This building was owned by a very prominent man in the City. He had a very successful business, was deeply involved in civic ventures to promote New Orleans, had a wife and three sons and two daughters.
This building flooded up to where the black bar is on the wall. The man died. His wife had preceded him in death. Their beautiful home near Lake Pontchartrain was in a rare area that did not flood. The home had to be sold while the market was good as 80 per cent of the houses in New Orleans had been ruined by floodwaters.
One son, the middle son, I believe, gutted this building and began to set up his own business of restoring the houses in New Orleans. One daughter, who was a writer for me when I was editor of a newspaper, flew in from Pennsylvania, took the bull by the horns, went out on the street and found a Mexican(remember we had few people in the City at the time) who said he would paint the house for a song. He did. The house went on the market and before anyone could turn around, it sold. It sold with everything the man and his wife had accumulated in their 50+ years of marriage. The buyer wanted to move in immediately!
Overnight, with moving vans and the help of friends, the children loaded everything from the house and attic into the vans, trucks and cars and moved it into this building that had been their father's very successful place of business.
Slowly, very slowly, they are going through it all. They meet here (they call it "the clubhouse") and sift through photo albums, chandeliers, thousands of books and everything that made their house near the Lake a home.
On this particular night, they hosted a political party amidst the gutted ceilings, torn out walls and their mother's furniture. Their candidate is running for District Attorney of New Orleans.
WHAT A SPIRIT! God love them.