THREE CURIOSITIES OF DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE stand within a few blocks of each other in the Carrollton section of Uptown New Orleans, each having long occupied a quarter or more of their squares: the cruciform Gothic Revival Wilkinson house at 1015 South Carrollton, completed in 1850; the Wrightian 7929 Freret, built for banana importer Salvador D'Antoni in 1917; and the tall Colonial 925 Burdette Street, perhaps, at least until recently, the most visible, and perhaps the least commented upon.

Contained within the vertical mass of 925 Burdette Street is an older raised house, itself the apparent remodeling of an earlier structure, that was bought in 1917 by Mr. and Mrs. Donald Ambrose Maginnis, a cotton broker and his wife then in their 20s with a two-year-old son. Remarkably, the house remained alone on its enormous parcel until 2021, occupying the square footage of its original lot that had been increased by the Maginnises with additional purchases to the river side of the property. The house remained virtually unchanged from the time of a dramatic 1928 alteration of the prior building up to its diminishment in 2020, a 92-year iteration very much, as were the Carrollton and Freret architectural anomalies, to its original occupants' apparent affinity for symmetry and disinterest in the local architectural vernacular. 




John B. Honor owned 925 Burdette Street from
May 1908 until May 1917; he had it on the market by
November 8, 1914, when the display advertisement above
appeared in 
The Times-Picayune. It may have been an ad in the
Picayune on March 4, 1917, below, that first attracted the attention
of Donald and Ruth Maginnis to the house and its possibilities at a
time when their cotton was high. The downtown-river corner

of Burdette and Freret escaped full-scale subdivision a
century ago; can redevelopment be held off again?



By all accounts the Maginnises led a very active life during their years at 925 Burdette. But the history of the house began nearly 40 years before, if not before, the property's discoverable chain of title going back to 1834. Walter M. Smallwood bought the property in 1878; a representation of the house appears on the Robinson insurance map of 1883. Later Sanborn insurance maps offer more details than do their Robinson counterparts, and suggest the presence of a typical center-hall raised house, which, as a recently discovered photograph reveals, it indeed was. The bones of it live in place today.




Circa 1886: Walter Smallwood's daughter Bessie and her husband
Bernard Shields are standing on the steps of what came to be numbered
925 Burdette Street. The rural roots of a rapidly suburbanizing district are evident
in a building that would morph with the times. The Robinson fire insurance map of 1883
reveals the sparse settlement and evolving street names of what was formerly the separate
town of 
Carrollton. Addresses at the time were given according to intersections; the lot later designated as 925 Burdette was in Square 104 of the old Seventh District. The
The Wilkinson house is seen in pink in Square 120. What had started as the
New Orleans & Carrollton Rail Road in 1835 is seen at the lower edge.



Walter M. Smallwood arrived in New Orleans from Missouri after being named Postmaster of the city on July 30, 1868. During his year's tenure, Smallwood was also listed in city directories as an "oil, glass, and glassware broker." Apparently, his heart wasn't in such a curious hybrid line; by 1871 he was, according to directories, both pursuing law once again and working as an editor at The New Orleans Democrat before moving to the Times a few years later (the papers merged in 1881). Smallwood and his wife, née Emeline Reinhard and known as Emma, brought with them to New Orleans their daughters Mattie and Bessie; the family moved uptown from Baronne Street to Pitt before settling in 1878 on Burdette Street in the former town of Carrollton in what Smallwood family records describe as a former plantation house. A rare photograph of it in the Smallwood family collection bears this out; what became 925 Burdette Street may indeed predate the Civil War and possibly have once been at the center of a relatively large spread in Carrollton before it was platted, and certainly before the suburbanizing district's annexation to New Orleans in 1874. After Walter Smallwood died at what the family referred to as "Arcady" on December 6, 1884, his journalistic legacy would grow in the form of his daughters and granddaughters. Mattie and Bessie carried on in journalism, blazing a trail for women in the field; their daughters would take it even farther. Mattie worked as a newspaper correspondent, later using the byline "Catharine Cole"; she has been described as the first paid woman journalist in the country. Mattie's daughter Flora Field, better known as Flo Field, became a reporter for The Times-Democrat while living at 925 with her family; she also became a playwright. Not to be outdone by her sister, Bessie became one of the first female press agents in the country as well as a vaudevillian, performing with her husband and five children. Bessie married Bernard C. Shields, a lawyer, city councilman, state legislator, and camera buff; their daughter Sydney Shields made perhaps the biggest splash of all, moving from the vaudeville circuit to a successful career on Broadway. (Walter M. Smallwood's great-great-granddaughter Sue Shields Marchman describes her family in more detail here.)




