New Orleans apartment building was born from an 1880s yellow fever epidemic

Summer in New Orleans, it is fair to say, isn’t the kindest of seasons. 

There is the heat. There are the mosquitoes. There is the near-constant tropical threat of The Big One. 

But as difficult as summers in New Orleans can be today, they are nothing compared with those in the mid-1800s, which inflicted on the city’s populace such annual plagues as yellow fever and cholera.

Today, we sag in summer. Our forebears, they suffered. 

As proof, one needs to look no further than the myriad old buildings constructed to care for the deluge of orphans created by the relentless scourges of summertimes past. 

Just such a building — a three-story brick structure designed in 1887 by noted local architect Thomas O. Sully — recently caught the eye of loyal reader Jimmie Papia.

“My daughter just moved into her new apartment building … at 3000 Magazine St.,” Papia writes. “There is a little history about it on their website, but I was wondering if you could give us (more)?”

Going way back

For the full answer, we’ll have to hurl ourselves down a history rabbit hole to the brutal summer of 1853. 

It was a tense time in New Orleans. The election of Abraham Lincoln was still seven years off, as were the secession of Louisiana and other Southern states just months later. The steady drumbeat of war, however, was already echoing in the distance. 

As if that wasn’t unnerving enough, the summer of ’53 also brought with it what is regarded as the single deadliest outbreak of yellow fever in the city’s history. 

New Orleanians of the time weren’t strangers to outbreaks. With its relentless heat and abysmal sanitation, the city was at the time a near-perfect breeding ground for disease (and mosquitoes, although they weren’t discovered to be the culprit for another half-century). Consequently, the city had suffered through near-annual outbreaks for decades.

But the outbreak of ‘53 was different. By the time it had run its course, some 8,000 souls had perished — nearly 8% of the population. 

The city’s gravediggers couldn’t keep up. On one particularly black Sunday, people died with such rapidity that some 64 unburied corpses reportedly piled up at a local cemetery overnight. 

With all that death came another problem: orphans, and lots of them. 

Planning for care

To care for them, a group of 25 Protestant women organized on Sept. 16, 1853, for the purpose of establishing a proper orphanage. Their chosen location: on Seventh Street, just off Magazine on the cusp of the Garden District and Irish Channel. 

The Protestant Orphans Home, commonly referred to early on as the Seventh Street Orphanage, would serve the city for the next 119 years. 

Initially, they operated out of a rented cottage on the site as they built a more permanent two-story brick structure. An infirmary was added in 1872. 

But people kept dying, creating ever more orphans — and a need for ever more space to house them. 

By April 1887, enough money had been raised through public and private channels to commission Sully to draw up plans for a new purpose-built structure on Magazine. The cornerstone would be laid in November that year, with the building dedicated the following April. 

It would be a beauty, melding Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne styles to create a fortresslike structure boasting ornate brickwork and a striking two-story corbeled arch defining the main entrance. 

On either side of the entrance, towers reached three stories, contributing to the citadel effect. 

Upon its opening, a wing on the building’s east side housed a dormitory for boys, with a tower on that wing’s easternmost end complementing those of the main building. A girls’ wing would be added later on the complex’s western side. 

For the decades that followed, the building served its intended purposes. But with science finally putting an end to the annual yellow fever outbreaks in 1905, the once-urgent need for orphanages in the city waned. 

Changing uses

By the 1950s, the Protestant Orphans Home was still operating, although its mission had shifted to care for neglected children. In the early 1960s, it shifted yet again, becoming a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children.

For a brief time starting in 1969, it was renamed the Variety Children’s Home following a $250,000 pledge from the local chapter of Variety International, a social and charitable organization of show-biz types led at the time by local movie theater magnate Teddy Solomon. 

It would eventually close for good in 1972. That same year, the girls’ dormitory wing was torn down, although the original Sully-designed building remained. 

In the years that followed, it would serve as home to an architectural firm and, for a few years, the Morton Goldberg Auction House. 

In 1979, the Historic District Landmark Commission officially declared it a city landmark. 

Nearly a decade later, developer Brian Gibbs plowed almost $3 million into renovating the building into 28 apartments, with an emphasis on its architectural details. 

That’s the apartment building in which Papia’s kid hangs her hat. 

Its all-too-fitting name: The Orphanage. 

Sources: The Times-Picayune archive; Historic District Landmark Commission; Society of Architectural Historians.

Know of a New Orleans building worth profiling in this column, or just curious about one? Contact Mike Scott at [email protected].