The following is excerpted from the National Register of Historic Places Register Form prepared by Jessica Richardson

The First National Life Insurance Building, 1000 Howard Avenue, is located at the southeast corner of Howard Avenue and Loyola Avenue just south of the Central Business District of New Orleans. The building, which comprises a 12-story office tower and an attached 3.5-story parking garage, is roughly one block west of the Upper Central Business District National Register Historic District. Across Howard Avenue is the National Register-listed Plaza Tower (1969, NRHP, 2013), and across Loyola Avenue is the Union Passenger Terminal Station (1954). Built in 1960-62, the tower is designed in the modulargrid modern or Miesian style and retains a high degree of exterior integrity. Constructed by the First National Life Insurance Company, the building housed a branch of the National Bank of Commerce, insurance companies, including the headquarters of First National Life, and a variety of other commercial businesses through 1989, when it was purchased by the Archdiocese of New Orleans. The three street facing elevations (façade/north, east, and west elevations) feature a curtain wall composed of gray-glass spandrel panels and square clear-anodized aluminum-frame fixed and operable-awning windows on each floor. The larger first and second floors create wings on the east and west elevations and feature the same grid pattern as the tower’s upper floors. A flat aluminum-frame porte-cochere covers the main entrance, which is accessed via a curved driveway on each side as well as a set of flagstone-paved steps. At the rear of the building, there is a 3.5-story concrete parking garage that was completed in 1960-62 to provide tenant and visitor parking as well as a drive-through teller for the bank branch. The exterior of the tower retains a high degree of integrity with some minor damage to windows due to Hurricane Ida in 2021. The interior was designed with emphasis on the main lobby entrance and elevator lobby on the first floor, as well as the elevator lobbies on each of the upper floors. Outside of that, each individual floor was left open for tenant build outs, which changed frequently through the 1990s. Because of this, none of the interior partitions beyond the primary historic circulation core and entrance corridor are historic. Intact historic interior features include the flagstone flooring throughout the main lobby, extruded-aluminum elevator doors and white marble wall cladding in the ground-floor elevator lobby, reddish-brown marble wall cladding in all upper-floor elevator lobbies, the bank vault and night drop box on the first floor, and several features at exterior walls, including insulated wall panels, aluminum base plates and wrapped sills, and some plaster. For these reasons, the building is eligible for listing in the National Register.

The First National Life Insurance Building stands as an architectural landmark on the periphery of the Central Business District where it was designed to accommodate the automobile and capitalize on the construction of Interstate 10 through the city. It was designed not just to work with its location, but also to stand out in the popular Modernist style of the time. As it meets the registration requirements stated in the Non-Residential Mid-Century Architecture of New Orleans, 1935-1975, this building is eligible forlisting on the National Register at the local level for its architectural significance.

Staff Recommendation: 

The Staff recommends that the Commission recommend 1000 Howard Avenue be placed on the National Register of Historic Places.