Dodwell House and Anna’s Place: Tremé Touchstones of Possibility
Inside Dodwell House on dedication day with a portrait is Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of America, Michael Curry, beaming on. Mural by artist Ayo Scott. Photo by Melanie Cole
October 2023A church that began as a seamen’s ministry in 1846 has a new mission now – and a newly renovated place to serve the surrounding communities.
- story by Bethany Bultman
photographs by Melanie Cole unless otherwise attributedA few weeks ago, when the current Anna’s Place students walked into the newly renovated Dodwell House for their first day of classes in the facility, they gazed around in awe.
“Is this really for us?” they asked.
Absolutely.
The 8,000 square foot Dodwell House Community Resource Center was originally known as the Marsoudet-Caruso House, an American-style center hall cottage, built in 1846 for Mdm. Marsoudet, a free woman of color, by two noted contractors, free men of color, she hired, Nicholas Duru and Jacques Michel St. Martin.
Of course, ownership of the home passed through many hands in its 177-year history. By the late 20th century, it had deteriorated so much from neglect that it was used as a decadently dilapidated set for the 1994 American Gothic horror classic, “Interview with a Vampire.”
A “before” photograph of the Marsoudet-Caruso House, courtesy St. Anna’s
In 2010, St. Anna’s Episcopal Church, just a few blocks away, acquired this ultimate fixer upper. Since February 2011, converting 1511-19 Esplanade into a resource center has at times been a wellspring of aspirations, a money pit, and a catalyst for a key parish mission: to break the cycle of poverty and violence for their neighborhood youth.
Many attending the Dodwell House Dedication on October 7, expressed the same wonder as its first students, but no one more than Darryl Durham, who founded Anna’s Art for Kids in 2010.
A bright Dodwell House, fully restored. Photo courtesy St. Anna’s
A devoted and highly qualified community activist and arts professional, Durham is a classically-trained clarinetist and the founder and chair of the Treme’ Artists Collective. Seeking a solution to the post-Katrina violence problem in Tremé, Durham proposed duplicating the Harlem School of Fine Arts, where he had formerly served as CEO, at St. Anna’s Episcopal Church.
Durham’s original class began that same year, when eight Treme’ children signed up for a weekend arts program. That first generation of kids to attend Anna’s Arts had to compete for space in St. Anna’s ramshackle parish house, packed with cases of groceries for the monthly food delivery mission. Classes were constantly interrupted by a myriad of community support groups and the ongoing medical mission.
Finding a quiet corner for lessons was almost more challenging than procuring musical instruments for those first students, whose worlds had been upended by Hurricane Katrina.
A coalition of others in St. Anna’s congregation, understanding the hard truths faced by these students, committed to helping Durham. They vowed to cherish and help sustain the kids as they negotiated the fragile reality of post-Katrina New Orleans, with its failing educational system and fragmented social services safety net.
Left to right, Cavin Davis and Darryl Durham, photo by Melanie Cole for FQJ
The Rt. Rev. Shannon Duckworth, the 12th Bishop of Louisiana, photo by Melanie Cole
The program was still in its infancy when Durham, his volunteer crew and several guardians and parents of children in the program saw the need for a permanent safe haven in the community. The vast, deteriorated mansion at 1519 Esplanade, just a few blocks from St. Anna’s church, seemed a great possibility for the program’s home. Within a year, the purchase was made. The long and arduous restoration process began in 2011.
During the Dodwell House official opening ceremonies, Durham and several of those involved in the project’s long restoration voiced their pleasure in seeing the ambitious dream finally manifested. They spoke of pride. They spoke of hopes – both realized and for the future. They pointed to the benefits the center will bring the community’s youth.
Treme residents Big Queen Dianne “Gumbo Marie” Honore Destrahan, Big Chief Darryl Montana, with St. Anna’s donor, Lenora Boutte, and Anna’s Place director, Dr. Cavin Davis., photo by Melanie Cole
Lauren Anderson, a former member of the St. Anna’s vestry and retired CEO of Neighborhood Housing Services, helped facilitate the restoration of the Dodwell House from the project’s beginning.
“Walking past the plaque out front is a testament to the legacy of African-American excellence from the earliest days of Treme,” she said. “By investing millions of dollars in renovating the building, we are bearing witness to a commitment to meet the children of Tremé where they live.”
Lauren Anderson, photo by Melanie Cole
The historic plaque that will be posted at Dodwell House
Another former St. Anna’s Vestry member, V.P. Franklin, PhD, is one of many who joined Anderson and Durham in working against the odds over the past 13 years. Dr. Franklin is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Education at the University of California, Riverside and the author of several books (including his most recent, “The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of the Children and Teenagers who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement”). At the opening celebration he focused on the children the center will serve. “Each of the students at Anna’s Place knows they are a part of something unlike anything else in the city of New Orleans.”