The middle period of 925 Burdette Street: This version, an alteration of an
earlier raised house that may have dated from before the Civil War, appeared
before the ownership of the Maginnises (if not that of John Honor) as Colonial Revival
designs gained in popularity around the turn of the 20th century. The views below
were taken by one of the Maginnis sons not long before work began on its
successor incarnation, one that has now given way to a fourth revision.





Emma Smallwood and Flo Field were still living at 925 Burdette at the time of Mattie's death in Chicago on December 19, 1898; the funeral, attended by Mayor Walter C. Flower, was held in the house four days later. The Shieldses had moved to a new house they built a few blocks away in 1896—also still standing—at 7602 Hampson Street. Mrs. Smallwood appears to have remained at 925 until close to the time of her death, which came at 7602 Hampson on March 8, 1902. By October 1901, 925 appears to have been rented for a time by the Misses Mandeire and Albertine Wagner and their sister Octavie Grancher, and then rented again from 1903 to 1907 to the family of William F. Hodgkins, about which little is revealed in the record. Of a higher profile was John B. Honor of the eponymous stevedoring firm, who bought 925 Burdette in 1908 along with multiple other lots surrounding the house. Honor was a man well acquainted with New Orleans families whose fortunes derived from commodities if one on the fringes of the tribal ties that bound that cohort socially. Honor was famously pugnacious, said to have been the last man to challenge another to a duel in New Orleans, and a man no less fearless of local royalty: It was in 1908 that he called out shipping executive Matthew J. Sanders, Rex of 1902. As for his real estate dealings, The Times-Democrat reported in December 1906—with a certain lack of clarity—that Honor had acquired a "lot, forming corner, Burdette and Elm [today, Freret]" from Maria Fenwick Watkins Prague, a widow, who had been slowly subdividing her quarter of the square block—which was, in fact, at the corner of Burthe rather than Elm. Honor appears to have been renting 925 when the paper reported on May 10, 1908—just weeks after challenging Sanders—that he had bought the house, sitting on "five lots and [a] portion," from the heirs of Emma Smallwood for $5,750; thus the property known affectionately by the Smallwoods and the Shieldses as "Arcady" was passed along after nearly 30 years. With his adjacent acquisitions, John Honor now owned the uptown half of the block bounded by Burdette, Adams, Burthe, and Elm streets.

The circumstances under which 925 Burdette came to be auctioned off by Honor in 1917 are unclear. Chain of title indicates that he may have lost it in foreclosure, with the Dixie Homestead Association acquiring it. While an auction was advertised prominently in newspapers, Donald Maginnis, who could have known Honor through business and possibly through the mutual interest of their families in Ocean Springs as a summer retreat, may have had prior knowledge of it. Whatever the nature of the transaction, the sale of 925 Burdette to the Maginnises on May 9, 1917, was reported in The Times-Picayune two days later. According to the paper, Donald Maginnis paid $15,000 for the house; the reporter considered the price to be low. Curiously, as one corner of the 900 block of Burdette Street was being expanded into something of an in-town estate, the adjacent riverward parcel was being subdivided into urban lots. The Burthe corner had been redeveloped by John Honor, with the Prague house and its large grounds giving way to two new houses, 901 and 909 Burdette, in 1912, and a third lot becoming part of 925's parcel. Donald Maginnis would acquire still more land on the river side of 925: In May 1920 he bought the cottage at 7723 Burthe Street, and, after transferring much of its backyard to 925, sold it the following October. (The Sanborn fire insurance maps below record the growth of the house and its lot.) Mr. Maginnis also acquired a 1908 house across from 7723 Burthe Street as an investment in April 1929 and, interestingly, he bought it from John B. Honor, who had owned it for two years as a city residence. (Honor died in Ocean Springs that August.) In 1929 the Maginnises rented 7730 to their friend Harry Barkerding, newly arrived from Charleston, who would buy it from Mrs. Maginnis in 1944. Only minor changes appear to have been made to 925 Burdette itself after its purchase by the Maginnises—at least during their first decade there. 





