The Hibernia Building was completed in 1921. The 23-story, 335-foot tall building was the tallest in Louisiana until the State Capitol building in Baton Rouge surpassed it in 1932. The building was New Orleans’ first modern skyscraper and known for its cupola, which is it in various colors for holidays throughout the year and once served as a navigational beacon for ships along the Mississippi River. The building’s original occupant, Hibernia National Bank, was founded by Irish immigrants in 1870 and took its name from “Hibernia”, which was the Latin name for the island of Ireland. Hibernia National Bank was Louisiana’s largest bank until it was bought by Capital One Bank in 2005. Following the purchase, the building’s first floor bank lobby remained in use while the upper floors, comprising 93% of the net rentable area, became vacant.

The Pythian building was originally built in 1908 by Smith W. Green, who was reputed to be the richest African American in New Orleans, and one of the wealthiest in the country. It was built for the Knights of Pythias, a late 19th early 20th-century fraternal order that grew out of a Civil War-era organization, and for almost 40 years operated as the organization’s headquarters.

Pythian Temple served for several decades as a hub of the African American community, with lodge rooms, a barbershop, a theater, a bank, an opera house, and an auditorium/dance hall. Tenants through the 1940s included many African American-owned businesses, such as the Industrial Life Insurance Company of Louisiana and the Peoples Benevolent Industrial Life Insurance Company of Louisiana.

In the 1940s, the Pythian became a wartime hiring office for Andrew Jackson Higgins, who built the Higgins boats that President Eisenhower famously said “won the war.” Higgins hired men and women of all races through a single personnel office, one of the first times this had occurred in the South. The Pythian’s top floor was a double-height ceiling dance hall where soldiers and sailors could dance and hear live music before shipping out to fight in WWII. Following its WWII use, the Pythian Building was primarily used as an office. In the late 1990s, the building began falling into disrepair space before ultimately becoming vacant after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The Rose Collaborative Project consists of the adaptive reuse of the former St. Rose de Lima Catholic Church and two adjacent schoolhouses in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans into a community-serving arts, education, and entrepreneurship hub.

The church portion of the Project was originally built by the St. Rose de Lima congregation in 1880. The original church building was destroyed by a fire in 1913 but was rebuilt in 1915. The Catholic Church deconsecrated the property following Hurricane Katrina and the church remained vacant until acquired by Rose CDC and Alembic in 2016.

The schoolhouse portions of the property were built following the 1915 reconstruction of the Church. The first schoolhouse was built in 1925 and is similar in size and scale to the church. The second schoolhouse was built in 1938. The Orleans Parish School Board occupied the schoolhouses until Hurricane Katrina forced them to abandon the property.