The Architectural Legacy of Nueva Orleans

The unparalleled infrastructural impact of the city's Spanish colonial era

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The French influence on old New Orleans, commonly referred to as “the French Quarter,” is well-known. But much of the architectural legacy of the Vieux Carré can actually be attributed to the Spanish colonial influence, even more than the French. 

In fact, the city’s most recognizable landmark, the Plaza de Armas (now called Jackson Square), boasts a remarkable concentration of Spanish architecture—many of its buildings financed and built by the Spanish dons in New Orleans during Louisiana’s Spanish colonial period (1763–1803). The most stunning examples are the architectural jewels of the Cabildo, parts of Saint Louis Cathedral, and the Presbytère. This “Holy Trinity” of Spanish colonial architecture was built by Spaniards in the late eighteenth century, when the banner of Castilla y León waved over the city. The structure of Jackson Square closely resembles Spanish plazas in Havana, Cuba or the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, Spain, with its equestrian statue of King Felipe III. 

In the forty years following King Louis XV’s discard of the struggling Gallic colonial outpost, the Castilian caballeros transformed Nueva Orleans from a struggling, poorly managed, haphazardly ruled wilderness village Europeans called “the Indies,” into a highly urbanized, flourishing, and stately Spanish metropolis. The wide-ranging Iberian administrative, economic, and cultural reforms enacted by the Spanish governors of New Orleans sparked a demographic transformation, infrastructure development, and economic growth.

The Fires of 1788 and 1794

 “The greatest impress that Spain left was architectural, and this came about partly by accident, or two of them,” writes Harnett T. Kane, author of Queen New Orleans. Kane is referring to two fires, in 1788 and 1794, that destroyed much of the city’s existing French infrastructure.  

The Good Friday fire of March 21, 1788 started at the home of Don Vincente José Nuñez, the Treasurer of the Spanish army. Devout Catholics, Nuñez and his family were celebrating the sacred day in their home on Chartres Street when a breeze ignited a lace drapery in their private chapel. Four hours later, when the fire expired, 856 of the city’s 1,100 buildings were destroyed. Constructed almost entirely of wood, New Orleans burned like a flaming torch, and nearly eighty percent of the city was incinerated. 

Six years later, a second, smaller fire took place on December 8, 1794. It was set by children playing with matches near a hay store on Royal Street, and ultimately incinerated another 212 buildings, removing just about every remaining vestige of French architecture, except the Ursuline convent. In all, the two fires consumed over 1,000 French-era buildings, virtually erasing the Gallic village. 

“What lay in the ashes was, at best, but an irregular, ill-built, French town,” wrote historian Grace King, author of New Orleans: The Place and The People. “What arose from them was a stately Spanish city, proportioned with grace and built with solidity, practically the city as we see it today.” Kane described early Spanish New Orleans as a “city of heavily walled brick houses, two-storied, tile-roofed, with wide arches, fanlights, and Spanish-style courtyards.”

A Spanish Quarter Rises from the Ashes

Following these devastations, the Spanish dons immediately began to rebuild New Orleans with uniquely Castilian characteristics. What emerged was a denser, more urban Spanish architecture whose hand-forged, wrought-iron balconies; curved, elegant staircases; hidden paved courtyards; arched carriageways; tiled roofs; and fanlight windows came to define the city’s aesthetic. In his book Old New Orleans, Stanley Clisby Arthur, wrote: “The best of the old wrought-iron balcony decorations, therefore, are in more than one-way, pure Castilian.”

In response to the fires, Louisiana’s Spanish Governor Esteban Miró (1782-1791) and his successor Francisco Luis Hector, Baron de Carondelet (1792–1797) issued swift changes in building, fire, and safety codes. Strict new laws mandated the use of nonflammable materials, including protective brick and stucco exterior walls, instead of combustible wood. Fire-retardant tile and slate roofs, imported from Havana, Cuba, replaced cypress shingles. The government instituted new fire-fighting equipment and hired night watchmen, called serenos, to patrol the streets at night. Two-story dwellings replaced one-story buildings, and the general appearance and safety of the city was improved. Carondelet instituted the city’s first street lighting system to prevent crime. Each night, serenos lit eighty oil lamps at street corners, which were fueled by animal fats. 

Two centuries after Spanish rule, a stroll through the Quarter reveals the physical and material evidence of the Castilian colonial imprint in the architectural structures we still see standing today, including these seven gems:

St. Louis Cathedral  (721-727 Chartres St.)