It would have been either the Honors or the Maginnises who surrounded the Burdette and Freret sides of the lot at 925 with the undulating picket fence that is an update of the 19th-century original and some of which remained on Burdette with its arbor-arch gate until recently. The house itself would also move closer to its current configuration. The Maginnis family would be growing; Donald Jr. was two years old when the family moved into 925; John arrived in 1918 and Malcolm, the third of what would be four boys, five years later. Gordon arrived in September 1928, not long after completion of the house's most dramatic reconfiguration, which began in November 1927 and kept the family in a rented house nearby for six months.

Curiously, a straight interior staircase between the original first and second floors runs forward toward Burdette Street from the rear of the current second floor to the third, attic level; while this reverse configuration seems odd for what appears to have been a better-utilized second floor in the circa-1900 Colonial Revival iteration of 925, this may be an indication that the staircase dates from the pre–Civil War structure in which it would have led to smaller quarters. This is speculation, however; a forensic architect would be needed to determine exactly how the house evolved and what might date from before the Civil War, from its middle years, and from the Maginnis makeover.

A close friend of the Maginnises was Carl E. Woodward, who in 1923 was cofounder with Thomas B. Denegre of Denegre & Woodward, general contractors. The firm became responsible for the radical 1928 remodeling of 925 in a newer Colonial style of architecture that had become an American suburban ideal by the 1920s, particularly once the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg got underway in the middle of that decade. In 1858, George Washington's Mount Vernon—in serious disrepair—had been sold out of the Washington family to the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, which began preservation and restoration; replicas of the house appearing at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and at other fairs were seen by millions and adapted by Theodate Pope Riddle, McKim, Mead & White, and other architects for lavish domestic projects in Connecticut and on Long Island that began to appear in shelter magazines such as House & Garden. Another similarity to Washington's Mount Vernon was that the new first floor of the greatly expanded 925 was constructed close to the ground. The new building rose on a concrete slab—an innovation for the era that afforded a graceful entry and connected the interior more closely to its gardens in a way unusual in a city of raised houses built on brick piers. A contract between Donald Maginnis and Denegre & Woodward for $26,500—$468,0000 in 2023 currency—was signed on November 15, 1927. (In 1935, on the Maginnises' Covington property called Mulberry Grove, Woodward would remake the Big House, a sprawling single-story whitewashed brick building, in a Colonial style complementary to 925—there including a version of the Chinese Chippendale porch-roof balustrade of the early Mount Vernon. It is still in family hands and, like 925 Burdette, essentially unaltered in appearance after 87 years. A second smaller house on the Northshore property, also designed by Woodward, mimics the main house and is also still in use by the family. Woodward's firm remains still very active in New Orleans today as Woodward Design+Build.)




Donald A. Maginnis Jr. poses in front of 925 Burdette
not long before it was raised to its current full two-story height.
The house in this phase is reminiscent of the much larger John H. Maginnis
residence that still stands at 2127 Prytania Street. The two-story symmetry of the 1928
remodeling of 925 was coincidentally reminiscent of the house built by A. A. Maginnis Sr.—
great-grandfather of Donald Maginnis Jr. and the father of John H. Maginnis—at the uptown/lake
corner of Prytania and Polymnia streets just after Appomattox; 2127 Prytania Street was
kept by the family until 1939, 1737 Prytania and 925 Burdette until 1942 and 1943,
respectively. As the wise Uptown New Orleans philosopher Richard French
has so eloquently said of once-high cotton, "Vut vuz, vuz."



The house at 925 Burdette Street was by all accounts the scene of many happy occasions inside and out, its yard inevitably becoming something of a playground for neighborhood children, with Malcolm Maginnis's marmoset Jackie and Mrs. Maginnis's roaming peacock added attractionsAround the corner next to each other on Burthe Street were Harry, Ted, and Bob Barkerding and Walter Carroll; over on Fern were the Schneideau boys. Malcolm Maginnis was moved to wistfulness on seeing the house in October 2012 at nearly 90, two months before he died; the row of tall palms along Burdette was gone, giving the street somewhat of a barren air, but the house itself took him back 80 years. He remembered when Jackie was caught outside during a cold snap and revived with a nip of bourbon and a brief respite in the warming oven of the kitchen's big O'Keefe & Merritt. Was the pirogue still in the attic? Was his go-cart—his Rosebud—still on the roof of the garage? The boat was said to have been placed in readiness as a contingency after the nearby Mississippi River levee threatened to give way in the high water of 1927. The go-cart was left on the roof for safekeeping when its owner was sent north to boarding school at the age of nine, grown out of and never retrieved from its perch before the family left Burdette Street for good.


