NEW ORLEANS – When Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, a group of highly trained professionals knew exactly what to do: Find and preserve Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, John James Audubon’s bird prints, a drum from the Battle of New Orleans and city records dating back to 1769.
To a large extent, they succeeded. These and other irreplaceable ingredients of the city’s history, along with Napoleon Bonaparte’s death mask, early Carnival costumes and the paintings of acclaimed primitive artist Clementine Hunter, have been moved to warehouses in the Baton Rouge area, said Emily Sneed, press secretary to Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, whose office is responsible for the state museum network.
She declined to be more specific about their whereabouts, citing security concerns.
Although these artifacts came through the storm undamaged, professionals are working to salvage about 6,000 bound volumes of more than two centuries of property transactions in Orleans Parish – about 10 percent of all the books in the Notarial Archives – that were under 3 feet of water in the basement of the Civil District Court building.
Concern mounted because archivists weren’t allowed inside for more than a week after the storm, prompting Shelly Henley, immediate past president of the Society of Southwest Archivists, to sound the alarm in a letter to editors of several newspapers.
Without professional help, the documents “will soon be unrecoverable,” she wrote. “New Orleans, a city so rich in history, may soon become a city with no history.”
All the documents are backed up on microfilm in Baton Rouge, but saving the actual records is crucial, said Stephen Bruno, custodian of notarial records.
“When you talk about losing land records, you can’t establish who the owner of a property is,” he said. “These records are critical to any kind of real-estate commerce in the city.”
His office has hired Munters, a Swedish firm, to restore the documents. The job could cost as much as $500,000, but, Bruno said, “there’s no price tag on this. They’re too priceless.”
The close call made Angele Davis, Louisiana’s secretary of culture, recreation and tourism, realize that a plan must be developed to protect these vital parts of Louisiana’s past.
“We’ve got a task force going now,” she said. “We have to come up with a plan to protect them.”
Members will include representatives of the Historic New Orleans Collection and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Buildings housing both institutions’ holdings were unscathed, even though the art museum was surrounded by floodwater.
However, the storm reduced a piece in the museum’s sculpture garden to a mass of twisted metal.
Davis’ purview includes the Louisiana State Museum system. Part of the roof was torn off the Old U.S. Mint building, but damage was minimal to the Presbytere and Cabildo, two iconic structures that flank St. Louis Cathedral overlooking Jackson Square.
Another historical storehouse that escaped damage was the basement of New Orleans’ main library, which houses the city archives. These papers date back to 1769, and they include the papers of all New Orleans’ mayors, some court records, photographs, slave records, maps and City Council minutes, said Tania Tetlow, chairwoman of the New Orleans Library Board.
“The historical importance of the survival of these archives cannot be overestimated,” said Loyola history professor Michael Ross, who described them as “one of the nation’s great historical treasures.”
The archives were secure, Tetlow said, because the library was built in the late 1950s, when officials were preoccupied with making buildings strong enough to withstand a nuclear attack.
The major focus of historical restoration has been the Notarial Archive. Munters employees assessed the damage last week, pumped out water and retrieved the books. Damaged books were sent off to a company warehouse, where workers hope to minimize damage by freeze-drying pages and vacuuming the ice off.
The other records were put in air-conditioned trucks to be delivered to a temporary storage site, said Bruno, adding that he does not yet know where they will go.
Older property records, some dating to 1734, are in the Notarial Archives Research Center in the Amoco Building. Although floodwater didn’t damage them, the lack of air conditioning is affecting older documents, he said, and they may be moved where air conditioning is available.
Among other repositories in the New Orleans area are several at Tulane University’s Uptown campus, including the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive; the Special Collections department, the city’s oldest historical research library; and the Amistad Research Center, which specializes in African-American history.
Although curators were optimistic because floodwaters did not get into those buildings, let alone near the collections, they were eager to pump in air conditioning to thwart the dangerous effects of mold and humidity.
JL END POPE
(John Pope is a staff writer for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. He can be contacted at jpope(at)timespicayune.com. Chris Kirkham and James Varnyy contributed to this article.)
AP-NY-09-20-05 1334EDT
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