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STAFF NEWS
Changes
Education director Sue Laudeman has retired after nearly 35 years of service to The Collection.
Dorothy Ball has been named editor in the publications department. Lauren Noel has been named marketing associate. Jennifer Navarre has been named reading room associate. Lynn Demeure has been named financial associate.
New Staff
Addie Martin, Dierdre Ellis, and Benjamin Hatfield, volunteers.
In the Community Pamela D. Arceneaux recently presented a variety of New Orleans-themed lectures to passengers aboard Royal Caribbean’s Navigator of the Seas.
Mark Cave served as an advisor to the Jersey Shore Folklife Center in the creation of its oral history program documenting the impact of Superstorm Sandy.
Senior curator Judith Bonner’s article “Modernism and Tradition in Louisiana and the Borderlands” was recently published in the winter 2013 issue of Inside SEMC, the magazine of the Southeastern Museums Conference. She also wrote a review of Romantic Spirits: Nineteenth Century Paintings of the South, The Johnson Collection, by Estill Curtis Pennington, for The Southern Register. She and Pennington co-edited Art and Architecture, volume 21 of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
Alfred E. Lemmon has been inducted into the Order des Palmes Academiques, a French order of chivalry for academics and educational figures. It was originally founded by Napoleon in 1808 to honor distinguished members of the University of Paris. In addition, Lemmon recently received the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’s Lifetime Contribution to the Humanities award.
The Way They Were
Website spotlights history of French Quarter’s finest
Attention, lovers of French Quarter history: your new favorite internet pastime has arrived, bringing to your fingertips a veritable parade of information about the Vieux Carre’s brightest stars.
In January 2012 The Collection launched the Collins C. Diboll Vieux Carre Digital Survey, an online database of historical information—real estate transfer records, photographs, architectural plans, parcel maps, and more—of French Quarter properties. To make the survey more user-friendly and accessible, a new Popular Searches field has been added to the homepage (www.hnoc.org/vcs) to quickly direct users to some of the more notable properties in the Vieux Carre. Now researchers can jump directly to the pages dedicated to landmarks such as St. Louis Cathedral, Jackson Square, Cafe Du Monde, the Louisiana Supreme Court building, Antoine’s, and all of the properties that make up The Historic New Orleans Collection.
Working with THNOC curators and historians, survey staff compiled a list of French Quarter destinations that hold cultural and historical significance to visitors and locals alike. Many of the picks are the subjects of recurring research requests at the Williams Research Center, such as Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop (above), the French Market, Pat O’Brien’s, and the Lalaurie Mansion. Other properties are historically significant to the legacy of the Vieux Carre, such as the New Orleans Police Department’s Eighth District station, which used to house one of the premier banks of 19th-century New Orleans, the Bank of Louisiana (below).
In addition to the new Popular Searches feature, the online survey includes updated information about dozens of lesser-known French Quarter properties. Since the birth of the original Vieux Carre Survey, compiled in the 1960s by the Works Progress Administration, the resource has been maintained by the WPA, the Vieux Carre Commission, and now The Collection. Interns Vassar 'Howorth and Taylor Coley have been assisting THNOC staff in adding more transaction records, as well as transcribing and digitizing information from the original WPA survey. This ongoing work ensures that the architectural, historical, and cultural significance of the Vieux Carre will not only be preserved for years to come but will also be more accessible to a worldwide audience enchanted by its storied streets.
—Matt Farah
The Vieux Carre Digital Survey’s new Popular Searches tab directs users to records and images of French Quarter landmarks such as Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop (THNOC, N-144; negative gift of Boyd Cruise) and the Bank of Louisiana (THNOC, 1979.93), which now houses NOPD’s Eighth District operations.
10	Volume XXX, Number 2 — Spring 2013