Somewhere on his family tree, Mike Hill of Lafayette believes, is rooted a little sugar cane.
Specifically, he learned one of his forebears may have been a sugar broker working out of building. That made him curious.
After his initial research turned up frustratingly limited information about the exchange, Hill decided to write to Curious Louisiana.
“What can you tell me about (the Sugar Exchange)?,” he asked. “Where was the building located? Is the building still standing? Are there photos of the building, inside and out? Are there other collections of documents relating to the exchange other than those at the Public Library?”
To answer those questions, we’ll have to turn the clock back to the 1880s, when sugar was king in South Louisiana — and as good as white gold in New Orleans, where it was for decades bought and sold in the open air on that part of the riverfront stretching roughly from Canal Street to Toulouse Street, on what is today Woldenberg Park.
Known as the Sugar Levee, it was the epicenter of the state’s sugar trade, where the sweet stuff arrived daily from plantations throughout the region. Once unloaded, shipments could be processed or stored in any of a number of “sugar sheds” then crowding the riverfront, before being sold and shipped to markets around the world.
Birth of the exchange
Eventually, the city’s sugar men — who previously sold their wares as part of the city’s Produce Exchange — decided that the industry warranted an exchange building all its own.
“The Louisiana Sugar Exchange was accordingly incorporated March 6, 1883, and the institution became a fixed one,” The Daily Picayune reported the following year in an article recounting the organization’s history.
Subsequent reporting covered the search by exchange leadership for a suitable site on which to erect the new building. They settled on a spot smack-dab in the middle of the Sugar Levee, at the northern corner of Bienville and North Front streets.
Architect James Freret was then brought on to design what would be a two-story Beaux Arts gem boasting floor-to-ceiling windows, a prominent clock on its riverfront side and dramatic exterior columns, all topped by a 65-foot rooftop dome/skylight.
“Probably no city in the world has its dealers in sugar housed as handsomely as New Orleans,” wrote The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, a trade journal, in July 1888. “A magnificent structure of plate glass, iron, brick and stone, built in semi-tropical style, and facing the sugar landing of the great Mississippi river, its beautiful main floor is now the head-centre for the sale of the crop in Louisiana.”
From planters to labor union
Opened on June 3, 1884, the Sugar Exchange building — later known as the Sugar and Rice Exchange — would remain at the center of the region’s sugar trade until 1940 when, amid shifting economic times, it was sold to a local labor union.
In 1963, the then-neglected structure was unceremoniously torn down, meeting the same fate as most structures of the riverfront sugar district.
Today, the site is part of a parking lot catering to French Quarter visitors.
Fortunately, before the building was demolished, the National Park Service’s Historic American Building Survey dispatched photographer Dan Leyrer to capture it on film before it was too late. He got shots of both the interior and exterior, although, given that it was at the time in the process of demolition, they only hint at the building’s former grandeur.