Tremé resident Alonzo Knox, Louisiana State Representative from District 93 and owner of a neighborhood coffee shop also spoke of the children.
“My heart is filled with hope for the intention of St. Anna’s to uplift Tremé’s youth,” he said. “Truly this small congregation [St. Anna’s] has vowed to be their brothers and sisters’ keepers to ensure a safe haven for our neighborhood students.” He went on to express his pride in the fact that a NASA hub was located a few blocks from his home.
The executive director of Anna’s Place and the Dodwell House Community Center is noted educator and football coach, Cavin Davis, PhD. He was recently selected as a fellow by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network with the Center of Creative Leadership. His personal motto fits the stunning transformation of Dodwell House: “Where the impossible can become possible.”
Davis began his remarks by noting that the day of celebration had been 42 years in the making for him.
Cavin Davis, PhD, executive director of Anna’s Place and the Dodwell House Community Center, with Fr. Don Owens, photo by Melanie Cole
“I am a St. Augustine graduate who spent most of my adulthood living and working between Atlanta and Houston,” he said. “Members of my family told me I needed to come back home.”
“So when Darryl Durham, the founder of Anna’s Arts, contacted me, I knew the time had come back to my home in Tremé. Sadly, my sister’s name is on the Victims of Violence wall at St. Anna’s. The mission is personal to me!”
Davis’s strategy is simple: He believes even the smallest detail can facilitate lasting change in the life of a child.
Details like providing transportation for every student from their schools to the Dodwell House. Like a NASA community leader who helps even the youngest of the children to build rockets. Like volunteer tutors from the local universities who help students with their homework. Like a healthy dinner before they go home. Like providing health care.
One of most dynamic programs Anna’s Place offers is called Developing Adolescent Workplace Navigation, or DAWN. It offers vocational training to help young people transition to adulthood, integrating skill development with real world experiences. The onsite cafe, Carter’s Café, (named in honor of Congressman Troy Carter who got the $750,000 federal Community Funding Projects appropriation to make it possible) allows Anna’s Place students the opportunity of working with the chef at Lil Dizzy’s restaurant nearby to learn professional culinary skills. Other DAWN tracks include music production and landscaping.
It’s a holistic approach to life and to love – one that Anna’s Place shares with the parish that brought it into being, St. Anna’s.
The Evolution of a Parish: Shaped by Heredity and Environment
Celebrating the grand opening of Dodwell House on that glorious October Saturday brought me back to the first time I experienced St. Anna’s Episcopal Church, in 1998. My husband, Johann, and I attended the marriage of two friends at St. Anna’s, just a few blocks away.
As we settled into the pew that night, we marveled at the number of times we had passed this Esplanade Avenue church without ever noticing it. Architecturally, it seems to have been designed not to call attention to itself (unlike the Dodwell House, with its bold coral-colored exterior).
The St. Anna’s marriage officiant we encountered that day in 1998 was a refreshing change from the norm – especially to someone like myself who had grown up Episcopalian and attended All Saints, an Espiscopal boarding school founded in 1908. The ceremony was led by Fr. Glenn Harper, a graduate of Annapolis Naval Academy, and an openly gay priest.
Wanting to learn more after that first encounter, I discovered that this unassuming Episcopal parish had begun in 1846 at the same time as Mdm. Marsoudet was settling into her elegant mansion.
The parish’s first location was also on Esplanade Avenue, although close to Decatur Street and the river. It was then called St Peter’s Seamen’s Bethel, founded as a mission to serve Anglican seamen from the port of New Orleans. It caused quite a stir at the time by offering “open seating” rather than charging worshipers pew fees.
In 1869, the original chapel and rooming house was sold and property was purchased on the 1300 block of Esplanade, where the church is currently located. One parishioner, Dr. Newton Mercer, gave $10,000 for the building of a frame church on the new site. The church was named St. Anna’s after Mercer’s deceased daughter and from the Christian history, the grandmother of Jesus.
Photo: Anna Mercer from the St. Anna’s Archive
Just a few years later, in 1876, the frame church burned, but by September 1877, a new brick church was completed. Its rector in the 1880s, Father E.W. Hunter, was charismatic, handsome and an avid “high church” Anglo-Catholic. He became something of a local media sensation when he broke with Anglican tradition to celebrate daily prayer with candles on the altar. St. Anna’s today continues to be known for its high church ritual, defined affectionately as “smells and bells.”
The World War I era brought untold loss to New Orleans: many of the 20 to 30-year-old generation were lost in the war and in the deadly Influenza pandemic of 1918-19 (which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide). Compounding this, a tornado rendered the Esplanade Avenue sanctuary uninhabitable. The fact that St. Anna’s survived the Great [Mississippi River] Flood of 1927, the 1929 Depression, and the World War II era was nothing short of a miracle. But by 1948, the building was condemned by the city and demolished due to water and termite damage.
