Apr 08, 2014 - Sale 2344

Sale 2344 - Lot 162

Price Realized: $ 4,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
(LOUISIANA.) Manuscript proposal and diagram for a riverfront bathing facility in New Orleans. Pair of manuscripts: 2 pages, 13 x 8 inches, and one page, 12 x 7 3/4 inches, both folded sheets with integral blanks; moderate dampstaining with slight loss of text, with crude repair on verso of diagram. In an attractive 1/4 morocco tray case. New Orleans, 1796
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A petition by New Orleans resident Bernardo Trémoulet to create a public bathing facility on the banks of the Mississippi River in the heart of the city. Trémoulet promises that separate facilities would be available for both sexes to bathe in the river ("ambos sexos con la devida separacion puedan tomar baños saludables intenta establecer estos en la orillas del rio"), in the shade of a grove of orange trees that gave this neighborhood the name "Alameda." The proposed facility was between St. Louis and Toulouse Streets, in the heart of what is now the French Quarter, where the riverboat Natchez presently docks. The petition is dated 19 July 1796, and bears a signed note of approval by the Spanish governor Francisco Luis Héctor, Barón de Carondelet, dated 27 July 1796.
Accompanying the petition is a hand-drawn plan of the bathhouse and environs. It shows the neighboring streets and four house lots to the northwest, as well as the orange grove, the outlines of the proposed structure, and the banks of the river. A pair of small profiles below the plan show the exact slope of the river bank within the structure. The plan is attested with the signature of surveyor Carlos Trudeau (best known as designer of nearby Lafayette Square), 1 August 1796.
Trémoulet soon sold his rights to architect Barthelemy Lafon, who never managed to build the bath house, but continued to assert his rights under the new American administration which arrived seven years later. See "The Vieux Carre, New Orleans: Its Plan, Its Growth, Its Architecture," page 50.