Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans (18 page)

On October 23, 1811, when Micaela was sixteen, she was married to Joseph Xavier Celestin
Delfau de Pontalba, her twenty-year-old cousin. He was the son of Baron Joseph Xavier Delfau de Pontalba
of Mont L’Évêque, France. Celestin, or Tin-Tin, as he was called, came over from France for the wedding, having never seen the bride before. Both Celestin and Micaela were heirs to enormous fortunes as well as to a barony, and nothing else mattered. The wedding had been arranged by their parents.

The young couple went to Europe on their honeymoon, accompanied by both mothers. If ever a couple was suited to such an arrangement, it was Micaela and Tin-Tin. Micaela had been educated by the Ursuline nuns and was therefore very sheltered. Never “pretty,” she was strong willed and intelligent. At the time of her wedding, she was childish in her dress and habits. She wore her hair in pigtails until the day she married and played with dolls on her wedding day. Celestin was her exact opposite. He was handsome (prettier than the bride, some said) but a weakling, who had been spoiled by his mother and ruled with an iron hand by his father. Once again, in marriage, he was to be dominated by a determined, headstrong personality: Micaela.

Celestin’s father had been born in Louisiana and educated in France. Like Almonester, he was a real estate genius who had accumulated a fortune in rental property.

Micaela loved the activity and gaiety of Paris far better than the quiet of Château Mont l’Évêque, which Celestin’s father had built and considered the family home. During the early years of their marriage, Micaela had three sons: Celestin, Alfred, and Gaston. When she was pregnant for her first son, her husband requested that she sign a contract, a “project of testament,” (prepared, no doubt, by his father), which put claims on her fortune in case she died in childbirth. She would not sign it. Arguments followed. This was the beginning of the end of the young Pontalbas’s marriage. Money and property had always kept the two families wary of each other.

Twice Celestin left Micaela. In 1831, she sailed to Louisiana without him and wrote that she was beginning proceedings for a divorce. Later, she returned to France, and her son, Celestin, now seventeen, ran away from military school to live with his mother. Hearing this,
the Baron, his grandfather, now eighty-one, dropped the boy from his
will. In an attempt at reconciliation, Micaela drove to Mont l’Évêque on October 18, 1834. She lodged in a “little château reserved for the use of visitors.”

The day after she arrived, the Baron, waiting until she was alone, went into the lodging, walked upstairs and into her room, and locked the door. Immediately, he shot three balls into her chest, followed by two more, which missed. While he was priming the pistol, Micaela found the strength to open the door and run to the floor below, where she collapsed. The Baron, thinking her dead, closed himself in the room once again and fired two shots into his heart, which proved fatal.

The scandal rocked Paris and New Orleans. Micaela, now Baroness de Pontalba, having inherited the title, had received four chest wounds, two of which were serious, and had lost two fingers of her left hand trying to protect herself; yet this incredible woman lived to the age of seventy-eight and was yet to accomplish her most memorable undertaking. In 1848, she returned to New Orleans to begin working on her buildings.

The buildings were designed by James Gallier
. But Gallier and the Baroness disagreed, and in 1849, she turned over the contract to a builder named Samuel Stewart
. The architect Henry Howard
also played a part. The Baroness, Howard said, not altogether satisfied with his drawings, called at his office to ask him to make a complete set of plans for the building. He asked for $500. She refused. He finally agreed to a fee of $120 without specifications.

The buildings were constructed of dark red brick with cast iron-decorated balconies, probably the first in New Orleans. The design for the iron work was done by Waldemar Talen
, who had also done the iron work for Nottaway Plantation
on River Road
.

The contract for the buildings called for sixteen houses fronting on the Place d’Armes
on St. Peter Street for a price of $156,000 using Howard’s plans with Gallier’s specifications. Micaela designed the A-P (Almonester-Pontalba) monogram that can be seen in the cast iron railings and was assisted by Talen, who made the drawings. When the uptown side was finished in the fall of 1850, the Baroness and her two sons moved into the third house from Decatur Street. In 1851, the downtown side was finished at a cost of $146,000. She had talked the builders into accepting $10,000 less on the second contract.

The Pontalba apartments.

The city undertook the renovations of the Place d’Armes
, contrac-ting for an iron fence, which still surrounds the square.

When the St. Ann Street apartments were complete, there were sixteen buildings on each side of the Square, with party walls between them, built to be used as stores downstairs and handsome residences above, as they still are used today. Each house had an entrance on the street leading to an inside staircase and to a courtyard and service area in the rear. The stores were generally rented to different tenants than the houses and had their own entrances. The second floor consisted of a
salon
with guillotine windows opening onto a balcony overlooking the Square and a dining room. The third floor was designed for family bedrooms, and the attic for servants’ rooms.

To the Baroness’s great good fortune, Jenny Lind visited the city just when the buildings were completed in 1851. P. T. Barnum, the circus impresario, was her sponsor; he had arranged for her to do thirteen concerts in New Orleans. She arrived in New Orleans from Cuba on the steamer
Falcon,
and as her ship approached the wharf, cheering crowds, estimated at ten thousand people, gathered to see the famous singer. One of the Pontalba houses had been reserved for her use, complete with the silver name plate on the door. They traveled there in carriages from the wharf as the crowds pressed around them. Jenny Lind
was delighted with her apartment, and she received applause every time she stepped out onto the balcony. After Miss Lind departed, Baroness Pontalba had the furniture from her apartment sold at an auction, bringing in a total of $3,060.50.

