New Orleans' Art Deco Lakefront Airport terminal sheds its Cold War shell

4re Nut · Oct 2, 2013

I thought this might be of interest to you airplane types. Heck, Bob Parks can probably recall the original christening in '34.

Older article: Lakefront Airport landmark's sad story gets happy ending | NOLA.com

The way some preservationists saw it, the Lakefront Airport terminal building, one of the finest examples of Depression-era art deco design in New Orleans, should have been put on the critical list in the mid-1960s after Cold War paranoia prompted the state to convert it into a cement-encased fallout shelter.

In 2005, guardians of Louisiana's endangered works of architecture braced for the building's last rites, after lake water swept inland by Hurricane Katrina swamped the structure.
But instead of a wake, a celebration is being planned.

Thanks to a special pool of Federal Emergency Management Agency money earmarked for historic restorations, the terminal's concrete tomb has been stripped away to reveal the original beige aggregate skin and nearly 150 windows that were bricked over five decades ago.

Next on the to-do-list are interior renovations scheduled to begin in August that include the removal of a massive slab that sealed off the second-floor balcony overlooking the grand lobby, which wowed visitors when the building opened its doors in 1934.

Lakefront Airport has one of only a handful of art deco terminals still standing in America.

Advocates of the ongoing $17 million restoration say the opportunity to save it, while staying faithful to the original design, is nothing short of a miracle.

"Preservationists never say die,'' said Carolyn Bennett, head of the Foundation for Historical Louisiana. "We're often there at the eleventh hour. But with this building, it was at the 11:55 hour.''

The project has been a labor of love for Alton Ochsner Davis, who leads the architectural team hired by the state.

"As an architect, there's very few buildings that you see in this good a shape that are this old with this much decorative material,'' said Davis, who returned to his hometown in 2008 to take on the job after a 25-year career in the Northeast.

"They just don't build them like this any more. To be able to work on a prize like this is really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It's the Super Bowl of architecture in a lot of ways.''

Until the unusual excavation got the green light two years ago, the terminal was often referred to as the "big monolithic block'' on the airport's southernmost boundary.

Today, a refurbished exterior lights up the landscape, its exquisite details once again in plain view. Just below the roof line, more than three dozen ornamental sculpture panels that ring the building have been painstakingly rehabilitated.

When the building was enclosed in the mid-1960s, architects from the Cimini and Meric firm installed a large metal grid on the building's exterior to hold the new exterior in place. In order to anchor it, workers had to shear off the top third of the 9-foot-high cast-relief panels that depict images of aircraft, birds, workers and geometric shapes.

By using photographs discovered at Tulane University, specialists brought to New Orleans for the current restoration have reconstructed the missing handmade sections of the ornamental panels, using Portland cement with a marble aggregate.

Davis has said he believes the architects who designed the metal grid always intended for their work to be undone someday. He gives them kudos for taking pains to limit the damage.

"They created a great big pillbox around the existing building,'' he said. "And by anchoring it on the top, in the middle and on the bottom, they avoided drilling a lot of holes."

During a recent tour of the site, Davis offered more words of praise.

"They could have destroyed a lot more than they did,'' he said. "They did it wisely so that there was enough of the original character of the building and historic elements that we were able to reproduce exactly what it was in 1934.''

Davis and his colleagues from Richard C. Lambert Consultants have taken care to preserve the interior, beginning with cataloging, labeling and storing the ornamental details.

The inventory includes wall sconces, directional signs, door transoms with original hardware, and three custom-made, folding-door telephone booths that sit near the foot of the main marble staircase.

Every item has been packaged and stored in bins on the site, while other details such as aluminum handrails and original glass panes were given protective coverings.

The firm took even more elaborate steps to preserve six murals by artist Xavier Gonzalez, which have suffered minimal damage. On the advice of an art conservationist, the murals have been placed inside wooden, climate-controlled boxes until interior renovations are complete.

Construction bids for the project's estimated $8 million interior phase are in hand and plans call for the state agency responsible for the airport to select a contractor later this month.

The indoor work is expected to take about eight months, though airport officials hope to begin showcasing a nearly-finished product in March when New Orleans hosts college basketball's Final Four tournament.

Davis, the grandson of renowned surgeon and researcher Dr. Alton Ochsner, readily acknowledges his obsession with the terminal rehabilitation.

