New Orleans Architecture: Faubourg Treme and the Bayou Road : North Rampart Street to North Broad Street Canal Street to St. Benard Avenue (New Orleans Architecture)

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Summary: Visions of a vanishing time and place
Review: This wonderful book is the second in the now-classic survey of historic New Orleans architecture. Distinguished by the same painstaking attention to detail as the other volumes, this book concentrates on the sections of the city now known as the Central Busisness District (or CBD) and the Warehouse/Arts District. Given the dramatic changes this section has undergone since the 19th century, this volume is both more valuable historically and perhaps a bit less interesting to the casual reader.

One section of the book is fortunately out of date. A special section highlights the row houses on Julia Street in the Warehouse District, then in sad disrepair, but now gems in that area's redevelopment.

Despite the towering skyscrapers lining Poydras Street and the gleaming hotel towers down by the river, this book calls our attention to what remains: the exuberant architectural display of a Victorian bank building or the shockingly vibrant facade of a Canal Street storefront. Through its thoughtful scholarship and careful display of maps, historic images and contemporary photograph, this book (likes its sisters in the series) is an inviting glimpse into the past for the careful reader.