News Roundup

Firm Awarded $300,000 To Design Perseverance Hall Project

City Business
February 4, 2008
by Ariella Cohen

NEW ORLEANS — The opening note has been sounded on the long-awaited renovation of a historic jazz hall in Treme, signaling progress for what is expected to become a major tourist attraction in a part of the city long ignored by most tourists, despite its storied past.

A nationally recognized museum design firm will begin work next week on a jazz-themed interactive exhibition to be installed on the ground floor of Armstrong Park’s Perseverance Hall, a 19th century Masonic lodge where some of the city’s most famed black musicians got their start.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based firm, Museum Design Associates, was awarded the $300,000 contract last week, said John Quirk, superintendent of New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park. The 2,500-square-foot multi-media exhibition space is expected to draw school groups and others to the jazz venue, now being renovated into a modern performance hall.

The renovated Perseverance Hall will open in the summer or fall of 2009, said Quirk.

“Expect a lot of audio in the exhibition,” he said.

Perseverance Hall is recognized for attracting both black and white audiences from the time it was built between 1815 and 1820 up through the 1930s.

Museum Design Associates has designed exhibits for dozens of major attractions across the country, including the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis, Md., and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.