One morning in 1922, photographer Charles L. Franck climbed into the rear cockpit of a biplane and had the pilot take him on an exhilarating spin around downtown New Orleans. From an altitude of perhaps 1,500 feet, Franck captured a series of oblique shots constituting the best early aerial coverage of the city’s urban core. One particularly dazzling photo shows the heart of the Central Business District from a point above Tchoupitoulas Street looking down at an angle of 75 degrees, with Poydras to the left, Canal to the right, and the dense commercial cityscape glowing in the light of a rising sun. Roughly one-third of the visible building stock is antebellum in vintage, mostly two- and three-story storehouses and townhouses typical of the 1830s through 1850s; another third entails the larger and more ornate commercial buildings of the late 1800s; and the final third comprises steel-frame high-rises of the early 1900s. The underlying street grid, however, is decades older than the oldest visible building, originating during the Spanish colonial regime.
What prompted the Spanish urbanization effort was one of the most infamous events in New Orleans history — the Good Friday Fire of 1788, which charred the heart of today’s French Quarter. Within days of the disaster, the Gravier family, owners of the plantation immediately upriver of the city, realized this was an ideal time to subdivide their land for urban development, with so many blocks in the city proper strewn with ruins. The task of designing the subdivision went to city surveyor Carlos Laveau Trudeau, who sketched a grid of rectangular blocks (as opposed to the squares in the original city) and streets of varying widths (pedestrian alleys, narrow streets, and two wider arteries, Poydras and Julia) around a central plaza (later named Lafayette), all attenuated to the confines of the natural levee, from present-day Common Street up to roughly Howard Avenue. Trudeau called the subdivision the Suburbio (or Arrabal, meaning suburb) Santa Maria, which francophones called the Faubourg Ste. Marie, and anglophones would later call St. Mary.
As close as it was to the city proper, New Orleans’ first suburb was nevertheless inconvenient, because a muddy terre commune — that is, the commons fronting the city fortifications, which had to remain unobstructed as a firing line — prevented development from uniting the two grids. Once those defenses became obsolete in the early American years, the newly chartered City of New Orleans petitioned the U.S. government to transfer the commons to municipal ownership. On March 3, 1807, the U.S. Congress confirmed the city’s claim to the commons, while also stipulating that a 60-foot-wide right-of-way would be reserved for a navigation channel to be dug connecting the Carondelet Canal with the Mississippi River…