Boyd Cruise painted 936 Calle de San Pedro in 1941.
936 Calle de San Pedro
This story is a classic example of falling down a rabbit hole. I parked in the “Red P” parking lot (IYKYK) at Rampart and Conti one morning, to work the information desk at the Cabildo. I walked up Calle de San Pedro, as the Spanish Colonials would have said St. Peter Street. When I came to the 900 block, I encountered some nice holiday lights at 936, including Mr. Bingle. I took some pictures and headed home.
Fast forward to after the holidays, and working on the current podcast series featuring the paintings of Boyd Cruise. It turned out, Cruise had painted 936 St. Peter. It didn’t feel like enough material for a podcast episode, but would certainly be a fun story.
Excavations
As you can see, 936 St. Peter is a simple cottage on a small lot. When I did a basic web search on the cottage, I found a fascinating story about excavations by the University of New Orleans Archeology Department at the location. Some backstory: St. Peter and Rampart was the location of the city’s first cemetery, one that pre-dates St. Louis Number One. The property owner of the house at that location found human remains when doing renovations. They halted the work and called in UNO. The archeologists were again called in for 936:
What stood out most during the excavation of the privy was the abundance of animal remains, especially the number of elements from skulls. When a rough count was taken of the entire assemblage, the privy feature was found to contain a total of 147 Caprine (goat or sheep) skulls.
Well, OK, it wasn’t human remains, but still. The article explains that the cottage was used at one point in the 1860s to extract goat brains for re-sale. It’s an incredible story.
The painting
Back to the cottage and Cruise. The building went up in the 1840s. Cruise visualized the house around 1850. Here’s the THNOC caption:
Facade view of a creole cottage at 936 St. Peter Street in the Vieux Carre. The building has Corinthian pilasters, green shutters and a single dormer on the roof. The time period depicted is ca. 1850 and shows a man and woman wearing the dress of the day, an African American wood hauler, and a boy with newspaper in front of residence.
They forgot the cat in the upstairs window! How rude! As with many of Cruise’s paintings, he adds people on the street out front. The lady on the left appears to be bundled up for chilly weather. The gentleman caller carries a bouquet of flowers. A white boy holds a newspaper on the right. It’s unclear if he’s bringing a single paper to the house or if he’s selling papers. A black man hauls a cart of wood down the street. His lack of a coat is inconsistent with the dress of the white adults, but there are a number of possible explanations. A very-regal orange cat observes the scene from the dormer window.
The house displays “130” for its address. Prior to 1895, street addresses were assigned per house, not per block. So, the Number 1 St. Peter would be the Arsenal, behind the Cabildo. The numbers incremented from there. After 1895, address numbering shifted to blocks, hence its present 936 address.
Podcast 46 features a Boyd Cruise painting of a Creole cottage at 707 Dumaine Street.
707 Dumaine Street by Boyd Cruise
Alvik Boyd Cruise painted the cottage at 707 Dumaine Street in 1941. Notarial documents list Rue Dumaine, the “Main Street,” as the “Street of Shops.” This painting features a one-story Creole cottage. It’s not a shotgun.
1880s sketch of the 701 block of Dumaine Street, courtesy THNOC.
A casual passer-by might mistake a Creole cottage for a shotgun double. While both have two front doors, the cottage is a single dwelling. A shotgun double contains rooms that connect front-to-back. A cottage such as 707 Dumaine Street contains four rooms, two in the front, facing the street, then two in the rear. The gates on either side connect the cottage with its neighbors. The flat roof design of these cottages remains on 707. This was the original Spanish Colonial design, but many of these cottages were re-fitted with angled roofs. The total rainfall in New Orleans created problems for flat roofs. Water puddled on the roof, rotting the wood.
The People
Cruise painted three people in his scene of the cottage. On the left, a Black woman looks out from the gate to the street. She’s obviously a #writingprompt. Given Cruise’s preference for antebellum scenes, she is likely enslaved. It’s possible that she lives there at the behest of her master, who keeps her in a nonconsensual relationship. With wife and family back on the plantation, many white men kept enslaved women in town, for their dalliances.
It’s possible the Black woman is household staff for a family living in the house. Or, perhaps she is a Free Person of Color and owns the cottage outright.
The two woman on the right sport French-styled dresses common in the 1850s. They wear jackets over their dresses. Cruise envisions them in the cooler temps of Fall or Winter.
The Architect
This cottage was designed by Architect, Engineer, Surveyor, and Scoundrel (he was a contemporary of the Lafittes), Barthélemy Lafon.