Jackson Square

While the second set of row houses was still under construction, improvements were begun on the Place d’Armes
. In 1851, the name of the Square was changed to Jackson Square
in honor of the hero of the Battle of New Orleans
. In 1840, Jackson had visited New Orleans and laid the cornerstone where a monument to him was to be erected. A decade later, spurred on by improvements all around the Square, the Jackson Monument Association
renewed its efforts
and legislature appropriated $10,000 toward the project. In 1866, Clark
Mills’s
equestrian statue of Jackson was unveiled.

Until the Baroness Pontalba’s apartments were built, the Cabildo and the Presbytère had only two floors. The old Spanish roofs leaked and needed repairs, so the City Council decided to add a third story to the two buildings with a Mansard roof and dormers. Flatboat wood was used and can still be seen in the construction. This addition gave the entire Square a more balanced effect.

In March 1852, the Baroness and her two sons left New Orleans for France, never to return. She died in Paris in 1874. Her former husband outlived her by four years. They are both buried at Château Mont l’Évêque, near Senlis, France.

In 1921, the Pontalba heirs, seventeen in number, sold the buildings on St. Ann Street for $68,000 to William Ratcliff Irby, who willed it to the Louisiana State Museum
. In 1920, the St. Peter Street building was sold to Danziger, Dreyfous, and Runkel for $66,000. They sold it in 1930 to the Pontalba Building Museum Association for $200,000. The Association turned it over to the city.

The Pontalba Apartments are often called the first apartment houses in the United States, but there is no proof of this claim. They are, however, beautifully designed and planned, an outstanding work of architecture and one of the nation’s foremost historic monuments.

The Garden District

The land grant given Bienville when he was governor was an enormous territory bounded by the river and what is now Claiborne Avenue, Canal Street, and Nine Mile Point, the bend in the river beyond Carrollton in what is today Jefferson Parish.

Shortly after the Company of the Indies had made the grant, however, Bienville was notified that such grants were no longer to be made to governors except if the land was used as a vegetable garden. Bienville immediately had a portion of the concession (from Common Street to Felicity Street) planted with vegetables, which became the reduced size of his plantation. His house was near the present intersection of Magazine and Common Streets.

Later, when Bienville left the colony for France, as we have seen, he gave his property to the Jesuit priests, who raised sugarcane in the area where the Jesuit Church is today on Baronne Street. In 1763, when the Jesuits were expelled, their property was confiscated and sold at auction in parcels. This is how the piece of land we today call the Central Business District came to be owned by Don Beltram (Bertrand) Gravier when the fire devastated the Vieux Carré in 1788.
His subdivision of the property created the city’s first formally developed
suburb. Originally Ville Gravier, it was later named Faubourg Ste. Marie and then Faubourg St. Mary.

German families had settled to farm the rest of Bienville’s original claim, but many left in the wakes of flood and fevers, headed for healthier cities. By 1740, many segments of this land had been sold in tracts, which became riverfront plantations belonging to the families d’Hauterive
, Broutin
, Darby
, Carrière
, and Livaudais
. These plantations became, in time, three communities called Nuns, Lafayette, and Livaudais. In 1832, the three communities were incorporated by an act of the state legislature into the City of Lafayette
. Eleven years later, the City of Lafayette took in a small settlement on its upper edges, the Faubourg de Lassaiz
, extending its boundaries as far as Toleldano Street. Finally, in 1852, Lafayette ceased to exist as a municipality and became the Fourth District of the City of New Orleans. The City of Lafayette, in its brief life span, became a gracious area of antebellum homes as well as a hard working, commercial riverfront territory.

In 1816, there was a crevasse in the river at the McCarty Plantation, several miles upriver from the Livaudais property in the City of Lafayette. Most of the plantations were flooded from the site of the crevasse to the city of New Orleans, including the property of Fran
ç
ois de Livaudais. Livaudais had married Celeste Marigny, daughter of Philippe de Marigny, the wealthiest man in Louisiana and one of the wealthiest in America. The Livaudais-Marigny wedding represented the merger of two great fortunes. After their marriage, the young husband and wife began the construction of a castle (on the site that would later be St. Thomas between Sixth and Washington), resembling those of their French ancestors. By 1825, however, they separated, and Madame Livaudais moved to Paris, where she was f
ê
ted by King Louis Philippe and his court.

In the settlement with Livaudais, she had received the Livaudais plantation, which extended from First Street to Ninth Street (now Harmony Street) and from the river to St. George Street (now LaSalle Street). She sold it to a group of entrepreneurs for $500,000. At once, the plantation was laid out into streets and lots. All she kept was the tract with her mansion on it, which was one block wide from Washington Avenue to Sixth Street and from the river to LaSalle. Since her mansion was so enormous, the blocks of the tract were cut wider all the way from the river to LaSalle, in order to conform to the width of that house on that one block.

Over a period of time, this unfinished castle was used as a residence for members of her family, a ballroom, a plaster factory, and a refuge for two old female hermits. It is called the haunted house of Lafayette. In 1863, it was finally demolished.

The lots of the newly dissected Livaudais plantation provided Lafayette City with river frontage, good residential sites, and silt-enriched soil in which anything would grow. Flowers bloomed year round, attracting wealthy Americans and even a few daring Creoles in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The area soon became known as the Garden District. It was a quadrangle bounded by Jackson and Louisiana Avenues and by Magazine Street and St. Charles Avenue. Originally, Apollo (Carondelet) and Josephine Streets were included as well.