Jacques Nicolas Bussière (often simply J.N.B.) de Pouilly (Châtel-Censoir, Yonne, France, 7 July 1804 – 21 February 1875, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA), was a Franco-American architect. He was one of the most important architects in New Orleans during the nineteenth century, particularly known for his work for the Francophone population of the city, as well as the current St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, and his designs for funereal architecture in the city's cemeteries.
Early life De Pouilly was born in Châtel-Censoir, a small village in the western part of Burgundy, northwest of Dijon and south of Auxerre (préfecture of the newly created Département of Yonne). His birth in July 1804 occurred at a critical juncture in French history, during the waning months of the Consulate, just before Napoléon was to crown himself French Emperor. He had four siblings, including a brother, Joseph Isidore, likely born in 1809, with whom he would later practice architecture in New Orleans.
Virtually nothing is known of his education and particularly his architectural training. Ann Masson, the architectural historian to have worked most extensively on de Pouilly, speculates that he may have attended a regional Ecole des Beaux-Arts in either Besançon, Troyes, or Lyon. Despite de Pouilly's clear knowledge of the trends of French architecture and the development of the eclectic style called the Néo-Grec among a new young generation of talented designers in the 1830s, no records at the national Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris betray that he ever matriculated there, nor has any other evidence surfaced to suggest that he studied in one of the ateliers (studios) officially or unofficially associated with the school.
Move to New Orleans and early success Likely immersed in the field of architecture by the mid-1820s, early sources indicate that he married Mlle. Laurence Drigny, the daughter of a French architect, at the Eglise St-Roch on the rue Faubourg St-Honoré in Paris on 1 October 1825, and that their daughter Lucienne was born in Paris on 6 January 1833. By December that year de Pouilly had immigrated with his family to New Orleans, and he was listed in an 1834 city directory as an architect with an office at 78 St. Philip Street, in the Vieux Carré, or French Quarter.
De Pouilly's first notable work in the United States was the new City Exchange (later St. Louis) Hotel (1835) in the Vieux Carré, finished in 1838, the Francophone community's answer to the Anglophones’ St. Charles Hotel on the other (southwestern) side of Canal Street in the “American Quarter.” His reputation as a trained architect seems to have preceded him in garnering the commission, and he completed it with the aid of his brother Joseph, who had arrived in New Orleans by this point. The hotel's arcaded ground floor, reserved for individual retailers, recalled the shopping district of the rue de Rivoli in central Paris by Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine dating from 1811. Described soon after its completion as a "magnificent edifice which is one of the greatest ornaments of the city," it contained a large lobby (or vestibule) that measured 40 feet (12 m) by 127 feet (39 m), a grand ballroom, and public parlors. It was destroyed by fire in 1841, then rebuilt with fireproof materials using a $600,000 loan from the Citizens Bank, whose new building de Pouilly had also designed in 1836. In 1837–38 de Pouilly also designed buildings for the adjacent Passage de la Bourse. The original City Exchange Hotel was host to a wide range of important people within the South. During the pre-Civil War period, the hotel was host to a large number of balls and meetings, the most well-known being the bal travesti, where Henry Clay gave his only speech in Louisiana, in February 1843.Francis Burns, "Henry Clay Visits New Orleans," in Louisiana Historical Quarterly 27 (July 1944), pp. 745–47.
The St. Louis Hotel's defining feature, however, was its vast rotunda, "open from noon to three o'clock for business only," where, in the periods when New Orleans served as the Louisiana state capital, the state legislature occasionally met in session. However, it became best-known (and infamous today) as one of the central meccas for slave-dealing, which was ubiquitous in New Orleans, a major distribution point for slaves sent to the states of the Deep South, particularly the Mississippi Valley, brought there by sea from Upper South departure points, such as Baltimore, Richmond, and Washington. An auction block was installed in the rotunda, covered with a dome composed of a honeycomb of clay pots, and famously illustrated (somewhat inaccurately) in British visitor James Silk Buckingham’s The Slave States of America (1842), with an extensive accompanying textual description of such a scene.
The hotel served as a military hospital for Union soldiers during the Civil War occupation of New Orleans beginning in April 1862; during the Reconstruction era (1865–77), it was sold to the state of Louisiana, where it became the de facto state capitol building during New Orleans’ last stint as the state capital. It was there that the Republican Stephen B. Packard relinquished the governor's office after the Compromise of 1877 that March, when newly elected U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew military forces from the South, thus ending Reconstruction and allowing white-supremacist Democratic regimes to return to control of Southern statewide and local offices for the next 85 years. The hotel deteriorated as it shuttled between a series of owners until it was finally destroyed in the hurricane of September 1915. The Omni Royal Orleans, built in 1969 and unconnected with the St. Louis Hotel, now stands on its site.
