The story of the Cottage on Tchoupitoulas is a microcosm of the human experience in New Orleans — in all its manifestations, triumphant and tragic, good and bad, exceptional and quotidian — and its relationship to this subtropical deltaic environment. This book tells the history of the site and environs of this historical house — that is, the historical geography of how this space and this structure came into its current form. Placing the story of this building within the history of New Orleans entails some nuance, because the structure does not have one clear, documented construction date. It was built in at least three increments and moved at least three times. The exterior wings, galleries and ornamental façade date to the 1850s; the structural core, floor, roof, and chimneys date mostly to the early 1830s; and parts of the timber wall frames and other “bones” of the building date to the late 1700s, hewn from cypress trees probably already growing when Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville, who was responsible for establishing a French colony in Louisiana, sailed by.
To visit the Cottage on Tchoupitoulas is to connect materially with a silent witness of centuries of history in what is now Uptown New Orleans, where it stands as the sole remaining structural landmark of the area’s plantation era, and the oldest building in the vicinity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Campanella, associate dean for research with the Tulane University School of Architecture, is the author of 13 books and hundreds of articles on New Orleans-area geography, history, architecture, culture, and related topics. The only two-time winner of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year Award, Campanella has also received the Louisiana Literary Award, the Historic New Orleans Collection Williams Prize, the Malcolm Heard Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Hannah Arendt Prize for Scholarship in the Public Interest, the Tulane Honors Professor of the Year Award, and the Association of American Geographers’ Media Achievement Award. In 2016, the Government of France named Campanella as Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, and in 2019, the State of Louisiana awarded him the 20th annual Louisiana Writer Award. Campanella lives in New Orleans with his wife Marina and son Jason.
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