Southern comfort: the Garden District of New Orleans, 1800-1900

S. Frederick Starr, Robert S. Brantley

MIT Press, Dec 18, 1989 - Architecture - 308 pages

This pioneering study of the opulent Garden District of New Orleans is a fascinating and entertaining account of how immigrant merchants and craftsmen from throughout the United States and abroad combined efforts to create one of America's first and most elegant suburbs, a lavish and enduring symbol of southern comfort in the Victorian era.

Southern Comfort is the first study of New Orleans to relate economic and social movements to the architectural face of the city, unveiling the process by which a predominantly Yankee suburb became a profoundly southern community Using New Orleans' unique notarial archive - a detailed written record of issues relating to real estate and architecture there - Starr skillfully creates an active interchange with the people who built the District.

Starr introduces the architects, builders, craftsmen, servants, and retainers and recounts the colorful details of their lives. He provides a highly readable portrait of the intertwined careers of two gifted architects who worked in the Garden District - Henry Howard and Lewis Reynolds - the former among the shrewdest practitioners of the architecture of flattery. And his portrayal of the career and clientage of Thomas Sully presents a series of important discoveries.

Southern Comfort shows how Anglo Saxon newcomers to the Crescent City capitalized on the boom of "King Cotton' and the possibilities posed by improved urban transportation to create a semirural village within the teeming Mississippi River metropolis. The text includes evocative photographs by Robert Brantley, as well as documentary illustrations from the rich archives of the Historic New Orleans Collection that are published here for the first time.

S. Frederick Starr is President of Oberlin College. From 1982 to 1984 he was Scholar in Residence at The Historic New Orleans Collection, and he is the author of New Orleans Unmasqued. He has also written numerous books in the field of Soviet affairs and on topics ranging from art and architecture to jazz.

About the author

S. Frederick Starr is chair of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the author or editor of many books on New Orleans and Louisiana, including "Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn" (University Press of Mississippi).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Southern comfort: the Garden District of New Orleans, 1800-1900
• Authors: S. Frederick Starr, Robert S. Brantley
• Photographs by: Robert S. Brantley
• Illustrated by: Robert S. Brantley
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: MIT Press, 1989
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Nov 3, 2007
• ISBN: 0262192837, 9780262192835
• Length: 308 pages
• Subjects: Architecture / History / General; History / United States / State & Local / General; History / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV)