New Orleans hit hard by criminals who steal historic architecture
NEW ORLEANS — Professional photographer Keith Calhoun is resigned to the hurricane that destroyed his studio. And he has even reconciled himself to the pilfering of negatives he had stored there. But what has him spitting nails is the recent looting of the fat cypress beams that had kept his Victorian-era building standing — and that would be key to putting it back together.
The beams, or joists — long pieces of dense, 19th-century timber that support roofs and floors and are virtually impossible to purchase new — fetch about $10 a running foot at a salvage yard, Calhoun says. He reckons he lost a truckload of antique wood.
Calhoun suspects that common thieves working his neighborhood wouldn’t be going after antique building materials such as joists, mantels and Victorian shutters unless they were being directed to by someone in the know. The value, he says, is only clear to renovators and aficionados of historic design.
“Not even the cops know this stuff’s valuable — they all live out in the suburbs,” Calhoun says.
Three months after Hurricane Katrina, much of New Orleans is still without electricity, and miles of its historic neighborhoods are virtually deserted. Tens of thousands of unoccupied homes, their doors kicked in by rescue teams, are standing unsecured in thinly patrolled neighborhoods.
In this environment, police say they have begun to see evidence of architectural pilfering, and they suspect out-of-state work crews are the source of much of the looting. At a recent community meeting, New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley said police have begun keeping careful watch on contractor trucks driving through the empty parts of town.
In an area known as Uptown New Orleans, one resident says he returned to find that over a two-day period, a crew had stripped his home of its asbestos shingle roof — an easily damaged building material unavailable new and hard to obtain at wrecking yards. “They salvaged what they could and what they broke they threw in the front yard,” says Michael Sewell, an employee of a shipping firm in New Orleans.
Collins Phillips, a retired fireman who lives in a tattered Victorian house a few blocks from Calhoun, says he returned from exile in Atlanta recently to discover that someone had tried unsuccessfully to wrench a stained-glass transom out of its casement over his front door.
“Next it’ll be all my cypress baseboards,” Phillips says with a sigh. After losing most of his furnishings to flooding and after tangling with his insurance company on a storm settlement, Phillips says architectural theft “is just one more thing to worry about.” He’s speaking by phone from Atlanta. Returning full time to a neighborhood without electricity is impractical, he says.
Preservationists worry that these tales are the beginning of an epidemic. “They’re going to mine our city and send it all to Southern California,” frets Patricia Gay, executive director of the Preservation Resource Center, a nonprofit agency dedicated to protecting New Orleans neighborhoods and especially its 16 federally recognized historic districts.
Preservationists blame local salvage yards for encouraging looters to strip empty buildings of Victorian embellishments. The Bank, a local emporium for old architectural elements, has been soliciting for such items in some of New Orleans’s most storm-damaged neighborhoods.
The shop, which caters to local and out-of-state renovators, buys architectural detail pieces, strips them of old paint, then repairs and resells them. A cypress mantel retails for $450 or more, while period doors go for between $350 and $700 apiece.