The historic St. Louis Cathedral is one of New Orleans’s most iconic and splendid ecclesiastical landmarks; and its history is inseparably linked to Spain. Three churches have stood on this historic site overlooking the Plaza de Armas during the past three centuries.

The first French Catholic church, likely in what is today the 600 block of St. Ann, was destroyed in the hurricane of September 1722, which demolished nearly every building in New Orleans. The second Church of St. Louis, designed by French engineer Adrien De Pauger, was built in the French style of briquette-entre-poteaux (brick between posts), with the outside walls covered in adobe and plaster. It was completed and dedicated in 1727.

Around 1763, shortly after Bourbon France ceded the colony to Bourbon Spain, and the dons came into possession of the city, the church was closed for much-needed repairs, and services were temporarily held in one of the king’s warehouses on Dumaine Street. Once repairs were completed, Pauger’s church operated until it was destroyed by the 1788 Good Friday fire. 

The day after the fire, Don Andrés Almonester y Roxas—a rich Andalusian real estate investor, businessman, and politician who had come to the Spanish colony nineteen years earlier as an escribano público (notary public)—offered to replace the ruined church with a larger one and to rebuild the priest’s house next to it; all at his own expense. The Illustrious Cabildo (city council) accepted the generous offer, and Almonester y Roxas not only supplied the necessary funds, enslaved labor, and material to rebuild a new Iglesia de San Louis, but also supervised the reconstruction with the promise of a much larger and more impressive structure than its predecessor—designed by engineer Don Gilberto Guillemard. The project officially introduced classical Spanish architectural forms to New Orleans, mirroring Iberian colonial churches in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Guatemala and Columbia, with features that included twin hexagonal towers flanking each side. The new Iglesia was completed in 1794—the same year of the second fire. But by the grace of God, the church was spared.  In 1819-1820, the city commissioned architect Benjamin H. Latrobe to design and build a central tower for the church, containing the town clock and bell. 

Over the next few decades, as the elegance and scale of the nextdoor Cabildo and Presbytère arose, the Basilica’s original grandiosity diminished beside them. In addition, the church was too small for the growing congregation. The city began to discuss renovations and expansions, and in 1849–1851 architect J.N.B de Pouilly embarked on his restoration—which ultimately culminated in a complete demolition and rebuilding of the church, except for part of the front wall. 

Like Don Almonester’s Iglesia, J. N. B. de Pouilly’s modern French Romantic design included a triple steeple façade, though the scale and size were much larger than the second Spanish Cathedral. There is symmetry in the two outward hexagonal spires with star-topped cross adornments, in the Spanish-French tradition, and a soaring central clock and bell tower; there are three clock bells and four ‘church’ bells. The de Pouilly design conveys the balanced architectural elements of columns and arches, with an exterior clock in the central tower. This is the St. Louis Cathedral we know today. 

The Cabildo (701 Chartres Street)

Architectural historian and preservationist Samuel Wilson, Jr. claims that the Cabildo is one of the most important historic buildings in the United States, “and undoubtedly the most important surviving monument of the period of Spanish domination in Louisiana.”  

The first Cabildo was built in 1769, after Louisiana’s second Spanish Governor, Don Alejandro O’Reilly (1769-1770), an Irishman in the service of the Spanish Crown, undertook a massive restructuring of the civil government in Nueva Orleans. One of Governor O’Reilly’s first acts was to abolish the old French Superior Council and establish a new Spanish Cabildo as a governing body. The simple structure that O’Reilly built to house the Cabildo complex—which included a military prison, civil prison, police station, jailer’s quarters, and government chambers—burned in the fires of 1788 and 1794.

After the 1794 fire, Don Andrés Almonester y Roxas offered to pay for the construction of the new casa capitular on the present site. Construction began in December 1795, and the building was finally completed and occupied on May 10, 1799, when the Illustrious Cabildo, the governing body of Nueva Orleans, held its first session in the Sala Capitular (capitol house). 