"I don't shut up when I'm in the building,'' he said. "I love telling people about it. And no detail is too obscure to warrant an explanation."

For example, he gets animated when he talks of using old photographs to re-create the missing pendant light fixtures, made from bronze or aluminum with smoked glass, that once hung over the lobby's two wings.

Entering the western end of the building that once housed the Walnut Room dining room, he points to walls where marble wainscoting and walnut paneling will be replaced; a section of original, tongue-and-groove cypress flooring he intends to preserve; and the spot where hand-crafted aluminum doors with leather panels will go.

Then there are the surprises.

"When we looked at old plans, we would see where there were doors,'' Davis said. "We couldn't see them until we cut away some of the drywall, and sure enough a door was there.

"In other places, we removed drywall and discovered marble behind it. Then there were the hidden safes. They've long since been opened. There was nothing in them.''

The architectural gem on Lake Pontchartrain's south shore is one of the many monuments to the political ego of Gov. Huey P. Long, who launched the terminal project in 1929. The governor drafted the same architectural firm, Weiss, Dreyfous & Seiferth, that had conceived his signature creation, the 34-story Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge.

In February 1934, he held a festive ribbon-cutting as a freshman U.S. senator -- with a vision for using the building as a showcase for visiting politicians and news reporters -- as he unleashed a populist campaign for the White House.

That bid would be cut short by his assassination a year later, but the airport remained a symbol of his fierce ambitions.

Newspapers and aviation journals hailed it as the gold standard of airport terminals, noting its many amenities: Living quarters where passengers and pilots could rest, a medical clinic with a surgical suite, a parachute storage room, a retail store, a post office, an upscale restaurant and a reception hall.

The interior was described as an art deco wonderland, highlighted by the Gonzalez murals and an array of stone wall and floor treatments, including pink granite, red, gray and beige marble, and ceramic and mosaic tiles.

Writers gushed over the lavish touches found throughout the terminal's two-and-a-half-story lobby, from the ceiling-level, bronze-colored frieze depicting developments in aviation to the plaster reliefs of industrial equipment, installed just below the balcony, to the massive inlaid compass in the polished terrazzo floor.

The restoration calls for bringing back all that detail, effectively turning back the clock on what has been likened to architectural sacrilege.

"To go from near death to complete rebirth, especially when it's reborn to what it was in 1934, is just remarkable,'' said Vincent Caire, a pilot and amateur historian who filmed a documentary on the airport who now works for the state agency that oversees the facility and other real estate assets of the defunct Orleans Levee Board.

"I wonder what Huey Long would say. I get chills every time I see the building.''

Airport officials say they're not just looking to open a museum. By next summer, they intend to have an operational terminal with office space available for rent, a state-of-the-art kitchen, a full-service restaurant and a cafe.

Landings and takeoffs are at about 55 percent of pre-Katrina levels, according to Louis Capo, who heads the agency that oversees the defunct Orleans Levee Board's real estate holdings, which include the airport.

"Once this airport terminal is open, we think it's going to become a national story,'' Capo said. "And along with other improvements, that will help the volume of activity increase.''

Once the restoration is complete, members of the preservation community are confident that the terminal will become an attraction, hosting receptions, fundraisers and lavish social gatherings.

"What's been done so far is already more than I ever imagined,'' said Bennett, who heads the Foundation for Historical Louisiana. "I mean from bomb shelter to beautiful landmark once again, it's just remarkable.

"If they do for the inside what's been done outside, we'll have a true destination spot, literally and figuratively.''
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Newer article: New Orleans' Art Deco Lakefront Airport terminal sheds its Cold War shell | NOLA.com

As T. Sellers Meric and business partner Benedict Cimini put pencils to paper a half century ago to redesign the Lakefront Airport terminal, preservation stood at the heart of each decision the architects made.

Not only did they want to preserve the local populace from nuclear fallout, but they also wanted to preserve the classic Art Deco building on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain that they were about to ensconce in concrete two inches thick.

At the height of the Cold War, Cimini and Meric produced an award-winning mid-century remodeling that turned the terminal at the end of Downman Road into a fortress of horizontal lines and right angles. Fifty years later, architects and engineers of another generation have restored the 1933 building to its original appearance in the heydays of Huey Long.

That final restoration will be publicly unveiled this Saturday at 10 a.m.