A wide lens reveals the enormous lot of 925 Burdette Street after even more property was
added. Palms and privet behind undulating pickets combine to offer an unusual
sense of both Southern California and Long Island in the Deep South.


A highly organized and well-traveled woman with definite tastes, Ruth Hobson Maginnis was a noted gardener who landscaped the grounds of 925 with a schooled eye. She filled the house with a no less well-thought-out combination of French and English furniture, but kept the scheme modern in its lack of any Victorian excess. Never without a sense of fun, she also filled 925 with congenial gatherings. Numerous parties are mentioned in The Times-Picayune, the Item and the States of the day; some were typically genteel, as would befit a founder of the New Orleans Junior League; others are said to have been a tad wilder. On November 7, 1931, the Maginnises were hosts at 925 with his sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur B. LaCour, at a debutante reception for the LaCours' daughter, Lorraine, who nine years later would marry William A. Wilkins at Mulberry Grove. Family legend has it that at one point early in the unpleasantness brought on by Black Tuesday, the Charles Monroses, Fern Street neighbors and dear friends, had had their lights turned off due to a neglected bill; a collection was taken up by the couple's larger circle to restore the current. Money left in the pot went to good use to bring in prohibited supplies to celebrate the relighting, perhaps via a stealthy lake speedboat. Lake-cruising boats were also popular during Prohibition for entertaining more or less out of the reach of killjoy authorities. A May 1931 outing of the Maginnises and friends including the Woodwards, the Russell Clarks, the Boatner Reilys, the Fisher Simmonses, and the Richard Ellises aboard William S. Penick's Ottelia ended when Mr. Ellis disappeared overboard—a coroner's inquest at which all guests testified ended in the ruling that Ellis's drowning was an accident, but an air of mystery would endure. Four months later, the group sobered up even further when a polio outbreak at the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, affected Russell Clark Jr., who was a boarder along with two of the Maginnises' sons, Donald and John, and their cousin Charles LaCour. Racing pilot and aircraft designer Jimmy Wedell, whose business partner Harry P. Williams would figure into the history of 925 Burdette a few years later, flew Mr. Clark north to his only son's bedside in a record 9 hours and 25 minutes. (Russell Clark Jr. survived his illness but died in the Pacific in 1944.)




Mr. and Mrs. Donald A. Maginnis with Charles E. Kock at the races in Paris,
1930, per Mrs. Maginnis's notation on the back of the photograph. Somewhat
more relaxed below at a Covington house party a few years later, Ruth Maginnis
is at far right, while Mr. Maginnis is cozy with Mrs. Lawrence J. Baldwin at left in an
image captured by her husband, a camera buff. With family ties going back into
the prior century—Albert Baldwin Maginnis was born in 1864—their children
and grandchildren would inherit humor as well as a rich family mythology
surrounding all manner of very happy times and internecine drama.



With their older sons now away at school and owing to the long illness—some say brought on by high spirits and high living—that had precipitated his early retirement from his seats on the New Orleans and New York cotton exchanges and on the Chicago Board of Trade, and from his local firm, Donald Maginnis & Co., the Maginnises began to spend much of their time north of Covington, then two hours from the city by car. Their New Orleans base became Mrs. Maginnis's mother's house at 3 Audubon Place; prior to his death there on May 24, 1937, at the age of 46, Mr. Maginnis spent his time in Covington raising chickens and camellias as hobbies, while his wife brought Mulberry Grove—a former Ozone Belt health resort—back to life as a private sanctuary for her husband. Every detail of her makeover of the property, from its long approach in from Lee Road, to its vistas, gardens, and outbuildings was overseen with the same extreme care that defined the house and grounds at 925 Burdette Street.




Circa 1930: In a picture most likely not taken by her mother, first cousins
Malcolm Maginnis and Peggy Hobson hang out in the yard of 925 Burdette Street.

The birdbath behind them stood in the same place until a few years ago; much of the
picket fence was destroyed in July 2020 as redevelopment of the lot began.