Architectural historian Talbot Hamlin notes that the building’s façade resembles the Cabildo in Oaxaca, Mexico, and other Spanish colonial cities throughout the Americas. Along the first-floor, thick columns are connected by nine arched openings; above, on the second floor, the walls are broken by fanlight transoms with handsome wrought-iron balconies, forged locally by Marcelino Hernandez, a Spanish immigrant from the Canary Islands. A triangular pediment centered over the three central arches draws your eyes to the building’s grand entrance. Rooted in neoclassical designs, based on architecture of ancient Greek and Roman styles, the Cabildo was originally built with two stories, featuring brick walls that were stuccoed. The roof was flat and covered with flat tiles, and there were eight plastered ornaments, or corbels, equally spaced along the façade. In the mid-nineteenth century, after the Louisiana Purchase, Creole leaders added a third floor crowned by nine gabled dormers, with eight casement windows, allowing light and ventilation into the new interior space. They also topped the building with its iconic decorative cupola and slender spire. 

The Cabildo served as the City Hall of New Orleans until 1853, when the seat of city government was transferred to Gallier Hall on Lafayette Square, then later to Loyola Street. In 1908, the city donated the Cabildo to the Louisiana State Museum, which has owned and managed the building since. 

Spanish Presbytère (751 Chartres Street)

Historically considered the Cabildo’s twin, the Presbytère is one of the finest examples of Spanish colonial public building architecture in the United States, according to Samuel Wilson Jr. and Leonard V. Huber, authors of The Presbytère on Jackson Square. 

Though it was originally intended to be a rectory, or Casa Curial (Ecclesiastical House) for the Spanish Capuchin priests, a Franciscan order who administered the St. Louis Cathedral—the Presbytère was never used for that purpose.  

There is evidence that two French presbyteres stood on the site, likely for the benefit of the Capuchins, before in 1769 the Spanish built another structure on the site—which was ultimately destroyed by the fire of 1788. Intended as a replacement, the Presbytère was financed by Don Andrés Almonester y Roxas, and a design matching that of the nearby Cabildo was completed in 1791 by Gilberto Guillemard (who also designed Almonester y Roxas’s St. Louis Cathedral) . But construction on the Presbytère was halted when the aging Almonester y Roxas died in 1798, and his widow filed suit to absolve her from the financial obligations to complete construction of these massive buildings. Work was halted on the one-story Presbytère for fifteen years; it remained unfinished until the church wardens contracted to have it completed in 1813. 

Architecturally, the Presbytère is a two-story brick building with a flat balustraded roof. The lower story has an open arched gallery, with two Doric pilasters. The upper story mostly mirrors the lower in design, but with Ionic pilasters. In 1847, a third-floor mansard roof and cupola—identical to the ones the Cabildo received the same year—were added. From 1822 to 1853, the building was home to the Louisiana Supreme Court, before church wardens sold it to the City of New Orleans. From 1834 to 1911, it was used as the city courthouse, and since 1908, the Louisiana State Museum has owned and operated the building. With the Cabildo, the Presbytère was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970. 

Bosque House (617-621 Chartres Street)

Many distinguished New Orleanians, whose names are prominent in Louisiana’s colorful history, have called the Bosque House their home. Though, not one is so firmly rooted in Louisiana history as Don Bernardo de Gálvez, the fifth Spanish governor of Louisiana (1777-1785), Captain-General of Havana, Cuba; Viceroy of New Spain (Mexico); and unsung hero of the American Revolution (1775-1783). Galvez and his wife Félicité de St. Maxent d’Estréhan (for whom they say the Felicianas are named) lived with their daughter Guadalupe at 617 Calle de Chartres for three years, from 1781 to 1784. He purchased the casa grande on October 15, 1781, from Spanish Intendant, Don Juan Ventura Morales. Convenient to Government House (the governor’s home), then located at Toulouse and Decatur, this was an ideal home for the official family and an elegant Spanish residence. 

When the war hero, ranking as Captain General, was transferred from New Orleans to Havana, Cuba in 1785 to serve as the Viceroy of New Spain (Mexico), Galvez sold their Calle de Chartres home to Don Jaime Jorda, a wealthy Spanish merchant and slave trader who owned other properties around the corner on Toulouse Street, according to Cabildo notarial records at The Historic New Orleans Collection. Three years later, Don Jorda transferred the title to Don Vincent José Nuñez, the Royal Treasurer and Paymaster of the Spanish army, on September 10, 1787. This is where, of course, the devastating  1788 Good Friday fire started—in Nuñez’s private chapel. 

After the fire, Don Nuñez began construction of a new house in 1789, but he sold it unfinished to Don José Javier Delfau de Pontalba, a lieutenant and colonel in the Spanish army.

