Walter Cook Keenan, an architect and civic leader, was born in New Orleans on November 2, 1881. He was educated at Tulane University and practiced as an architect for more than 55 years. He also served for many years as a member of the Audubon Park Commission and, from 1937 until 1952 as a member of the Vieux Carre Commssion. In 1943, he was named the "Architect of the Commission," a position that approximated that held today by the Director of the Vieux Carre Commission. Keenan died in New Orleans on November 7, 1970.

The origin of the Keenan Collection is undocumented, but we believe that the photographs came into the City Archives as part of a deposit of records from the Vieux Carre Commission. It is likely that Keenan took the photographs in his capacity as Architect/Director of the Commission.

The Southeastern Architectural Archive at Tulane University houses a large collection of Keenan's prints and negatives.

Scope and Arrangement

The collection consists of thirteen prints photographed and processed by Keenan himself and two duplicate prints, mounted on white board, presumably made at a later date by someone other than Keenan, all depicting buildings in the French Quarter. The thirteen Keenan prints bear a stamp on the back which reads: "This photograph was exposed, developed and entirely processed by me. Permission is granted for its reproduction without charge provided fair credit is given to me. WALTER COOK KEENAN." The duplicate prints are not stamped. The address of the building shown in twelve of the Keenan prints was typed on the front of the photograph, possibly by Keenan himself.

The photographs were printed on paper of various sizes or perhaps trimmed to various sizes after processing. The largest of the prints is 7 1/2" x 9 1/2"; the smallest, 7" x 9".

The prints were scanned (by a Louisiana Division volunteer) as grayscale images at 400 dpi on a Microtek E6 scanner and saved as 2000 pixel TIFFs using Photoshop 4.0. The TIFFs are being retained as archival masters. Photoshop was also used to produce edited 500 pixel JPEGs and the 85 to 100 pixel height JPEG thumbnails displayed below.

Captions used are those typed on the face of the photographs (with the exception of the photo of Dauphine and Gov. Nicholls, which is not labelled).