1521 Mandeville - Sheriff's Sale

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   This shotgun single at 1521 Mandeville, built in 1871, goes to Sheriff's Sale on September 13.  With the future of the home in the balance, we wanted to highlight its history.

For our purposes, the history of the home begins in 1859, when Mistress Marie Eleanor Renovi and her husband, John Francis Fernandez, purchased two vacant lots of ground in the square bounded by Mandeville, Spain, St. Avide (now N. Claiborne), and St. John the Baptist (now N. Robertson) from the succession of John's father, Joseph.  The lots had been in the Fernandez family for decades, unimproved by successive generations but always contributing to the family's wealth.  The Plan of 2 Lots of Ground in the 3rd District, left, hung on the wall of Norbert Vignie's auction house in advance of the auction to advertise the properties for sale.  [d'Hemecourt, J.A. Plan Book 65, Folio 15 (065.015), October 3, 1859]  

On January 11, 1871, Michael Kastner purchased one of those vacant lots from the Fernandez's for $200.  Kastner promptly improved the parcel, causing his tax assessment to jump from $200 in 1871 to $2000 in 1873.  We can be certain that the hike in the tax assessment corresponds to the addition of a building to the lot.  Although the structure appears in the Surveyor's Plan Book, 1874-81, the first detailed description of the house does not appear until 1878, when Kastner's estate went to auction following his death.  The 1878 act confirmed the purchase of three adjoining lots on Mandeville St. by Catherine Gaus, Kastner's sister, for $2225.  Gaus paid $725 for "a frame house, slate-roofed...having three rooms, sheds, cistern, privy, etc," the same house that stands there today.  Gaus' winning bid, quite low relative to the tax assessment, shows that real estate auctions in the 1870s closely resembled those like the Sheriff's Sale today, where valuable properties could go for pennies on the dollar.

Note the "old" address numbers in the description.  New Orleans converted to the present system in the 1890s to establish uniformity across the various old ward and district boundaries.

      

Charbonnet, F.D. v. 102, Act 435, June 2, 1920.

The house stayed in the Kastner family until 1912, when Eugene Bordes, a butcher at the St. Roch Market, paid $1300 for the buildings and improvements on lot 19.  When Bordes sold in 1920, the Deputy City Surveyor, C. Uncas Lewis, made a plan of the property showing the same structure cited in the 1878 sale.  Lewis labeled the structure, "No. 1521, single one story." 

Although the house changed hands several times throughout the 20th-century, the physical structure itself changed very little.  The slate roof mentioned in the 1878 sale may be gone but the same walls that Michael Kastner raised in 1871 have stood the test of time.

Two Buildings Become One

A client in the Irish Channel wondered why the floors near the center of her brick home stood a few inches higher than the floors around the perimeter walls.  With the knowledge that this structure had commercial uses at various points in the past, we considered the possibility that the storage of heavy equipment caused the stress in the floors.  Or perhaps a past owner had altered the corner entrance, leading to the slope.  The floors are solid brick, however, not wooden floor boards.  If not a structural issue then perhaps the ground itself had sunk under the weight of the walls.  Whatever we came up with was, unfortunately, only speculation.  Truthfully, one may never know the cause of such architectural phenomena in a home or business.  

In this instance, however, I discovered a valuable piece of evidence in the chain of title that provided the real answer to the riddle.  While tracing the route of conveyances beyond a transaction from one Emile Lasére to Guillaume Rozés in February 1860, I found a reference to Lasére's purchase of the property at a Sheriff's Sale several years previous.  Most of the time, an act of sale will reference the previous sale of the property as an assurance that said property had clear title.  Since the last transaction concerning this property had not been an ordinary purchase, I walked eagerly from the Notarial Archives on Poydras Street to the Louisiana Division at the Main Branch of the New Orleans Public Library.  Once there, I pulled the microfilm with the records of the Civil District Court for the relevant date, September 1854, to gather the extra information offered by the sheriff's records.  


I found a detailed advertisement for the auction, describing the condition of the property and a description of the buildings on the various plots of land involved.  The auction concerned a total of eleven lots in the upriver faubourgs, one of which is the subject of our present day investigation.  

The first paragraph describes the lots.  "Lot No. one forms the corner of Pleasant and Chippewa streets," the ad reads.  Yes, that's our lot of ground.  The next paragraph provides more details.  "Together with all the buildings and improvements on lot No. one..."  We are on the brink of an official description of our building, not a set of information that every sale includes, believe it or not.  "First," the ad continues, "a good, substantial brick dwelling house, having 40 feet, 10 inches front on Chippewa street, by 51 feet in depth on Pleasant street."  Indeed, this is our lot but the building that stands there today measures nearly the entire length of the lot on Chippewa Street, nearly 58 feet.  Could it be that the present building, despite its solid brick construction and walls four bricks wide, simply is not the same building that stood there in 1854.  It is possible, yes, but the next sentence solves the mystery of the sloping floor.  "Second, another brick building of 16 feet, 9 inches in front on Chippewa st..."  

1896 Sanborn
Note the Chippewa St. municipal addresses

1887 Sanborn
Note the municipal address of 37 Pleasant

When we add the lengths of the two buildings on Chippewa Street, we get 57 feet, 7 inches.  The single building today measures only a few inches wider than the combination of the two 1854 buildings.  The evidence suggests quite strongly that a previous owner joined the two original buildings into one larger structure.  The five inch gap between the two 1854 buildings accounts for the rise in floor elevation at a point 40 feet from the Pleasant Street wall.  These two images from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, show a single building at the corner of Chippewa and Pleasant.  The next phase of our investigation seeks to discover who joined the buildings and why.   

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