After the second fire occurred in 1794, burning that structure to ashes, Don Pontalba sold the property to the wealthy merchant and ship owner Don Bartholomé Bosque on December 1, 1795, who built the stately house that exists on the property today. 

Architecturally, the front façade looks unassuming, but this impressive dwelling has been greatly changed since Bosque’s original design, which had a flat azotera tiled roof terrace and garden section and featured twelve rooms on the second-floor and a curved stairway in the center of the property. The mirador railings bear the markings of the renowned Mexican blacksmith, Marcellino Hernández, and boast an Arabesque central monogram o with the initials “BB” turned backwards, so that Don Bartholomé Bosque could enjoy them himself from his balcony. A splendid and spacious carriageway, located on the right side of the building, leads to an airy rear courtyard with a gracious central metal water fountain and servants’ quarters. On the second floor, a balcony runs the full length of the building's façade, projecting over the sidewalk, and it has four great windows, which are of the Spanish colonial style. 

Bosque lived in the house for fifteen years with his six children. One of Bosque’s daughters, Cayetana Susana (Suzette) Bosque y Fanqui was the third wife of Louisiana’s first American governor, William C. C. Claiborne. After Bosque's death, his widow sold the property at 617-621 Calle de Chartres to Ciriaco de Cevellos on July 9, 1810. 

Today, Casa Gávez is privately owned by a limited liability corporation known as CLIBE, LLC, according to the  New Orleans Assessor. Since 2009, the Spanish mansion has been carved up into half a dozen or more apartments.

Merieult House (527-533 Royal Street)

José Montero de Pedro, author of The Spanish in New Orleans and Louisiana, describes the Merieult House as the “patriarch” of the Spanish Quarter.

During the succession of Spanish merchant Don Pedro Aragón on April 25, 1792, the property at 527–533 Royal passed to Jean Francois Merieult. Merieult was a junior judge of the Illustrious Cabildo, a wealthy shipping “merchant prince,” plantation owner, and trader of the enslaved. Likely with enslaved labor, Merieult and builder Jacob Copperwaite oversaw construction of the Spanish colonial style home that today bears his name—one of the few structures to survive the fire of 1794. He retained ownership of the property until the spring of 1819, when Catherine McNamera Merieult, his widow, sold it to Jean Lanna, a merchant. 

The property passed hands until it came under the ownership of General Lewis Kemper Williams and his wife Leila in 1938. After her death in 1966, the Williams’ will established the Kemper and Leila Williams Foundation, which is today the operating entity of The Historic New Orleans Collection. In 1970, the Merieult House on Royal Street opened to the public as a museum and research center.

Architecturally, the Merieult House is a splendid example of Spanish colonial craftsmanship in New Orleans, featuring stucco-covered brick and arched ground floor openings, a tiled roof, and courtyard. The ground floor façade consists of a series of ten granite pilasters, with molded granite capitals. The granite pilasters supported a broad, flat granite lintel crowned by a simple granite Greek Revival torus molding. On the second floor, a series of seven similar and equally spaced triple hung windows, with louvered shutters, all open onto an elegant, geometrically designed cast-iron balcony, which runs the width of the Royal Street façade.

Bank of Louisiana (417-425 Royal Street)

One of the most interesting buildings constructed in the old Spanish city is an Iberian structure of note at 417 Royal Street, directly across the street from the main entrance to the Civil District Courthouse, an American-built nineteenth-century architectural monstrosity. 417 Royal has an illustrious past, and was home to many renowned New Orleanians. 

The property was first owned by Doña Angela Monget, who later sold it to Gaspar Debuys and Hubert Remy. Six days after the sale, on December 8, 1794, the second great fire ravaged Debuys' and Remy’s newly purchased property. They sold it a month later to engineer and cotton planter Vincent Rillieux, a wealthy Spanish merchant of that period, who paid Gaspar Debuys and Huberto Remy a tidy $1,900 Spanish piastres on January 8, 1795 for the charred ruins at 417 Royal Street. He then contracted an architect (whose name has been lost to time) to build the three-story mansion that remains on Royal today. The building was completed in 1795. 

