Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Update on Dali in New Orleans

I received the email below earlier today regarding the photo of Dali in New Orleans I posted recently:

Just thought you’d might like to know who lives in that house – my husband, Myron, myself, Sharon, Myron’s son, and 4 dogs. I was searching around for stuff on the Alan Rosenberg I grew up with, the president of the Screen Actor’s Guild, married to Marg Helgenberger of the TV show, CSI, and found your blog --- with a photograph of my house on it!!!

You also might like to know that my husband is an energy consultant and we have one of the most energy efficient homes in town, complete with a ground source heat pump, ductless cooling & heating, and a tornado resistant roof.

Kamal Dali is a really neat guy – Greek, who’s been very successful in the Aububon Park/University area as a painter. Nice man.

It’s taking forever to paint our house, though. It truly needs a lot of work other than just painting but we’re getting there. We’ll be painting the inside next (it has a lot of Craftman type details with extensive woodwork & 4 types of molding) and I’m having a great time thinking about color selection. I’m just about to take a class at the NO Institute of Fine Arts in Color Theory. I share this with you because you are an art specialist.

Anyway, this is probably more than you wanted to know about the picture – kind of spoils the mystery, My husband and I were very amused when we stumbled across a photo of our humble home on your blog, but, hey, we were recently looking up his name and found out that some professors in France and Australia thought his PhD thesis research very important work and were building on it – we contacted them and they wanted us to come to France and give a conference in his honor! Amazing, huh? Take care, Sharon

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Mother's Day

My mother, circa 1963:

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Jazz Fest

Charles at Jazz Fest, New Orleans (we saw Archie Bell and the Drells, Carol Fran, Eddie Bo and a few other legends):

More New Orleans

My grandfather's cousin's house (Fortune Jaubert, Jr.), designed by Favrot and Livaudais in 1904, on St. Charles Avenue at Valence Street:

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Albert Ledner, New Orleans Architect

On my trip to New Orleans I discovered that one of my favorite buildings is for sale. Designed by Albert Ledner for the National Maritime Union, the building served in recent years as a church. It's about a 15 minute walk from my parent's house, about 5 minutes from the Garden District, so I walked over and took the pictures below. In New York Ledner designed two buildings for the Union: one is now the Maritime Hotel and the other is part of St Vincent's hospital and currently known as the O'Toole building. St Vincent's wants to demolish O'Toole along with all its other buildings so a developer can build luxury high-rises and a new hospital. For more on Ledner and the fight to save O'Toole go to DOCOMOMO's website and download their excellent PDF: