New Orleans - CBD: Ogden Museum of Southern Art - Howard Memorial Library and Robert E. Lee Monument
The Howard Memorial Library, at 615 Orleans Avenue, was designed posthumously based upon an enlarged design Louisiana native Henry Hobson Richardson had submitted for the Hoyt Memorial Library in East Saginaw, Michigan. The massive Richardsonian Romanesque brick and sandstone building served as a library for over 50 years, ceasing operations in 1939. Richardson's sole design in the south, it purchased by the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and renamed the Patrick F. Taylor Library. The library, expected to house the museum's 18th and 19th century art collections, was scheduled to open in 2005, but a combination of legal obstacles and Hurricane Katrina have pushed that back.
The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans, is an art museum with a particular focus on the visual arts and culture of the American South within the context of the region's history and culture. The museum's
Stephen Goldring Hall, the Howard Memorial Library (renamed the Patrick F. Taylor Library), and the Clementine Hunter Wing. The museum is built off of the collection of Roger Ogden, a Louisiana businessman and philanthropist. By the mid-1980s, Ogden had collected a full range of paintings that recounted the history and changing aesthetics of painting in Louisiana.
Concrete plans for the Museum's future were laid down in late 1994 when the public announcement of the founding of The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, built upon a gift of works from the Ogden Collection to the University of New Orleans Foundation. By 1999, the museum's five-story Stephen Goldring Hall was under construction and its historic library was under restoration.
The library's reading room, a grandly scaled circular rotunda, measuring 40-feet high and 40-feet in diameter, is one of the most impressive late 19th century interior spaces in Louisiana. It features a a massive hooded fireplace, crowned by n elaborate oak hammerbeam vaulted ceiling. When viewed directly from below, the beams curve up and merge in an intricate radial pattern, with 17 hammerbeams jutting dramatically into the room, each terminating with a distinctively carved head of a mythical creature.
The Robert E. Lee Monument (far left), a 60-foot marble doric column, topped by a 12-foot state of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, sits in the center of Lee Circle near the Pontchartrain Expressway. The 250-foot diameter circular plot of land, encircled by St. Charles Avenue in its 900 and 1000 blocks was named after Robert E. Lee by the New Orleans City Council in 1877. Dedicated on February 23, 1884, the monument was a joint effort between John Roy, who architected the column, and Alexander Doyle, who sculpted the statue.
Four sets of staircases, aligned with the major compass points of the circle, ascend to the top of the base of the Lee Monument. built of granite slabs, the base rises in four steps to support the fluted, capped by a marble drum on which the statue rests. On the four corners of the square base of the monument are large classical cast-iron urns, held by tripod supports, which contain ornamental shrubbery.
Howard Memorial Library National Register #91000343 (1991)
Lee Monument National Register #91000254 (1991)
New Orleans - CBD: Ogden Museum of Southern Art - Howard Memorial Library and Robert E. Lee Monument
The Howard Memorial Library, at 615 Orleans Avenue, was designed posthumously based upon an enlarged design Louisiana native Henry Hobson Richardson had submitted for the Hoyt Memorial Library in East Saginaw, Michigan. The massive Richardsonian Romanesque brick and sandstone building served as a library for over 50 years, ceasing operations in 1939. Richardson's sole design in the south, it purchased by the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and renamed the Patrick F. Taylor Library. The library, expected to house the museum's 18th and 19th century art collections, was scheduled to open in 2005, but a combination of legal obstacles and Hurricane Katrina have pushed that back.
The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans, is an art museum with a particular focus on the visual arts and culture of the American South within the context of the region's history and culture. The museum's
Stephen Goldring Hall, the Howard Memorial Library (renamed the Patrick F. Taylor Library), and the Clementine Hunter Wing. The museum is built off of the collection of Roger Ogden, a Louisiana businessman and philanthropist. By the mid-1980s, Ogden had collected a full range of paintings that recounted the history and changing aesthetics of painting in Louisiana.
Concrete plans for the Museum's future were laid down in late 1994 when the public announcement of the founding of The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, built upon a gift of works from the Ogden Collection to the University of New Orleans Foundation. By 1999, the museum's five-story Stephen Goldring Hall was under construction and its historic library was under restoration.
The library's reading room, a grandly scaled circular rotunda, measuring 40-feet high and 40-feet in diameter, is one of the most impressive late 19th century interior spaces in Louisiana. It features a a massive hooded fireplace, crowned by n elaborate oak hammerbeam vaulted ceiling. When viewed directly from below, the beams curve up and merge in an intricate radial pattern, with 17 hammerbeams jutting dramatically into the room, each terminating with a distinctively carved head of a mythical creature.
The Robert E. Lee Monument (far left), a 60-foot marble doric column, topped by a 12-foot state of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, sits in the center of Lee Circle near the Pontchartrain Expressway. The 250-foot diameter circular plot of land, encircled by St. Charles Avenue in its 900 and 1000 blocks was named after Robert E. Lee by the New Orleans City Council in 1877. Dedicated on February 23, 1884, the monument was a joint effort between John Roy, who architected the column, and Alexander Doyle, who sculpted the statue.
Four sets of staircases, aligned with the major compass points of the circle, ascend to the top of the base of the Lee Monument. built of granite slabs, the base rises in four steps to support the fluted, capped by a marble drum on which the statue rests. On the four corners of the square base of the monument are large classical cast-iron urns, held by tripod supports, which contain ornamental shrubbery.
Howard Memorial Library National Register #91000343 (1991)
Lee Monument National Register #91000254 (1991)