Mister Moore’s neighborhood
The Warehouse District, once literally nothing but industrial warehouses, has grown to become a hub of great award-winning restaurants. Julia Street, lined with galleries, has replaced the French Quarter as New Orleans’ art district. It is also “museum central,” with the Ogden Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum, the Children’s Museum, the Civil War Museum, and the massive and ever-expanding World War II Museum.
In the midst of the now thriving neighborhood is a weird city block of brightly colored but seemingly unfinished buildings and a nonfunctioning fountain in front of a nonfunctioning clock tower. The area looks like a movie set, and in fact it has been—most recently for one of the Planet of the Apes sequels.
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Address Lafayette Street at Commerce Street, New Orleans, LA 70130 | Tip There is a smaller and more “normal” tribute to the Irish of New Orleans in the form of the Irish Cultural Museum (933 Conti St) in the French Quarter. Beginning in the 1700s, New Orleans received many Irish immigrants. During the Potato Famine (1845 and 1852) thousands arrived in the port city and provided cheap construction labor. Nearly 8000 died digging the New Basin Canal, which was later filled in, during the 1950s.
It is actually the Piazza d’Italia, an award-winning tribute to the Italian immigrants of New Orleans, designed by the well-known postmodern architect Charles Moore. Moore worked collaboratively with three architects from the Perez firm in New Orleans to conceive an abstract public fountain in the shape of the Italian peninsula surrounded by multiple colonnades, a clock tower, and a Roman temple.
Completed in 1978, the Piazza d’Italia debuted to widespread acclaim. It was intended to be a “surprise plaza” like those found in Mediterranean cities, where pedestrians suddenly emerge from narrow passage ways to find an open square lined with cafes and shops. However, rapid deterioration set in because the surrounding area never blossomed. Many New Orleanians have neither seen nor ever heard of the square. Others refer to it as the first “postmodern ruin.”
There are ongoing efforts to revive the plaza. In 2013, the mayor announced $280,000 in funds to help restore the Piazza d’Italia to the gathering place it was always intended to be. For now, it remains a vision of a city that seems to have sprung from the mind of Salvador Dali or Max Ernst.
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