Podcast 44 features a Boyd Cruise painting of “The Levee” on the Mississippi River.
“The Levee” by Boyd Cruise
Alvik Boyd Cruise painted this exciting and busy waterfront scene in 1959. While THNOC dates the setting as 1859 (probably a typo from the actual date the artist created it), the inclusion of the Steamboat Fashion puts it at 1865-1866. While so many of Cruise’s paintings focus on particular homes and buildings, this one casts a wider net. Instead of capturing the feel of a particular building in time for a Historic American Building Survey, the artist re-creates the activity in the port, mid-19th century.
This painting shows activity in the second-largest port in the US in the 1800s. What’s particularly interesting is that Cruise details the port after the Civil War. When we think of 1865, images of the destruction and horrors of war often come to mind. Many forget that the direct participation of New Orleans in the war ended in 1862. By 1865, the Mississippi was open to riverboat activity from Vicksburg to New Orleans. With the war over, investors contracted shipbuilders to get more boats in the water that would transport cotton from plantations to the port for export.
Cotton
Bales of cotton stand on the dock. They await loading onto ocean-going ships for export. These steamboats brought “raw” cotton from plantations to New Orleans. Those big bales were too bulky for export. So, cotton factors purchased the bales from ship captains. They transported the cotton to industrial pressing plants. Think of a trash compactor in a home kitchen, but on a much larger scale. They returned the compressed bales seen in the painting to the dock. Ocean-going vessels transported those bales up the Atlantic coast and to Europe.
The Historic BK House is a local museum with an incredible story.
Historic BK House by Boyd Cruise
This painting of the Historic BK House was Boyd Cruise’s last painting. He completed it in in 1962.The house is located at 1113 Rue Chartres (across from the Old Ursuline Convent).
Cruise painted numerous houses and buildings in the French Quarter, visualizing how they looked in the 19th Century. While most of Cruise’s works imagined the buildings in the 1850s, this one is post-war. Local auctioneer Joseph LeCarpentier commissioned François Correjolles for the design and James Lambert to build it. LeCarpentier sold the house in 1833. Dominique Lanata, a grocer, acquired the house in 1865. He didn’t live there, renting it out until selling it in 1904. Frances Parkinson Keyes (the “K” in “B-K”) acquired the house in 1945. She restored it and wrote a number of stories and novels while living there.
So, the B-K House has a rich history that naturally captured the imagination of Boyd Cruise. To start off the re-structuring of the NOLA History Guy Podcast, our first four-week series will be paintings by Boyd Cruise. Cruise received a number of commissions through government-sponsored programs. He painted houses and buildings in the Quarter as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) program. What’s fantastic about Cruise is that he took technical drawings and modern photographs of Vieux Carré homes, then time-shifted them back to the 19th Century. He added people and activity, setting the viewer in an earlier New Orleans.
Timing
The specific timing of the view is interesting, in that the scene pre-dates Brevet Major PGT Beauregard’s time as a resident of the house. Beauregard honeymooned here with his second wife in 1860. He lived in the house after the war, until 1868. Beauregard then moved in with his son, René, at 934 Rue Royal. Since New Orleans’ direct involvement in the war ended in 1862, the port was operational and local businesses grew and thrived. Here’s the THNOC caption for the painting:
View of the Beauregard – Keyes house, 1113 Chartres Street in the Vieux Carre. The house has columns, portico and curved side staicases, and ornamental ironwork. Children play at the side of the house, and a fruit vendor and two women are in front of the house.
Let’s start with the children. Two kids play behind the gate to the Historic BK House’s side garden. A third tries to fly a kite on the sidewalk. Two women chat on the sidewalk, just down from the kite boy. What are they discussing? Are they connected to the house, or just passing by? The fruit vendor heads down Rue Chartres, selling his wares. He’s typical of vendors, walking through the streets, offering some convenience to folks who don’t have time to go to the market. Cruise regularly added children and animals to his scenes, providing the viewer with scale. A gentleman is on the first floor, calling on someone in the house. Is it the woman who answered the door? So many writing possibilities in a Boyd Cruise painting!
Podcasts
NOLA History Guy Podcast has a new format for 2025. We’re presenting series of pods with common themes. The first series, for January, 2025, features Boyd Cruise podcasts. You can hear the first in the series, about the Le Pretre Masion (also known as the “Sultan House”), on Dauphine Street and Orleans Avenue.
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