You're looking at forty-eight columns. I want you to count them later if you don't believe me — forty-eight. Ionic on the bottom, Corinthian on top, wrapping three sides of the building. Thirty-five rooms inside. Three ballrooms.
This is the Buckner Mansion — eighteen fifty-six, a Kentucky cotton broker named Henry Sullivan Buckner. He moved to New Orleans and discovered the most powerful motivator in the history of architecture. Not beauty, not innovation — just pure, undiluted spite.
Buckner had a business partner named Frederick Stanton. They had some kind of falling out — the details are lost to history, which almost certainly means it was about money. Stanton went off to Natchez, Mississippi, and started building Stanton Hall — a mansion so enormous it took up an entire city block.
And Buckner's response was magnificent. He hired Stanton's own architect — a man named Lewis E. Reynolds — and told him to build something bigger. That is one of the pettiest uses of money I've ever
come across, and I have to say, I respect it enormously.
The fortune that paid for all this came from enslaved labor — every bale of cotton picked by hand, shipped through the largest slave market in America, right here in New Orleans. The beauty of this house and the horror of how it was paid for have always existed in the same sentence.
After the war, the house changed hands a few times and ev