Meric, now 85, (Cimini died in 2007) is sanguine about the dismantling of his design, which the American Institute of Architects honored in 1964 but had fallen out of favor in recent years.

"I thought we did a great job, but I wasn't attached to it," he said from a couch in his living room. With its square angles and vertical facades, his house in the Lakewood South neighborhood architecturally nods toward his ideas for the airport. Both were built in the same era. "These are different times."

As is the case with many things in New Orleans, change for the airport catalyzed with Hurricane Katrina.

Sitting on the bank of Lake Pontchartrain, the terminal swallowed a few feet of water and was battered by high winds and rain during the storm. Wilma Heaton, who was working for the Orleans Levee District, had an office on the second floor and was one of the first people to survey the damage.

"I just sat here crying," she recalled. "I said, 'This place has to come back.'"

As federal disaster aid flowed to New Orleans, FEMA sent $10 million to restore the Lakefront Airport terminal. Barred from rebuilding several structures outside the new levee system, officials redirected another $9 million in federal dollars from those projects to the terminal.

The consulting firm RCL Architecture of Mandeville signed onto the restoration project in 2006 and began four years of research into the building's history.

Designed by architects with Weiss, Dreyfous and Seiferth, construction on the original building began around 1929. Lakefront Airport started taking commercial flights in 1933, although it wasn't officially christened until Feb. 9, 1934.

The building is steeped in history. Amelia Earhart stayed in its VIP suites on her way to California to launch her final flight. Air races were common occurrences and spectators watched from the terminal's rooftop observation deck. Murals by the late Spanish-American artist Xavier Gonzalez spanned the central atrium's second-floor balconies.

Long, a U.S. senator by then, had a fully operating surgical suite installed onsite, preparing for the worst possible scenarios. The terminal also housed a post office, a kitchen, cafe, restaurant, a station for immigration and customs and offices for the federal departments of Agriculture and Commerce.

Inside it was a small city and an architectural marvel, unlike any other art deco site in New Orleans because of its level of detail. Built for about $3.5 million at the time, it couldn't be built from scratch today, said Alton Ochsner Davis, an architect who led the recent restoration project for RCL.

"There are so many features to this building," he said. "It would be cost-prohibitive."

Cimini and Meric understood this, but in the months following the Cuban-missile crisis, the threat of nuclear war took precedence. Still, they went through enormous pains to preserve as much of the original architecture as possible as they bricked up windows and sheathed the building in concrete and steel.

"They recognized that the completely different art deco design had value and was appreciated by many people, artisans and civilians alike," said R. Vaughn Cimini, Benedict Cimini's son. "And they thought it would be a disservice to society to destroy it."

Meric said he didn't design the 1960s renovation to be temporary, but he believes that had it not been done the building would likely be in worse shape than what Davis found it in.

"We probably protected the building for 50 years," he said.

Meric and Cimini's decisions turned the restoration project into a revelatory treasure hunt, Davis said. As each wall was removed a new feature would appear. Crews found six of Gonzalez's eight murals still hanging in their original spots, carefully covered with protective rice paper. The Louisiana State Museum has returned a seventh mural, but an eighth one was destroyed. The Non-Flood Protection Asset Management Authority plans to host a fundraiser on Feb. 9 to help pay for the existing paintings' restorations. Following the terrazzo tiling on the floor, Davis retraced the terminal's original hallways, moving walls and doors back to their original places wherever possible.

The restoration removed the large boardroom Meric and Cimini had installed above the lobby, once again opening the atrium's nicotine-stained ceiling two stories up to the open air. Davis said his team salvaged enough tiles to recreate the original colors of the painted ceiling before decades of smoking travelers had sullied it.

Davis also orchestrated the renovation of the airport's fabled Walnut Room, a popular dance hall and dining space during the war years and the 1950s.

Along with its terminal, Lakefront Airport is undergoing its own small renaissance. It handles roughly 190 takeoffs and landings every day, and in June it restored commercial airline passenger service for the first time since 1946.

"It's like a battered child," Heaton, who is now a commissioner with the Non-Flood Asset Management Authority that oversees the airport, said of the terminal. "But it survived, and it's back and it's a new day."
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A few pics, more at the above links.

Gatorrari · Oct 2, 2013

Marvelous! Reminds me of the similar renovation of the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport in N.Y.C.

