"He loved the pool (but) hated the gallery because, he said, it had no great view, as the LaPrete Ma

In the 1940s, when Tennessee Williams wrote "A Streetcar Named Desire," cheap tickets airplane the courtyard of 1014 Dumaine St. was a sooty, forlorn place with clotheslines slung from the balconies. Captured in an old photo, it looks like the place Stanley bellowed from, one where you could hear the streetcar churning down nearby Royal Street.
By the time Williams bought the once-grand 1835 Greek Revival townhouse, it had been fully restored, yielding three full-floor apartments and three small ones in two dependencies. Williams would live off and on in its second-floor Apt. B for 21 years, until his death in 1983.
"He had recently repainted 1014 all pink and told us that the Russian painter he hired was stealing him blind, and he was ready to sell to get out of the hassle of dealing with New Orleans contractors," Lutz said.
Those who know that Williams considered New Orleans his "spiritual home" might find it intriguing to see the term applied almost literally in Apt. B's current incarnation as the home of interior designer Emily Adams.
cheap tickets airplane An Ohio native who moved in two years ago, after living cheap tickets airplane in various parts of the Quarter since the early '70s -- including 18 years in the Pontalba -- Adams has showered the apartment's six rooms with artful sacred objects.
"The apartment was not distinguished," Holditch said. "It had a bust of Lord Byron, which had an interior compartment; and a big brass bed in which, Tennessee said and wrote, he hoped he could die, when the time came, because it held such wonderful memories of his life with Frank Merlo.
"He loved the pool (but) hated the gallery because, he said, it had no great view, as the LaPrete Mansion did," Holditch said, referring cheap tickets airplane to the nearby "haunted" house Williams had long wanted to buy.
The earliest established sale of the property was in 1784, according to the Louisiana Collection of the New Orleans Public cheap tickets airplane Library, when the house changed hands from powerful Spanish Colonial leader Carlos de Reggio to his counterpart, Juan Ventura Morales.
Morales was infamous for trying to place Spanish duties on American cargo traveling through the port -- after the Louisiana territory had been transferred to France -- a move said to have inadvertently hastened the Louisiana Purchase.
Past owners also include the merchant and philanthropist Julien Poydras, for whom the downtown thoroughfare is named and whose friendship with Gov. William C.C. Claiborne prompted his election cheap tickets airplane as president of the first legislative council of the Territory of Orleans.
The house built on the property in 1835 has undergone numerous changes, but the apartment divisions set in the 1950s were maintained by Williams, whom Adams knew casually "from the old days at Marti's" and whose presence she says is still felt in the neighborhood.
Adams' own touches have included painting the 12-foot walls a terra-cotta cheap tickets airplane color, underbrushed with gold and umber, a nice complement to the wide heart pine floors and a good background for her many artworks. Several are by well-known New Orleans painters and photographers, including the late Leonard Flettrich and Adams' friends cheap tickets airplane Tony Green and William Greiner.
Most prominent are a pair of cushioned settees -- one 1803 French, the other 1796 English -- that survived Hurricane Katrina with only glancing cheap tickets airplane damage, a pristine Biedermeier chest of drawers and a circa-1790 gold-leaf Russian chair perched across the bedroom from the Buddhist shrine.
The light-filled study/library off the Dumaine Street balcony, which Adams uses as a studio, is the place Williams spent considerable time on his autobiography, "Memoirs," and where other books by and about him dot the floor-to-ceiling shelves.
WHAT: The Tennessee Williams House at 1014 Dumaine Street, designated a Literary Landmark by Friends of Libraries U.S.A. in 2006, is featured cheap tickets airplane on the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival 's Literary Walking Tours