In making a burned-out husk of a former corner store her place of business — and later, her private home — Miriam Carter resisted the urge to install interior walls, relying instead on three 20-foot pillars that run the center line of the ceiling from the floor for structural support. “To avoid jackhammering the slab, I ran all of the plumbing along the baseboards to be l-mounted to the walls,” she said.
“The work I do is restoration, not renovation. I never remove the original lath and plaster, or any of a building’s original structure. If I can find a building’s original footprint, I will return it to that. The most I will do to lath and plaster is to cut a central joint patch. These houses were built to expand and contract through their transoms. These houses have stood for 160 years, so I just try to let them do their thing.”
Carter discovered Algiers Point in 1981 shortly after moving to New Orleans from Des Moines, Iowa.
“I discovered this perfect neighborhood. There were Black, white, Mexican, and Asian people. It was so wholesome because it was so well mixed. I liked that it was working class, affordable, and had trees and grass.”
She bought her first house in the neighborhood in 1985. After witnessing numerous properties stripped of their architectural fixtures by clueless renovators and thieves, she became a figure in preservation and restoration.
She met her late husband, Patrick “Tony” Carter, in the early ‘90s. He was a Vietnam Navy veteran and aPOW who endured a stay in the Hanoi Hilton before going to work as a Chicago police officer. He came to New Orleans on a whim. Together, they eventually owned 11 properties in the neighborhood, including one suspected of being the old Belleville convent.
“I used to regularly see Blain Kern Sr.’s Mercedes parked outside, where he would be sitting and reminiscing with his mother about the old neighborhood,” Carter said.
The couple restored the properties together, sometimes with assistance from contractors with Division 9 LLC, the commercial construction company Carter established after the 1984 World’s Fair.
“It was when contractors had screwed everyone while others were getting screwed and sued,” she said. “The test for the license was made much more arduous to pass, but you had to pass it before you could run a contracting business. That was a tough test. I figured if I could pass it, I was ready for anything.”
The Carters were living elsewhere on the Point in the early 1990s when a disgruntled patron or neighbor heaved a Molotov cocktail into the two-story, circa 1866 corner store across the street from Tony’s Algiers Point Sports Bar, Tony Carter’s place of business.
The ancient building roared into vociferous fire, spewing out blackened, gasoline-laced gushes of oily smoke. Within minutes, it was a charred hulk; its vinyl siding melted upon the building’s frame.
“The smell was horrible,” Carter recalled. “I did not want that across the street from my husband’s place of business. He deserved better than to have that horrible, bombed-out monstrosity across the street.
“I got the name of the building’s owner, Jerome McBride Sr. I sent a fax to his office, ‘Call Miriam Carter,’ and a phone number. I did this every day for 40 days. Turns out he was a Wedgewood dealer on a buying trip to London. Upon his return, he called right away. He was going to have the building demolished. Instead, we came to a mutually agreeable selling price.”
The building’s transoms and cased openings remained intact, and its original commercial entrance was returned to its original corner location. The restoration left the beams exposed and unpainted. Some of them bear graffiti or messages etched into the wood. One message advises, “Jesus Saves.”
When the melted exterior siding was removed, Carter discovered original advertisements for Holsum bread and other foodstuffs painted on the original wood siding, which had been spared from the flames. Last year, she employed artist M.J. Robitaille to paint a mural on the Eliza Street façade depicting a pair of bluebirds perched on branches of American holly.
“The birds are a happy thing,” she said, “and the streets of Algiers Point were once planted with American holly trees that were all lost to blight. This speaks to the neighborhood’s history.”
Her late husband’s collections of victrolas and objects d’art depicting them are found throughout the 1,800-square-foot space on the first floor, as are his collections of figurines bearing the likeness of the Nipper, the mascot for the Victor Talking Machine Company and RCA. Collections of blue and white Delft china are family heirlooms. Several windows — many stained glass — hang throughout the home in various heights suspended from the ceiling.
“I like windows,” Carter said. “People are always giving me windows.”
Take a tour of this home and six other private residences (and one bonus) at PRC’s Spring Home Tour, presented by Entablature Design + Build, April 5 and 6 in Algiers Point!