Many stories of the Maginnises on Burdette Street are confirmed by newspaper reports. While the family was away in October 1926, Herman O. Baker, referred to in the press as "the society burglar" and "the daring plunderer of Uptown homes," gained entrance to 925 by posing as a contractor. Baker did his homework by observing residences from his parked Studebaker and by studying social columns to determine when his victims would be out of town. Looking around on a first visit using his contractor ruse on the servants, Baker returned later when he knew there would be in residence just one maid, who was easily tied up; $20,000 worth of silver was stolen. Baker also managed, somehow single-handedly, to load a heavy iron safe into his getaway car parked in back. The $30,000 worth of bonds known to be in the safe were never recovered; Baker claimed to have burned them. (The box itself was, however, found, and later, in Covington, held such treasures as Mrs. Maginnis's grandsons' plans to turn Mulberry Grove into the world's largest go-cart track, the cousins having acquired many new versions of the one possibly still sitting on the roof of the garage at 925 Burdette Street.) Baker was captured by police in December 1927 and sentenced to three to five years of hard labor at Angola. For some reason out on a pass a year later—he was apparently well-behaved and very good at building coffins in prison—Baker stole a car and, in the process of robbing a Tulane Avenue variety store, was shot and killed with his own gun. He died wearing a suit belonging to Donald Maginnis that his wife Myrtle Baker had kept for him. Between bouts of such drama, there were more parties. When a guest accidentally broke a small windowpane in a living-room French door, every one of the rest of the dozens of panes in the room was smashed so as not to leave a clumsy pal feeling badly about the damage—and so the party could continue. At a dinner at which artichokes were served, the same hapless friend, feeling no pain, was served a pine cone as a joke; his game attempt to eat it greatly amused the rest of the table, who, perhaps, had seen a Chaplin film or two in their time. Between the fun and games, in addition to running her house and doing the volunteer work expected of her cohort, Mrs. Maginnis became entrepreneurial. In partnership with her lifelong friend Julia Armstrong Mayhew (later Mrs. Allard Kaufmann), she opened "Julie et Ruth" at Burdette and Maple, just down the street from 925. Uptown matrons flocked to the well-traveled Mmes Mayhew and Maginnis for the sort of lingerie not found at D. H. Holmes or Maison Blanche.




Ruth Maginnis had a lily pond built toward the Freret Street
side of 925 Burdette in 1921; John and Donald Maginnis Jr. were
photographed—reluctantly it seems, perhaps rather having had an
an actual swimming pool—circa 1923. There was, at least, a peacock
roaming the yard. The urn at left and its mate were later moved to
sit next to the big artesian-well-fed swimming pool at Mulberry
Grove, the Big House of which is seen below in May 1940.



Once the Maginnises retired to Covington they leased 925 briefly to their friend Frank Clayton Anderson of Mobile, whose family operated the Houston-based Anderson, Clayton and Company, by the 1930s the largest trader of cotton in the world. (After his death in 1939, Anderson's uncle Monroe Dunaway Anderson would endow the cancer center named after him.) Anderson was followed as a renter by another Maginnis family friend, Mrs. Harry Palmerston Williams, the former silent-screen star Marguerite Clark, whose husband, the lumberman and aviator, had been killed in a plane crash in May 1936; the couple had been living in the house that is now the Milton H. Latter Memorial Library. Moving into 925 five months after her husband's death, Mrs. Williams is said to have lovingly maintained her landlord's garden during her three-year tenancy; while apparently content renting a residence, unsure of her long-term plans, Mrs. Williams did put some of her capital into the ownership of Carrollton real estate, purchasing in 1936 the charming 1923 Spanish Revival store building still at the uptown-river corner of Carrollton and Willow. She left New Orleans three years later and would die in New York in September 1940. Mrs. Maginnis continued to lease the house; occupying it from late September 1942 through the winter was Rear Admiral Frank T. Leighton, commandant of the Eighth Naval District, headquartered in New Orleans. Though now widowed, and with Malcolm and Gordon away at boarding schools in New England, Mrs. Maginnis decided to make Covington her permanent residence, keeping an apartment in the city, and in April 1943 accepted the $31,500 offer of Sylvester W. Labrot Jr., president of the American Creosote Works and a well-known sportsman; the transaction closed in June, with Mrs. Labrot's name the one appearing on the title as Elizabeth Gay Labrot. As a garden-club chum of the seller, she would perhaps have been especially attracted to the grounds. The Labrots hired the meticulous firm of Armstrong & Koch to do some repairs and renovations. It may be that, traveling in the same circles, the Maginnises and Labrots had similar tastes, but a grandson of Mrs. Maginnis, after visiting the house for the first time in 1977, reported experiencing a pleasantly eerie familiarity in terms of the house's proportions and detail, both of a distinctly 1920s sort, and reminiscent of the houses at Mulberry Grove. The Times-Picayune reported the Labrots' sale of 925 in June 1947; they moved to Garden Lane. Paying $46,000 for 925 was clothier Philip W. Taxman, who stayed not much longer than the Labrots—a classified advertisement in the Picayune that ran in January 1952 offered household possessions for sale and indicated that Taxman and his family needed to vacate 925 immediately. With real-estate man Poche Waguespack as intermediary, Dr. Edward J. Ireland, professor and head of the department of pharmacology at nearby Loyola University, had purchased the house for a reported $62,350 not long before, his family getting ready to settle down for 925's longest tenancy of all. Mrs. Ireland, who as Elvé Louise Newman received a degree from the Loyola College of Pharmacy in 1943, died at 925 Burdette Street on March 29, 2019, at the age of 98. Among other family members, Stella, her pet tortoise since childhood who has been known to escape from the yard on occasion, survives her.

