There was good news and bad news when the City Council’s Quality of Life Committee got an update Monday on a Central Business District building that partially collapsed late last year.
Work to restore the headquarters of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities at O’Keefe Avenue and Lafayette Street should begin in the coming weeks, but the streets around it could remain closed into early next year, committee members learned.
The LEH submitted plans on June 6 to restore its building. Those plans have “largely been approved,” and work could begin by Aug. 1, Jeffrey Schwartz, director of the city’s Office of Community and Economic Development, told the committee.
“My colleagues at HDLC and Safety and Permits reviewed that in a matter of days to make sure that the city was not going to be a hold up in any way in terms of the work restoring the building,” he said.
The building, known as Turners’ Hall, was built in 1868.
After the partial collapse, a city official told Preservation in Print that large trucks and heavy traffic hitting potholes on O’Keefe next to the building caused it to shake violently, which was damaging to its historic masonry, and helped lead to its destabilization.
Pillars at the bottom of the building were undergoing tuckpointing and re-stuccoing when the partial collapse happened on Dec. 14.
During that repair work, bad stucco that had suffocated the brick beneath was removed. As it was taken off, support for the building failed and it began to fall. Crews braced the building, and no further collapse happened.
It was one of several buildings in the city’s older neighborhoods that collapsed toward the end of 2024.
Councilwoman Lesli Harris, who chairs the Quality of Life Committee and in whose district Turners’ Hall is located, asked Jay Dufour, the Chief Building Official and Chief Plan Examiner for the Department of Safety and Permits, what could be done to stop similar collapses in the future.
He said a survey of brick masonry buildings could help.
“I was reading something about that earlier, that they do things like that in Europe,” he said.
On Monday, O’Keefe and Lafayette remained closed to traffic. Schwartz said the streets may not reopen until January.
Harris asked what the city could do to help make sure businesses in the area are not affected by the ongoing closures. She noted that Maypop, a restaurant across the street from the LEH building, closed in recent months. Its owners cited the collapse and its effect on its business as the reason.
Schwartz said efforts to inform the public that businesses in the area are still open are ongoing but that safety is the priority.
“Right now, we are working to do everything we can to make sure that the building is restored to a point we are confident in,” he said.
Rick Hathaway, Director of the Department of Public Works, said the timeline to reopen lanes of O’Keefe could be moved up as work on the restoration progresses.