An 1859 article about St. Peter’s in the Times-Picayune
The building demolished in 1948
The current church, a mid-Twentieth century modern structure, was built in 1952 and by the 1960s, Fr. Henry Crisler took the helm of the St. Anna’s and began building a more inclusive parish, inviting people of color to become part of the congregation. It was a direction embraced fully and with vigor by the next rector, Fr. Robert J. Dodwell.
St. Anna’s as it now stands, photo by Ellis Anderson
A Radical Mission of Inclusion: Father Dodwell
“Eleven A.M. is our most segregated hour in Christian America.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. NBC Meet the Press, April 17, 1960Bob Dylan’s 1964 classic, “The Times They Were a-Changin’” clearly did not apply to the New Orleans power structure in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Most politicians in Louisiana were struggling to preserve its antebellum hierarchy. Louisiana’s segregationist Governor John Julian McKeithen (1963-1972) even used state funds to “buy peace” from the Ku Klux Klan.
Enter The Rev. Robert John Dodwell (1934-1998), a former LSU frat boy. According to his younger sister, Gloria Dodwell Kellum, PhD, her brother held the coveted position as the handler of the LSU mascot in the 1950s. He proudly escorted the caged “Mike the Tiger” to the field at home games, where it would growl to intimidate LSU’s opposing team’s players as they ran into Tiger Stadium.
Dr. Kellum attended the dedication of Dodwell House on September 7, with some of Dodwell’s nieces and nephews. In an on-site interview, Dr. Kellum explained that as children, the Dodwells were more familiar with the French Quarter than most locals in the 1940s.
Bethany Bultman interviewing the late Fr. Bob Dodwell’s sister, Gloria Dodwell Kellum, PhD, at the opening ceremonies for the Dodwell House.
Back then, their father served as the President of Regal Beer (“lager” spelled backwards). From 1890 to 1960, where the Royal Sonesta Hotel stands today, American Brewing produced its beer at their sprawling Bourbon Street facility, which had a conveyor belt crossing Bienville Street. In the 1940s and 50s, their ad campaign promised New Orleanians that Regal Beer “pays dividends in health” and was brewed in “the cleanest and most sanitary plant in America.” “Prince Regal Salutes You” was the iconic image accompanying the catchy slogan: “Red beans and rice and Regal on ice.”
The Dodwell’s core family value: to love humanity. They lived on a small farm on the Old Hammond Highway near the American Brewing Distribution facility in Baton Rouge. It was a predominantly African-American community. According to Dr. Kellum, the Dodwell children were deeply troubled when they entered first grade and discovered that none of their playmates were allowed to attend the same school.
The Rev. Robert John Dodwell (1934-1998)
After being ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1959, Dodwell served in conservative parishes in Alexandria, Lake Charles and Monroe. No sooner had Father Dodwell returned to the edges of the French Quarter in 1970 than local and national law enforcement laid siege to young supporters of the New Orleans Chapter of The Black Panthers for Self-Defense.
The Panther community-building goals included decent housing, an end to nutritional apartheid, employment equity, an end to police brutality, and programs for early childhood education. But to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the Panthers represented the number one threat to American democracy. Hoover actually sent a tank to aid the New Orleans police in their siege.
As the new rector of St. Anna’s, Father Bob took the Panther’s demands as the value of loving the people you serve and the power of making space for opportunity. Admittedly, Father Bob had come from congregations whose equity programs were thin on the ground. But drawing inspiration from the words of Albert Einstein,“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything,” he re-imagined St. Anna’s responsibility: to serve its community instead of supporting the “isms” of the past.
During Dodwell’s tenure, the first African American vestry member of Saint Anna’s, Cirillo Balderamos, was elected. Neighborhood women, calling themselves “The Night Owls,” began gathering at the church to make sandwiches for the unhoused. When Bessie Jones was elected by the parish to serve, she became the first female vestry member in the Diocese of Louisiana.
Over the years, Bob Dodwell reshaped societal gatekeeping, despite the deluge of inequities facing the Tremé community. He laid the foundation of St. Anna’s moral imperative. It’s a legacy that has manifested itself in Anna’s Place – and the new community center that bears his name.
A Template for the Future
Durham and Davis both believe that the Anna’s Place program and Dodwell House will serve more than just the surrounding neighborhoods.
“Our hope is that other New Orleans congregations will use us as a model and duplicate Dodwell’s legacy,” said Davis.
“This represents a homegrown community solution to neighborhood problems,” said Durham. “We’re creating opportunities to stabilize one child at a time.”
Read more about St. Anna’s post-Katrina work in our earlier FQJ story: “St Anna’s Episcopal Church: An Unorthodox Beacon of Metanoia”
Image courtesy Dodwell House
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