Squandered Heritage in The Big Easy

From our New Orleans correspondent Laureen Lentz, a former Chicago native, comes word of Squandered Heritage, a website she's created with Karen Gadbois to document threats to the city's architectural legacy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The site includes one prominent building, the striking and beautiful St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, a modernist design dedicated in 1963, shown here in photographs by David Gregor. It's become the focus of a last ditch battle to prevent its demolition by the archidiocese for a new school.


And while most of the other structures pictured on the website are much more modest, perhaps even mundane, they're reminder of how a rich architectural heritage is dependent not just on prominent monuments but on a consistent fabric of buildings of distinctive character, such as the house on Deslonde Street, pictured below, an elegant example of the New Orleans type of shotgun structure that the website reports has been saved and is now undergoing renovation.