Don Rillieux had built several other houses on Royal Street just after the two fires, including the Rillieux-Waldhorn building on the corner of Royal and Conti Streets, located at 335-341 Royal Street. After Rillieux died, on February 12, 1800, his widow, Doña Maria Tronquette Rillieux, transferred the title to James Freret, who had married Rillieux’s daughter, Eugenie. Freret fell into financial difficulties and had to relinquish the building at public auction on June 2, 1801. 

"In the forty years following King Louis XV’s discard of the struggling Gallic colonial outpost, the Castilian caballeros transformed Nueva Orleans from a struggling, poorly managed, haphazardly ruled wilderness village Europeans called “the Indies,” into a highly urbanized, flourishing, and stately Spanish metropolis."

The property passed a few more hands before it was purchased by Julien Poydras, president of the newly formed—but short lived—Banque de la Louisiane (1805-1820). Louisiana Bank’s initials “LB” still can still be seen on the second-floor wrought-iron mirador. It was the first bank established in New Orleans after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. 

In 1819, a financial panic swept across the United States, and a severe economic depression ensued. The Bank of Louisiana occupied the property until its liquidators sold it for $25,000, on October 5, 1820, to Martin Gordon, Sr., a friend of United States President Andrew Jackson. In 1841, judge Alonzo Michael Morphy, a lawyer and justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court (1839-1846), was the highest bidder at a sheriff sale and acquired Martin Gordon’s lavish Spanish casa at 417 Royal. For fifty years, Judge Morphy, along with his wife, Thelcide Le Carpentier Morphy, and their four children lived at 417 Royal. 

Although the judge was a prominent member of the Louisiana bar and one of the most illustrious members of Louisiana’s high court, this renowned Louisiana barrister’s fame hinges not on his legal pedigree, but on the fact that he was the father of Paul Charles Morphy, the internationally celebrated chess child prodigy—who himself lived at 417 Royal until he died at forty-seven years of age, on July 10, 1884. In 1891, the family relinquished the property at an auction sale, and it passed through a series of hands before opening, with an extensive renovation, as the Patio Royal restaurant in 1921—where it stood as a hub of New Orleans social life for thirty years. 

Since 1954,  the building is best known in New Orleans as the home of the iconic restaurant Brennan’s and is currently owned by Ralph Brennan and his business partner Terry White. 

Architecturally, the building at 417 Royal is a two-story, brick and plaster structure with a carriageway leading to a rear courtyard. The ferronnière mirador supporting brackets are among the finest in the Quarter.

Montegut House (729-733 Royal Street)

Casa Montegut was built shortly after the fire of 1794 for Dr. Joseph Montegut (1739-1819), a prominent French medical doctor in the service of the Spanish army and chief surgeon of Charity Hospital (another historical icon funded by Don Andrés Almonester y Roxas in 1796). 

The house is a five-bay Spanish colonial townhouse in a two-story masonry building, with brick and plaster facade, fanlight doors, and a handsome arched central carriageway on the ground floor. The second floor mirrors the five bays on the first level, but four of the upper-level bays are square. The building is crowned with three arched roof dormers, with pilasters. Four attractive pilasters punctuate the building’s front façade. The central carriage way leads to a rear courtyard. The second floor mirador has a handsome wrought iron railing that runs the length of the façade. On the second-level the arched central bay mirrors the ground-level carriageway, with fanlight windows above the horizontal board shutters. Two chimneys bookmark the three central dormers.

This impressive building once dominated the whole block, stretching from Calle de Santa Anna (St. Ann) at one end to Orleans Street at the other. Dr. Montegut owned numerous properties in Nueva Orleans, including his own home at 729-733 Calle Real, 721-727 Calle Real, 325 Calle Real, 329-331 Royal, and 712-714 Calle de Santa Anna, according to the Historical New Orleans Collection’s Vieux Carré Digital Survey. 

Dr. Montegut sold 731 Royal Street to the Sisters of the Ursuline Convent on July 12, 1815, who held it for over a decade before putting it back on the market. The property passed multiple hands over the centuries and is today owned by Renvdin Family Properties, LLC, according to the New Orleans Parish Assessor’s Office. 

More Spanish Than French

Stepping into the Spanish Quarter is like being transported to Spain or a New World Spanish colonial city. Spain’s brief rule in Louisiana not only contributed considerably to the colony’s size, growth and diversity, but it also fostered development that would endure in Louisiana to the present. The Spanish architecture in New Orleans from the late 18th century, therefore, is unique, like the city itself, and it is one of America’s greatest outdoor museums.