Free previewStop 5 of Garden District Walking Tour: Mansions and Lafayette Cemetery
The Girl Named Howard Comes Home
You're on First Street in the Garden District, in front of number 1239. Find the marker by the fence. It calls this the Brevard-Rice House, and those two names belong to very different people. One is the man the house was built for. The other is a woman who started life with a name nobody would have predicted.
The house went up in 1857 for Albert Hamilton Brevard. Its style is called transitional, a word that fits a house built just four years before the Civil War, when one era of building was giving way to another.
So who is the second name? Anne Rice was born in New Orleans in 1941, and she wasn't born Anne. She was named Howard Allen Frances O'Brien. Her mother liked the idea that naming a girl Howard would give her an unusual advantage in the world. Then came her first day of school.
That's the opening. The rest plays at stop 5 of Garden District Walking Tour: Mansions and Lafayette Cemetery (3 min in all). Unlock the tour to hear it all, or try stop 1 free first.
