🎶 2022-08-25 02:27:00 – Paris/France.
The tattered pale blue facade of Perseverance Hall was all that remained intact of the old jazz hall on Wednesday afternoon. The rest of the wooden structure, at 1644 N. Villere St. in New Orleans' 7th Ward, had crumbled to rubble during the previous two rainy days.
The late XNUMXth century building was damaged in Hurricane Ida last year. The back part was a gaping hole and one of the remaining walls was braced with wooden supports. The structure was in danger of imminent loss, according to a letter to the editor written by architectural preservation advocate Frederick Starr in September.
Perseverance Hall, a jazz landmark in New Orleans' 7th Ward, was damaged by Hurricane Ida in 2021 and collapsed nearly a year later.
STAFF PHOTO BY DOUG MacCASH
Starr called City Hall and urged residents to take action before it was too late. Now Starr's fears have come true.
Darryl Montana, leader of the Yellow Pocahontas Mardi Gras Indians and owner of a home near Perseverance Hall, said the building was "leaning from Ida."
"Yesterday or the day before," he said, a passerby commented that "it's going to be fine."
"Fortunately," Montana said, "no one was standing there" when the old building gave in to gravity.
Starr, a former professor of history and architecture at Tulane University, said the structure was erected by a group of free black people who called themselves The Perseverance Society, known in English as the Perseverance Benevolent Mutual Aid Association.
Only the pale blue facade of Perseverance Hall, a jazz mecca in the 7th arrondissement of New Orleans, is still standing.
STAFF PHOTO BY DOUG MacCASH
These mutual aid associations provided health and funeral insurance for their members and were common in the town of Crescent. The Société de la Persévérance built the hall on rue North Villere in 1880. It served as a meeting place and concert hall.
Perseverance Hall should not be confused with the historic Perseverance Hall No. 4, an older Masonic Lodge building, also built by the Perseverance Society, which is located in Armstrong Park.
At the start of the 20th century, Perseverance Hall became an incubator for a new form of American art, a "base for a Who's Who of early jazz musicians", Starr said, including Sidney Bechet, Buddy Bolden, Johnny Dodds and others.
The building's role changed in 1949, when it was sold for $6 to the Holy Aid and Comfort Spiritual Church, according to the Orleans Parish Assessor's Office, which recently appraised the property at 000 $42. The building alone was valued at $600.
In a May video produced by WWOZ radio, the church's newest leader, Harold Lewis, recalls being told that at parties held in the building in the 1940s and 1950s, attendees sprinkled the floor with sand to facilitate dancing. Lewis said he hoped to repair the building and reinstate it "as a neighborhood facility."
“I believe as a neighborhood we need places like this to survive,” he said in the video.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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