Longue Vue House & Gardens — City Beautiful in the Suburbs

Cotton broker Edgar Stern and Edith Rosenwald Stern — daughter of Julius Rosenwald — owned the property where the original house and gardens began in 1924. In 1934 they hired landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman to design the gardens. Through the re-working of the gardens the Sterns decided their house did not allow them to fully enjoy their new grounds. They moved the original house and erected a new one in its place, starting in 1939, finished in 1942. William and Geoffrey Platt designed the replacement. Their father, Charles A. Platt, was Shipman's mentor. The house has four facades, each with a different appearance, and out each of the four sides there is a different garden. Twenty rooms on three stories, original furnishings intact. New Orleans became the largest port in the Southern United States throughout the 19th century, built on cotton export and a Mississippi River trade network that funded merchant fortunes. Longue Vue is what one of those fortunes made when it tried to plant City Beautiful principles in the subtropical air. The design conversation here is axes and allées, not courtyards and balconies — the clearest surviving example of that ambition in New Orleans. Shipman designed eight acres of garden rooms. Longue Vue was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991, then declared a National Historic Landmark in 2005. It was deemed nationally significant for its association with Shipman, and as the only major work of Shipman's where she exerted complete creative control over the landscape. Hurricane Katrina damaged the house. Volunteer and staff labor enabled it to reopen for tours. The house is in the Lakewood neighborhood off Bamboo Road. Open Wednesday through Sunday, admission around fifteen dollars. Go to see what New Orleans wealth chose to build when it wanted ordered garden rooms instead of wrought iron, and what survived when the water came.