescent City as the land of opportunity. They commissioned Lilienthal to complete a photographic survey of the city, a study that would highlight the area's stable economy and industrial strengths but also show ties to familiar European institutions.

"In the photos you get a sense of previous generations' immigration to the city in the establishment of the German theaters and the French operas," Van Zante says. "It gives you a real sense of a multi-ethnic city."

The ultimate venue for the photographs is the Louisiana Pavilion at that year's Paris Exposition, an international exhibition of scientific, industrial and artistic advances. With an anticipated attendance of 11 million, the exposition promised a significant audience for the photographs. No expense was spared for Louisiana's participation in the event. The council devoted considerable resources to the project, paying Lilienthal $2,000 for the commission, as much as his contemporaries would make in a year.

The Paris Exposition was the World's Fair of its time, and Louisiana sent samples of its primary agricultural and commercial products for display. When visitors entered the Louisiana Pavilion, they encountered cotton, moss, tobacco, pimientos from Avery Island, dress shirts from a New Orleans tailor, clocks made by Louisiana artisans as well as Lilienthal's portfolio of New Orleans photographs. The pavilion itself was even a display item in the exhibit. Designed as a prefabricated cypress cottage in which immigrants could reside while they constructed their permanent house, the tiny 15-by-20-foot structure must have made cramped quarters for visitors who wished to see the fruits of Louisiana's bounty.

Although Van Zante says French newspaper accounts expressed confusion about the Louisiana Pavilion's tiny, prefab structure, the exhibit inside, nevertheless, won a gold medal at the exposition, with Lilienthal's photographs garnering a bronze medal.

After the exposition closed, the New Orleans photographs became part of the emperor's personal possessions. (Napoleon himself reciprocated by sending the city council a book he wrote on the life of Julius Caesar.) After his death a few years later, Napoleon's widow took the photographs and other possessions with her to the emperor's boyhood home in Switzerland. The house and its holdings became state property following her death, becoming known as the Napoleon Museum. The photographs had long been in storage when the museum's new director discovered them in 1995.

Although the existence of the collection was unknown to anyone in New Orleans, the name of the photographer was a familiar one. The Southeastern Architectural Archive possessed numerous Theodore Lilienthal prints from the mid-19th century, including some stereoscopic images of the same scenes in the Paris Exposition collection.

These double images, when viewed through an instrument called a stereoscope, present a three-dimensional representation of the photograph being viewed. They, like the photos in the exposition collection, consisted largely of buildings and scenic views of the city.

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