Best of Squandered Heritage Vintage

Arthur Raymond Smith House..gone

By Karen Gadbois, Co-founder and staff writer September 19, 2008 5:16pm 6 comments

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http://techchris.com Chris Johnston

To be honest it is an improvement. Unless someone is working to actively rehab a house like that ,tearing down is progress in action, with an emphasis on action.
http://northwestcarrollton.com/ Karen Gadbois

Yes, well perhaps, but the owner is mentally unstable. So I wonder where he will go now, under the overpass?
Carmen

Chris, agencies like NOAH were originally set up to help owners like the one Karen describes. But under Nagin’s leadership, NOAH imploded and such owners were left first without help, then without a home entirely. That’s no improvement.
MC

Sad news. This is an exclamation point on how this city and state continually fail the mentally ill. They might not exhibit this in the grandstand at Jazz Fest or on the cover of a tour guide, but how many of us have brought a visitor to Holt or photographed Arthur Raymond Smiths work? The individuals who bring no direct profit to the city are still an integral part of our culture. The very agencies intended to help, have helped themselves and harmed our city.
Puddinhead

Whoa!!!! That’s the house that I lived in the first two years that I was married–1306 Music!! At the time my wife’s family owned it, and it was used as the “starter” rental for each of her older sisters as they got old enough to move out of the family home.

In all fairness, we put a lot of work (and as much money as two newlyweds from that neighborhood could scrape up) into that house when we moved in in 1984, but even then it would have qualified as “substandard housing”. When my in-laws passed away the house was sold to the owner of the cleaners that was then across the street. We always thought he wanted it to use the land to get his delivery vans off the street, but he never did tear it down.

Incidently…if you would have counted the number of trips I made up and down the too-narrow-for-a-wheelbarrow alley with five gallon buckets of garden soil (a full truckload) to create raised beds for strawberry plants….LOL.
Anthony Turducken DelRosario

As of 2013, Mr Smith lives in Central City near Loyola and Harmony. He has turned 1306 Music into an outdoor shrine/lounge area.