One storey wood frame shotgun houses line a flat grid of ditched streets, restored in matching rows at Project Row Houses on Holman Street.
What Third Ward looks like
Third Ward runs on a flat grid of narrow residential streets, with open ditches instead of storm drains along many blocks. One storey wood frame shotgun houses line the streets to the north, board and batten or lapped siding under low pitched metal roofs, some boarded up and a few freshly painted.
At on Holman Street, two facing rows of shotgun houses sit around a shared yard of live oak trees, kept and repainted as artist studios and gallery space. Down the block, the restored sits on the corner of Elgin and Emancipation, its front white brick and stucco.
South of the shotgun blocks, red brick lecture halls and a glass sided science building rise on the campus, taller than the houses around them. The 's own brick quadrangles begin at Scott Street, the shared border where the two campuses continue as one uninterrupted stretch of institutional brick.
keeps its iron fence and live oaks off Emancipation Avenue, the ward's commercial spine of storefront awnings and pole signs. stands further east in a two storey yellow brick building, blue brick trim ringing its window bays.
Shot in Third Ward
Third Ward TX, a 2007 documentary directed by Andrew Garrison, follows the artists who founded Project Row Houses as they restore its shotgun houses. It was filmed at the complex itself, on Holman Street.
Third Ward TX, 2007
Project Row Houses
The film follows the restoration of twenty two shotgun houses built in the 1930s, laid out in two rows around a shared yard of live oak trees. Filming took place at the complex on Holman Street, since grown to forty properties across five blocks.
Central City's shotgun houses share Third Ward's one storey wood frame form and narrow lots, built in the same decades for the same scale of working household. Shotgun doubles and raised piers are common on both sets of blocks. New Orleans' iron porch brackets and taller pier heights read differently in a wide shot, so a tighter frame on the siding and roofline holds the match best. Try searching wood frame shotgun houses now.
Orange Mound in Memphis, Tennessee
Orange Mound was built as shotgun house lots for Black working families beginning in the 1890s, the same house form and block scale as Third Ward's northern streets. Chain link fences and small front yards repeat in both places. Brick veneer additions on some Orange Mound houses would need avoiding to hold a pre-1950s frame. Try searching small shotgun house lots now.
Atlanta University Center in Atlanta, Georgia
The brick campus buildings of the Atlanta University Center's historically Black colleges share the scale and material of Texas Southern's own quadrangles. Both mix modern glass additions into an older brick campus. Atlanta's campus is denser and more wooded, so an open lawn or plaza keeps the comparison from reading as a different city. Try searching brick campus buildings now.