The house was first offered for sale in the fall of 2019 with the deed restriction that the property could not be subdivided. With no sale forthcoming, the restriction was lifted; on July 23, 2020, the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate website reported in its review of Orleans Parish property transfers for the week of June 22 that the house and its grounds had just been sold to Crescent City Developers for $1,850,000. Partial demolition of the building was underway within weeks toward a goal of lot reconfiguration to accommodate as many as five new residences on the lot; priced at $850,000, the narrowed original residence was placed on the market on September 22, 2020, as an otherwise unrenovated five-bedroom, four-bath house. A year later, five new cookie-cutter residences in a trending Greek Revival–Revival double-gallery style—arguably out of place in this part of town—had been erected alongside the much-modified original 925 Burdette Street. With no takers as an unrenovated property, 925 received a slick if seemingly cosmetic makeover and in mid 2022 was on the market for $2,249,000. In the Garden District, maybe. The house sold for a more realistic $1,625,000 in March 2023. 


Despite having lost its 120-year-old physical context, 925 Burdette Street remained for a time an attractive house. A version of the undulating picket fence and arched gate of its early years
would be recreated, but fencing and house would be painted a charmless beige.


Front-door symmetry, seen circa 1930, and unchanged for 90 years




A rare interior view: Ladies of the Garden Study Club are seen on the
staircase of the house, which is at the end of the entrance hall, during a tour
of members' 1938 Christmas decorations organized by the group. Mrs. Maginnis
and Mrs. Williams opened 925 Burdette Street along with houses belonging to fellow
club members and friends including Mrs. Charles Seyburn Williams (Marguerite 
Williams's
sister-in-law), Mrs. James Weaks Reily, Mrs. Edgar Stern, Mrs. Russell Clark, Mrs. Arthur
Moreno, and Mrs. John Chambers. The image appeared in the Picayune on December
18, 1938. Below is an image taken from a similar vantage point 81 years later.
It is an open question in 2019 as to whether 20th-century domestic architec-
ture can be appreciated in New Orleans along with that of earlier eras.






Above: As of July 24, 2020, the lakeward wing of 925 Burdette Street had
just been demolished; the fate of the side wings—and that of the whole structure,
at first unclear, with some fearing the start of demolition by neglect—is now apparent
in the images below made in September 2020. Some reports had it that the house was
being narrowed to accommodate five new residences on the lot, three of them
on building sites toward the Freret Street corner and two toward the river.










A September 2020 rendering illustrates a narrowed
but otherwise unrenovated 925 Burdette Street; as seen on
October 5, 2021, the original house is flanked by two riverward and
three lakeward residences rendered in the current trend toward a retro–
Greek Revival style whose antecedents are more commonly found
in denser downtown New Orleans neighborhoods of narrow lots
such as those on the fringes of the Garden District.


As seen on January 27, 2024: With more flags than an embassy, 925 is now an inappropriate dull
 beige and seemingly tiny while also managing to look newer than its five new lot-mates.  


ADDITIONAL IMAGES of 925 Burdette Street are HERE and HERE

PLEASE ALSO SEE 3 AUDUBON PLACE   



Illustrations: Private Family Collections; New Orleans Public Library;
The Historic New Orleans Collection; The Times-Picayune; LOC