JCR · Oct 2, 2013

Very, very cool. I love Art Deco.

JeremyJon · Oct 2, 2013

great post Steve!

Bob Parks · Oct 2, 2013

4re Nut said: ↑

I thought this might be of interest to you airplane types. Heck, Bob Parks can probably recall the original christening in '34.

Older article: Lakefront Airport landmark's sad story gets happy ending | NOLA.com

Newer article: New Orleans' Art Deco Lakefront Airport terminal sheds its Cold War shell | NOLA.comA few pics, more at the above links.
Click to expand...

In 1934 I spent a lot of time at Hoover Field, the old Washington, D.C.airport, watching things like Ford Tri-Motors and Curtiss Condors. Unlike the beautiful terminal in this post, the terminal there was a shabby disgrace to the nation's capitol city. My father did some architectural work on the new Washington National on the Potomac in 1939-40.

NürScud · Oct 2, 2013

Very cool.. Impressive!

tazandjan · Oct 2, 2013

Hope they do something similar to San Antonio's old original airport as they rebuild the terminals there.

The original one here in Albuquerque was preserved, but too small to actually use for day to day operations.

Tcar · Oct 2, 2013

tazandjan said: ↑

The original one here in Albuquerque was preserved, but too small to actually use for day to day operations.
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I grew up in ABQ, spent many hours in that airport. We'd go to the Fred Harvey restaurant there for Sunday Dinner after church... white tablecloths, etc.

It is 'Pueblo Style' with stucco, wood Vigas, and wood ceilings, flagstone floors... only had about 6 gates.

We'd watch the Frontier DC-3's, the Continental Viscounts and Convair 340's, the the TWA Constellations (later the Super G's) and Martin 4-0-4's. And the Cutter-Carr Bonanzas and Twin Bonanzas that ran the air taxi service from there to Los Alamos for the Nuclear Scientists.

Great memories. It's a museum now, I think.

davebdave · Oct 2, 2013

Can't forget about the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia

The Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport: Where Planes Landed by Sea | Untapped Cities
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Bob Parks · Oct 2, 2013

davebdave said: ↑

Can't forget about the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia

The Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport: Where Planes Landed by Sea | Untapped Cities
Click to expand...

All these old Art Deco terminals are beautiful and well designed. To me, they depart from the cold surgical expressions that too many times confront a person when they are approaching an edifice that should offer some semblance of welcoming comfort. There has to be a connection from structures to the human.

Gatorrari · Oct 3, 2013

davebdave said: ↑

Can't forget about the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia
Click to expand...

I didn't forget - see reply #2. But thanks for including the photos.

davebdave · Oct 3, 2013

Gatorrari said: ↑

I didn't forget - see reply #2. But thanks for including the photos.
Click to expand...

Whoops

Gatorrari · Oct 3, 2013

It's always good when any old transportation terminal is returned to its former glory.

When I first lived in Philadelphia in the mid-80's, 30th Street Station (used by Amtrak and SEPTA, the local commuter train authority) was a run-down mess, but something was done, and today it's a marvelous place again.

Similar magic was done to N.Y.C.'s Grand Central Terminal, Washington's Union Station, L.A.'s Union Passenger Terminal, and Seattle's King Street Station.

Crawler · Oct 3, 2013

The destruction of Penn Station in NYC was tragic. What was erected in its place added insult to injury.

4re Nut · Oct 3, 2013

davebdave said: ↑

Can't forget about the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia

The Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport: Where Planes Landed by Sea | Untapped Cities
Click to expand...

Very cool!

Maybe this thread will become the defacto "cool airport" thread.

Gatorrari · Oct 3, 2013

dinodan said: ↑

The destruction of Penn Station in NYC was tragic. What was erected in its place added insult to injury.
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Agreed, though I was just a bit too young to have experienced the "old" Penn Station. But you are right; what is there now looks like a glorified bus station.

They have been talking for some time about moving Penn Station to the Post Office building one block to the west, and that building does have some class to it. There would still be a subway connection (8th Ave.), but I don't like that fact that the station will be one more (long) block further away from Herald Square and the rest of the midtown retail district. I guess it's a matter of what one wants out of life......

Tcar · Oct 3, 2013

Old Penn Station (New York)...

New York's original Penn Station Pictures - CBS News

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New Orleans' Art Deco Lakefront Airport terminal sheds its Cold War shell

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