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Commercial Building (New Orleans Canal and Banking Company; Bank of Louisiana)

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1843, James H. Dakin. 301–307 Magazine St.
  • (Photograph by Dell Upton)
  • (Photograph by Karen Kingsley)

This finely proportioned three-story corner building faced with light gray granite originally housed a bank and five stores. Archival drawings indicate that the superb granite Doric portico with fluted columns and a frieze of triglyphs and metopes, as well as the frame of the window directly above it, came from the previous structure on this site, a bank built in 1832 by architects J. Reynolds and J. M. Zacherie. Beginning in the 1830s, granite facings, a fashion said to have originated in Boston, became popular in New Orleans. Here, where subsidence problems usually confine the use of granite to piers at ground level, this building is unusual.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Karen Kingsley and Lake Douglas
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Data

What's Nearby

Board of Trade and Board of Trade Plaza (New Orleans Produce Exchange)
St. James Hotel (Banks Arcade)
Whitney National Bank Safe Deposit Vault
One Shell Square
Hilton Hotel/New Orleans St. Charles Avenue (Masonic Temple)

Citation

Karen Kingsley and Lake Douglas, "Commercial Building (New Orleans Canal and Banking Company; Bank of Louisiana)", [New Orleans, Louisiana], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/LA-02-OR111.

Print Source

buildings of new orleans book

Buildings of New Orleans, Karen Kingsley and Lake Douglas. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018, 138-139.

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