It's a real building - "a one of a kind Castle on the water" in New Orleans. (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 year ago by InevitableSwing@hexbear.net to c/urbanism@hexbear.net

37 comments fedilink hide all child comments

3262 Ridgeway Blvd, New Orleans, LA 70129 | MLS #2419017 | Zillow

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] axont@hexbear.net 9 points 1 year ago

There are a weird amount of castles in Louisiana. The state capital building in Baton Rouge used to be a castle actually.

I had a literature professor tell me the south had a weird medieval Europe fixation for a while after the civil war. He compared it to the cowboy movie fixation of the 1950s, or how in Europe for a while every play was about pirates. Louisiana was really into that author Walter Scott for a while. Another professor I had linked the medieval knights literature to how southern capitalists and slave owners saw themselves as romantic style aristocrats.

[-] InevitableSwing@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago

Sometimes I post castle(-related) buildings in this comm not because I look for them but because "shitty architecture" Twitter accounts have them. For example a castle-related excrescence I posted once that looked like a low poly castle. I assumed the New Orleans castle was the same. Just another rando's dream.

The state capital building in Baton Rouge used to be a castle actually... the south had a weird medieval Europe fixation

That's news to me.

---

Ninja edit

𝚅𝙴𝚁𝚈 𝙲𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙿𝚈 𝙻𝙾𝚆 𝙿𝙾𝙻𝚈 𝙲𝙰𝚂𝚃𝙻𝙴 - Hexbear

[-] axont@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago

I looked into this one you've posted. I think originally it was meant to be some kind of attraction for the 1984 World's Fair that was held in Louisiana that year. Can't figure out why or what purpose it served though.

[-] Tachanka@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago

I had a literature professor tell me the south had a weird medieval Europe fixation for a while after the civil war.

after all, the KKK larped as knights

[-] axont@hexbear.net 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My professor brought up that Mark Twain would make fun of that cultural trend occasionally. Twain probably thought the same, that racists were using a cartoon version of Europe as an aesthetic. Like the steamboat that crashes is the Walter Scott, a prominent medieval romance author who Twain really hated. The entirety of Twain's book "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is a guy from 1889 ends up in feudal England and basically clowns on the concept of monarchy and chivalry so hard he makes England into a republic. Then the Catholic church tries to kill him.

Honestly typing that out I forgot just how cool Mark Twain actually was. American mythology has tried to smooth over how vocally anti-racist he was too. He even called himself an anti-imperialist one time