The City That Care Remembered
A Heart for Tourism
New Orleans is an undoubtedly a unique city. While predominantly known for its Spanish and French heritage, New Orleans also blends cultural influences from Africa, the Caribbean, England, Ireland, Germany, and Latin America. In 2023, nearly 18 million visitors spent $8.75 billion visiting the City of New Orleans. In 2025, $500 million was brought into the city for the Super Bowl. While many people flock to the city to experience the food, festivals and music, the city naturally highlights its culture through its built environment. In the last decade, there has been an increased interest in experiencing places through a new lens, in a way that is more authentic to the lives of locals and less curated for the tourist. This has manifested itself in the proliferation of smaller, boutique hotels that offer less amenities than traditional hotels, but have a unique richness to their intimate space. In New Orleans, this occurs across the City, but particularly along Canal Street from the Mississippi River to Claiborne Avenue, where this iconic canal turned road serves as a boundary between the French Quarter and the Central Business District. Historically, this corridor was home to the City’s finest department stores, restaurants and entertainment venues. Structures of four to five stories offered warehouse storage and living space for merchants directly above their place of business, but by the late 1960’s, its glamour and utility had diminished as people moved out of the city and into suburbs. Spearheaded by the Downtown Development District and the New Orleans City Council, savvy developers have since taken advantage of the underutilized upper floors of Canal Street’s historic architecture to bring a new experience to tourism. Here, visitors can step right out their storied door into the heart of New Orleans.
Utilizing Federal and State Historic Tax Credits
The redevelopment of Canal Street would not be possible without Federal and State Historic Tax Credits. Ultimately every project has a budget and every developer has a pro forma that needs to be met to make the endeavor feasible. For buildings that qualify for these tax credits, it allows for the preservation of our collective history, offsets the hefty expense that can come with repairing and reusing historic properties, benefits the environment as the most sustainable building is the one that already exists, and re-energizes communities.
According to the National Park Service, since the federal government first introduced the historic tax credit program in the mid-1970s, it has directly created 3.2 million jobs, $503.8 billion in economic output, $251.6 billion in gross domestic product (GDP), $185.1 billion in private income, and $71.3 billion in tax revenue.
Every Building Has a Story to Tell
Part of what draws people to Canal Street is that each building has its own history and style. No two buildings are alike, and it’s this authenticity and sense of place that draws tourists to these new boutique hotels. Our project, the Vitascope, at the Corner of Canal Street and Exchange Place is a perfect example of this. It’s a series of individual buildings built in the late 1800s and early 1900s, one of which was home to the United States’ first permanent, for-profit movie theater. This theater was referred to as Vitascope Hall and is the inspiration for the development’s new moniker.
There’s Always a Curveball
Midway through construction documents, the opportunity presented itself for our client to purchase a third adjacent property at 629 Canal Street. It is a narrow, four-story brick building in the Italianate style. We were challenged to incorporate the upper floors of this building into the new hotel development, making it solely accessible through the two original properties. The first floor of each building would remain as independent retail space. Combining the upper floors of the buildings brought many challenges, including navigating drastically different floor-to-floor heights between properties and the code implications of utilizing the properties as one building, all while retaining the independent lots of record. Careful research, existing conditions documentation, and coordination with elected officials, the developer, and contractor made for a seamless resolution of these challenges, and maintaining an efficient layout of hotel units despite the added complexity ensured the project’s viability.
A Beautiful Before and After
To say that the buildings had seen better days would be an understatement. Years of deferred maintenance resulted in extensive water intrusion and termite damage. There was vegetation growing on the roof and the floor was dipping at each column, creating a dangerous, funnel-like condition. Along with our client, we were able to see beyond this, and how the strong bones and extant ornamentation from these historic buildings could become so much more as a mixed-use retail and hotel revitalization.
The transformation of these underutilized, deteriorating buildings into a thriving hotel with bustling ground floor commercial spaces is nothing short of spectacular. The development, which features two ground floor commercial spaces and twenty two and three-bedroom hotel suites across the historic upper floors and small penthouse addition was recognized by the Louisiana Landmarks Society with an Award for Excellence in Historic Preservation. Gone are the modernized storefronts of each building which detracted from the original architecture. Gone are the crumbling ceilings and sloping floors. Gone are the broken windows and water intrusion. All of which were replaced with materials that reflect the original architecture – hard wood floors, beadboard ceilings, and exposed masonry – and mixed with modern comforts like quartz countertops, marble-look tile, and champagne bronze accents.
Travel enthusiasts are no longer looking for a single standard room in a hotel that could be in anywhere town USA. The Vitascope offers an experience you can only find in New Orleans. Soaring ceilings and massive windows bring the City into the apartment-style unit. All different types of visitors can utilize the inclusively-designed 2-bedroom and 3-bedroom accommodations – families, friends, coworkers, all of varying age and ability – the options are endless. Each distinctive layout provides the comforts of home – spacious kitchens and bathrooms, bedrooms with space for queen size beds, living rooms with furniture to take a load off after a day or night of exploring the City, and even in-unit laundry to clean up before you head home.
The Vitascope is a shining example of what can happen when hospitality successfully meets historic renovations : a seamless blending of the old and the new through respect for the past, an eye on the future, and a new type of hotel experience made possible by the AQ Team.