They're cooking up a big demolition party in New Orleans to eradicate one of the city's iconic structures: No need to waste one's weary little gray cells on this building, the story line goes, it's just a humdrum piece of mid-20th century architecture whose date with the wrecking ball has come.
Previous developers have failed to revive the 33-story office tower at the foot of Canal Street on the Mississippi River. And while lip service is being paid to two proposals to renovate the building, the mayor's money is on a third option that would demolish the city's one-time World Trade Center for an ersatz Eiffel Tower, an artificial St. Louis arch, an ineffably New Orleans-esque symbol of statutory grace. See Exhibit 3 here.
Exhibit 3 is an effort to build something tourist-worthy for the New Orleans tricentennial, which looms just around the corner in 2018. I salute the ambition, idealism and civic swing-for-the-fences this plan represents, but it's a hollow knock. Five reasons (and then some) why I hope this never happens:
1) The World Trade Center, which I prefer to call by its historic name -- The International Trade Mart -- is indeed iconic, which is all the more reason to save it rather than scrap it. Heed this passage from Alonzo Ensenat's 1974 history of this place and its purpose:
"One has only to look toward the head of Canal Street, our main and wide thoroughfare, to see a visible monument to New Orleans' internationalism in the towering International Trade Mart building. ... What made New Orleans the natural soil for such consciousness of the worth and importance of international trade? Obviously it was necessity born of its very geographical location. Trade is the lifeblood of New Orleans, and the Mississippi River at its door gave that trade a magic impulse that made New Orleans grow from a humble village on the fringes of the wilderness in the mid-1750s to the modern metropolis it is today."
2) From such noteworthy New Orleans names as Archie Jewell (whose three-minute Toastmaster speech launched the World Trade Center movement in the city), Rudolph Hecht, William Zetzmann, Edward LeBreton, Theodore Brent, Clay Shaw, Hale and Lindy Boggs, deLesseps Morrison, Andrew Higgins, Alton Ochsner, Bud Walther and many more, this trade movement flourished. It was Mrs. Boggs, in fact, who contributed the early mission statement: "Dedicated to world peace, trade and understanding" long before Messrs. Lowe and Costello made their musical marks with a similar credo.
3) Deep into its mission, when the earlier Trade Mart building had been sold to a New York investment group and leased back, the organization began facing financial challenges when sublessees began flocking to finer accommodations in the Central Business District. Led by board President Lloyd Cobb, the group packaged city, state, port and railroad properties in a blighted riverfront area to form the basis of a $17 million tax-exempt bond issue under the city's bonding authority. By pursuing tax-exempt bonds, this nimble public-private partnership figured out a frugal way to bring back tenants in a new building at lease rates lower than competing CBD buildings. The structure was built at-cost by Memphis-based builder Bloomfield & Associates on the condition that Bloomfield receive a 25 percent share of lease proceeds. What a concept! What a public-private partnership concept! What a pre-New Markets Tax Credit concept!
4) The International Trade Mart was christened in conjunction with the 250th birthday of New Orleans on April 30, 1968, amid great civic pride and fanfare. Now, less than 50 years later the plan is to plow it asunder so some silly new sculpture can replace it on the same site for the tricentennial? No, don't do it. Especially considering that ...
5) Quoting Ensenat, "It is a beautiful building, designed by famed architect Edward Stone and now stands as a distinguishing symbol at the entrance to New Orleans harbor, just as Sugar Loaf Mountain does as the entrance to Rio de Janeiro or the Statue of Liberty when entering New York harbor." True, its height has long since been eclipsed by taller CBD towers, and the World Trade Center organization now resides in swankier climes in One Canal Place, but consider, too, that it was one of the International Trade Mart fathers -- Clay Shaw, before history cast him a dreadful curveball -- who successfully lobbied for the iconic Rivergate Convention Center that now is also gone with the wind.
Ironic, isn't it, that those who worked to establish New Orleans as a major trade, convention and tourism capital will now be ignominiously honored with the removal of their legacy? It took terrorists to remove the iconic World Trade Center towers in New York, but even before those towers were a gleam in David Rockefeller's eyes in the 1950s, these proud New Orleanians were making plans to propel the city into a new era of greatness.
The same founders of the World Trade Center movement in New Orleans coined a plausible idea in 1939 to stage a Pan-American Fair in New Orleans in 1942, the 450th anniversary of the landmark Columbus voyage. The leaders, among them Mr. Hecht and Mr. Zetzmann, were lobbying the Louisiana Legislature for $1 million that in theory would be matched by $5 million federal dollars to pull the grand event off. The idea reached as far as Secretary of State Cordell Hull, according to Ensenat, when World War II's ugly head ended the entire idea.
Today, this proposed tricentennial plan feels like little more than heartless hegemony on the part of the current crop of convention leaders, a crass commercialism that drapes itself in a faux public art tribute with little regard for its own significant local history. At the expense of more than $200 million in state funding? Really?
I understand the arguments about the International Trade Mart's unusual shape not lending itself to many contemporary hotel and office floor plans and, hence, the inability to forge a successful private redevelopment of the building so far. But heck, for the kind of money we're looking at spending here, the International Trade Mart could be made to be a Taj Mahal, one even fit for a future New Orleans City Hall. Cannot a public-private partnership today come close, even remotely close, to the wise frugality shown by the group that first built this iconic building?
I like Alan Maclachlan's idea (see comments in The Lens) of a crescent piece of public art. It's perfect, even should it amount to a relatively frugal but spectacular topping of the International Trade Mart with a brilliantly lit crescent as its crown. If the hegemonists must have their way and the structure must be demolished, one would hope that at least the dream of the Pan-American Fair would finally be born as a permanent tribute to the "world peace through trade" idealism these founding trade visionaries sought.
I spoke with a New Orleans CVB leader the other day who, though he admitted a personal preference for seeing the International Trade Mart remain above ground, concedes that Mayor Mitch Landrieu has been lobbying for demolition and a clean slate for some time – and the clean slate crowd seems to be winning. History only matters in New Orleans, it seems, when the pedigree in question can claim Jackson, Lafitte, d'Iberville, Bienville or Napoleon as contemporaries.
Meanwhile, the $5.5 billion-a-year New Orleans tourism drumbeat marches on, crushing significant modern architecture in its path ...
Though it matters little (elsewhere in this debate), on a personal note I recall riding in a yellow school bus with my brown bag of sandwiches and banana on an exciting field trip that led to the Musée Conti Wax Museum, the Cabildo and the International Trade Mart in the very year that the Trade Mart opened. Standing at the observation level of the Trade Mart and staring awestruck at the grandeur of the river and the city, I could never have contemplated anyone at any time wanting this compass-shaped marvel to go away. With the perspective of several more decades, my needle still can't contemplate such a grave end.
Recent Comments