De Pouilly's reputation after the 1841 fire at the St. Louis Hotel appears to have been affected very little, as he continued to garner numerous commissions in the city center. Other works in the 1830s and 1840s included townhouses for prominent French-speaking Creole citizens, including a home and pharmacy for Louis Dufilho on Chartres Street in 1837 (now the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum), and the Olivier family's residence at 828 Toulouse Street in 1839. In 1842 he and his contractor partner Ernest Goudchaux received commissions for St. Augustine Church in what is now Tremé, one of the most prominent African-American Catholic parishes in New Orleans; the residence for a Mme. Avert; and Edouard Bertus, a fencing master; as well as the St. Charles (or Camp Street or American) Theatre in the American Quarter on Poydras Street.
Funerary architecture New Orleans' official topographical elevation is five feet below sea level, and the high water table below the ground surface means that the soil is unsuitable for underground burials. This has presented a problem for the city but also an opportunity for funerary architecture, as the city's residents have as a result preferred above-ground entombments. De Pouilly became intimately involved with the development of this type at the same time he was designing other buildings for living inhabitants, partly due to his partnership with Goudchaux and partly from his own acquisition of an interest in a granite and marble yard near the St. Louis Cemeteries, established in 1789 not far to the northwest of the inland boundaries of the Vieux Carré, eight city blocks from the banks of the Mississippi. Considered at the time a suburban location (as the city limits stretched no farther than the limits of simply today's French Quarter), in the subsequent years they have become surrounded by various residential and commercial districts.
De Pouilly's contacts within the Francophone community in New Orleans provided him ample opportunities to experiment with funerary monuments as early as 1836. One significant cemetery project came when local merchant Alexandre Grailhe commissioned de Pouilly to design an elaborate Egyptian revival family tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2. Construction of this tomb commenced in 1850. A series of other cemetery projects followed for de Pouilly, mostly at the St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 and mostly for local people of considerable financial means. His designs were heavily influenced by the architecture found in the Parisian cemetery Père Lachaise, coincidentally itself founded the year de Pouilly was born (1804), which at the time was also well outside the medieval walls of Paris before the expansion of the city in the 1850s and 1860s under Napoléon III. De Pouilly must have known Père Lachaise intimately, as several tomb designs of his actually replicate tombs in the Parisian necropolis.
De Pouilly's prolific tomb commissions came from both wealthy New Orleans families and the city's numerous benevolent organizations. The first above-ground tombs at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 were erected by 1804 and were common by 1818. The movement toward above-ground tombs was hastened by the elevation of the regular parish Church of St. Louis to cathedral status in 1794 with the creation of the new Diocese of New Orleans. As a consequence, burial of members of the clergy or other privileged people of the community could no longer take place within the church, and so they and their families sought the prestige of an above-ground tomb at St. Louis Cemetery, in concert with the economic prosperity that New Orleans enjoyed as the foremost U.S. port around the Gulf of Mexico. For these reasons, tombs at St. Louis Cemetery came to be considered status symbols in the community.
To achieve designs suitable for his clients, de Pouilly made use of carved marble and granite, molded plaster, and cast-iron railings, all in styles that often carried historic significance or symbolism. His designs for tombs, essentially decorated cubical or prismatic vaults, drew also on the works of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand published between 1799 and 1810. They frequently consist of a prostyle pedimented front resting on two columns, not unlike a modest Greek or Roman temple. The various stripes of classicism, such as Greek Revival and a severe eighteenth-century Neoclassicism popularized by the paper architecture of Etienne-Louis Boullée or Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, were regular components of his repertoire, but de Pouilly also adapted to the Néo-Grec eclecticism of his French contemporaries like Henri Labrouste and Félix Duban; he also turned to Gothic, favored by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and others after 1840. Like most nineteenth-century architects, many of de Pouilly's tomb designs are evident in his sketchbooks, at least one of which currently resides in the Historic New Orleans Collection. De Pouilly also frequently worked in concert with Florville Foy, a free man of color in New Orleans who contemporaneously built a successful business as a marble cutter and sculptor for funerary monuments.
St. Louis Cathedral and career difficulties By the end of the 1840s, de Pouilly stood at the peak of his career. The singular extant commission for which he remains best known is the remodeling of St. Louis Cathedral, whose design he produced, though he did not see the job through to its completion. The cathedral, which had been founded as a parish church as soon as the French settled New Orleans in 1718 and then elevated to a diocesan seat, had gone through numerous reconstructions and enlargements as the population of the city grew; it was also damaged in several fires that struck New Orleans over the subsequent years, such as those of 1788 and 1794."Our History", St. Louis Cathedral. Retrieved February 16, 2020. After Benjamin Henry Latrobe moved to New Orleans, he added a central tower with a clock and bell in 1819; the latter was embossed with the French legend "Victoire" in commemoration of the American victory over British forces in the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815.