The Commercial Store, Warehouse & Office

The Commercial Store, Warehouse and Office.
This building type, which was adaptable for a range of functions, is still a dominant element on several streets in the Central Business District. It first arrived in New Orleans in 1830, with the construction of a four story specimen on Magazine Street near Canal, designed by the prominent New York architectural firm of Town and Davis. From that point until the advent of the Civil War in 1861, it was the single most common building type in the area. Basically designed to make the fullest use of a small and narrow lot, these buildings were built side by side, ranging from three to five stories in height. Only the front and rear elevations were broken by windows, as the buildings were common wall designs, with only the corner structures having the luxury of side windows. The layout of the interiors of these simple buildings depended upon the commercial use to which they were put. A warehouse would have no need for formal partition walls or interior decoration as would an office, but both could easily fit within the simple rectangular shapes of these buildings.

External Features and Characteristics.
This building type is, without exception, a common wall masonry structure. That is to say, it is flanked by other buildings of similar, if not identical design. The facade walls are placed on the front property line, and in some cases, the rear facades rest on the rear lot line. In situations where there is more than one identical structure, the repetition of the door and window openings makes it appear that you are looking at a single large structure rather than a series of individual buildings, each of which may only measure twenty-five to thirty-five feet in width. The street fronts of these buildings consist of a series of regularly spaced bays on the ground floor with regularly spaced window openings on the upper floors. The ground floor structure is either fronted with a granite post and lintel system, or a cast-iron post and lintel design attached to masonry piers. Most of the granite street front details are very simple, with the cast-iron versions tending to be much more ornamental. The large openings between these columns were fitted with multi-fold wooden doors which could be folded back towards the interior of the building so as to provide an unobstructed means of access to the first floor. There is a considerable range of designs that can be used on these doors with some being more elegantly detailed than others, depending upon the internal functions. The upper floor window openings tend to diminish in size as the height of the building increases, with the second floor windows being full length. All upper story windows were generally fitted with shutters. Buildings designed to accommodate office uses featured louvered shutters. On the second floors of offices, one often finds an exterior balcony cantilevered from the facade wall. On warehouses and stores, the balcony is not used; rather, a simple canopy topped with standing seam metal roofing and supported on metal brackets is installed to keep the sun and rain away from the ground floor openings.

The exterior character of these buildings changed as the 19th century progressed. The simple, high quality exposed brick facades of the Greek Revival style examples of the 1830s and 1840s were replaced in the 1850s and 1860s with stucco finished fronts in the popular Italianate style. The ready availability of cast-iron as a building material in the 1850s and 1860s led to the installation of larger and more ornate balconies, as well as ornamental hood moldings over the facade windows. Window openings themselves changed from simple square headed forms to segmentally or fully round arched forms.

By the 1880s, the designs of the street level fronts of these commercial buildings began to change into a form that was more conducive to the display of merchandise. The first floor was divided into three bays, with the narrow central bay containing the entrance to the store. The two wider outer bays were fitted with large sheets of plate glass, serving to provide more natural light for the interior of the building, as well as offering the pedestrian an unobstructed view of the store's merchandise. The metal frames of these storefronts became rather thin, further emphasizing the large expanse of glass at ground level.