By Bruce Eggler
The city will dedicate $3 million in federal Community Development Block Grant money to the museum, founded in the late 1990s.
Landrieu is expected to say that the city is counting on the expanded museum to contribute to the revitalization of Treme by spurring nearby business development, creating jobs and developing a cultural center of importance to the entire city and beyond.
The museum is based in the Treme Villa, an 1828 mansion at 1418 Gov. Nicholls St. that’s also known as the Villa Meilleur or the Meilleur-Goldthwaite House.
The $6 million project will include acquiring the house across the street at 1417-19 Gov. Nicholls and renovating some of the seven buildings in the current museum complex that stretches for a full block along North Villere Street, from Gov. Nicholls to Ursulines Street.
The key projects will be restoring the blighted Passebon Cottage at 1431-33 Ursulines and reconstructing the cottage’s rear slave quarters building.
The entire capital campaign, said Jonn Hankins, the museum’s executive director, “will restore the buildings and grounds of the NOAAM campus to reflect their glory days of the 1840s, when Treme was the most sophisticated African American neighborhood in America.”
The end result, he said, will be “a restored Creole community circa 1845 here in Treme.”
A city spokeswoman said the $6 million campaign also will “serve to support collaboration between area universities and the museum in fields of creative arts, museum studies, art, history, archiving and educational programming.”
The Passebon Cottage, built in 1843 by a well-known builder and ‘free man of color,’ is being restored as part of the museum. It will house a permanent exhibit on the history of Treme.The Passebon Cottage, a two-story double Creole cottage, was built in 1843 by Pierre Passebon, a well-known New Orleans builder and a “free man of color.” Treme is considered to have been the largest and most important community of free people of color, or non-enslaved African-Americans, in the country before the Civil War.
Hankins said the cottage “is in a condition of stabilized blight. The roof is partially imploded, and the interior wood framing is in danger of collapse due to years of water and weather damage coming through the partially exposed roof. The second floor is being held up by temporary jacks. The rear wall is in imminent danger of collapse.” The right side and front brick walls were stabilized after Hurricane Katrina.
Once restored, Hankins said, the Passebon Cottage will house a permanent exhibit on the history of Treme, “providing an experiential architectural context from which to interpret, for future generations, the legacies of the people who pioneered jazz music, Creole cuisine, New Orleans voodoo, second-line funeral processions, the publication of the first newspaper and first anthology of poetry by African-Americans, as well as the pivotal civil rights legacies of Homer Plessey, Alexander P. Tureaud and others.”
The cottage’s slave quarters collapsed on Christmas Eve in 2009 and will be rebuilt.
The building at 1417-19 Gov. Nicholls St. will be acquired to house museum offices and host community events and conferences. It also will be used for storage and perhaps some exhibits.
Before the founding of the museum, all of its historic buildings had fallen into serious disrepair and blight. Beginning in 1996, with the guidance and support of Mayor Marc Morial’s administration, the buildings were renovated and organized into the New Orleans African American Museum of Art, History and Culture.
The museum was formally incorporated in 2000. Since then, it claims to have been a catalyst for both public and private efforts in historic preservation and community development that have helped to revive Treme.
The road has not been smooth, however. In 2003, the museum had to close after Morial’s successor, Ray Nagin, cut off much of its financing, which came almost entirely from the Community Development Block Grant money the city got from the federal government.
At the time, federal officials were investigating how millions of federal dollars had been used to support the museum. In 2005, an audit concluded that much of the money had been spent on museum operations that were not eligible for block grant money, and the city should repay more than $1 million.
The audit did not question the money spent to rehabilitate the old buildings, however, and the city is turning to the same source for the $3 million Landrieu will commit to the museum today.
Without city sponsorship or a staff, the museum remained in limbo when Katrina hit the city in 2005. Floodwaters did not reach the raised villa or its outlying buildings, but wind ripped slates from roofs, uprooted trees, felled a brick fence and otherwise damaged the museum and grounds to the tune of $1 million.
Since 2007 the museum has slowly worked its way back to regular operations, hosting special events and gradually presenting more frequent exhibits, especially since Hankins became the director a little over a year ago. It is currently open Wednesdays through Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.