New Orleans - Beauregard-Keyes House

We are in New Orleans to attend our neice's graduation from Tulane, but are doing a little sightseeing too. After a springtime rainstorm, we took a stroll from our lodgings at the NOPSI hotel in the Central Business District to the French Quarter, where we zigzagged over to Royal Street, the main shopping and business street of the district since the 1840s. We were on our way to the French Market when I spied a sign for the Beauregard-Keyes house,with tours on the hour. And as it was five to the hour, I told Steven it was fated that we stop and tour this nearly 200 year old house.

The house is next to Ursulines street, across from a former convent for Ursulines nuns, now a museum. It was these nuns who sold the first owner, John Le Carpentier, the lot for the house in 1825 for $6,000. The house, of Creole American style (Carpentier and his architect were both Creoles from Haiti), was completed in time for the wedding of Carpentier's daughter in 1829. But then Carpentier sold it a few years later in 1833 to Swiss businessman John Merle, who was forced to sell it after the financial panic of 1837. A plantation owner's widow purchased the home, then the Lanata and Giancona familes, Italian merchants. In between, Dominique Lanata rented the house to General P.G.T. Beauregard, the Confederate General, though only for 18 months circa 1865 or 1866. (Later, when the house fell into disrepair, it was a group of Southern ladeis, captivated by Beauregard, that renamed the house Beauregard House. It also helped with the fundraising.) You can still the general's trunk in the house as well as his portrait above the mantle in the ballroom.

Before it could be razed and replaced with a macaroni factory, it was saved for preservation in 1926, then rented by the novelist Frances Parkinson Keyes before becoming museum in the 1970s.

But the best story of this house involves the Sicilian mafia, or more precisely the Silician Black Hand. The Giancano family had purchased the house in 1904 and ran their wholesale liquor business out of it and were doing quite well when four members of the Black Hand came to call on June 16, 1908. After what must have been a tense dinner (in the room above), Pietro Giacona excused himself from the table for a moment, came back with a shotgun, and shot all four men from the Black Hand. Only one lived. Pietro and his son were arrested, but nothing came of it. The Italian community in New Orleans instead considered giving them a medal.