Last Known as the Canal Street Hotel, This New Orleans Motel Closed in 2009

The Governor House Motor Hotel, New Orleans Louisiana

Date added: March 17, 2025

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Hotel

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The Governor House Motor Hotel was the first motel or motor hotel built in New Orleans's central business district and marked the end of the dominance of old-line hotels. The automobile-oriented travel of mid-century America represented an acceleration and popularization of leisure and business travel which fueled New Orleans's tourism industry which became the city's dominant industry.

In the early 1960s, William P. Bosworth, Jr. (1925-2009), a New Orleans builder whose previous experience was primarily in building single-family homes, saw an unprecedented opportunity in the changed landscape of the city's lodging industry. He had been very successful with his first venture into a commercial building, a motel on Tulane Avenue in 1957. With the grip of the old line hotels on new building loosened and the strong demand for New Orleans accommodations, Bosworth decided to build a motor hotel on Canal Street. He chose an under-used site with a gas service station and garage, at Canal and South Claiborne Avenue, on the southwest corner. The site was farther north than the other downtown hotels, but it was beside the planned route of Interstate 10, then under construction. Bosworth's venture became the Governor House Motor Hotel, a six-story, 216-room motel that was not only the first new hotel to be built in the downtown area since 1928, it was the first motor hotel or motel in the central business district. New hotel-motels had been constructed earlier in the French Quarter, but the business district had remained a separate sphere to most New Orleanians, representing business and commerce. The Governor House, begun in 1963, signaled the end of the grand downtown hotel period and marked the beginning of a new era of the city's downtown hotel industry.

The Governor House plans consciously attempted to blend the best features of motels and hotels. In this outlook, Bosworth and his associates were in tune with the national trend away from spartan roadside motels of the prewar years to the plusher motels of the 1950s. The term "motor hotel" began to appear in lodging industry publications around 1952, and by 1960 was accepted as a distinct category of motels.

With his new project, Bosworth drew on his experience with the Tamanaca Motel, his Tulane Avenue site, and the expanding motor hotel business at large. When plans for the Governor House were announced in 1962, one of the backers, Charles A. Prechter, a real estate broker, told reporters that the new motor hotel would include a restaurant, bar, swimming pool with patio area, a rooftop garden, and ample space for self-parking. He also emphasized that the building would be designed to showcase the "uniqueness of New Orleans' atmosphere." Prechter made a further point of tying the new building to its location, saying it would be "the kind of building that you want to stop and look at it when you drive down Canal Street".

Prechter and Bosworth both realized the significance of building on Canal Street. Bosworth's Tulane Avenue Motel was a 100-room, three-level structure designed in an uncompromising modernist style. For the Governor House, he turned to the same architect, George J. Riehl (and his associate, Donald Graves), but they developed an exterior that was felt to be appropriate to the city's main corridor. None of Bosworth's correspondence or papers about the Governor House have survived (although Riehl's building plans and drawings are archived at Tulane University) so there is no direct documentation of how the building's design developed. Unlike building in the Vieux Carre, Bosworth was not constricted by legal design or historical neighborhood regulations. His decision to invest the building with a "New Orleans look" (in the words of his son, William P. Bosworth 3^rd) was a personal decision. In an interview, his son elaborated on the distinctiveness of Canal Street. For a hotel on the city's most important roadway, said the younger Bosworth, his father instinctively knew that a Canal Street hotel needed a stronger, "more elegant" presence than the unadorned, vertical Tamanaca. "Canal Street is different," he said, to the agreement of his mother and sister (all New Orleans natives) who were also present for the interview. By giving his motor hotel an unmistakable "New Orleans look," Bosworth was following the dictate of the influential hotel architect Morris Lapidus (1902-2001) who famously said, "Motels must be billboards!" In the automobile age, Lapidus preached that the exterior of a hotel or motel had only a brief moment to communicate its message. Thus, the Governor House with its old brick facades, french doors, balconies, and shutters was able to broadcast its New Orleans roots and promise of a comfortable Southern manor house interior without relying on an overly large sign. Tourists or motorists whizzing by on Interstate 10 would not have known that combining the iconic design elements associated with the Vieux Carre's 18^th and 19th-century buildings and modern 20th-century construction was emerging as a distinctive category called French Quarter Style or French Quarter Revival Style but they would instantly be reminded of the storied French Quarter. As with almost every commercial endeavor in New Orleans, Bosworth was no doubt eager to associate his building with the French Quarter, a name and idea thought to be irresistible to tourists.

Bosworth's background was deeply rooted in New Orleans, where he was born into a middle-class family. He attended Tulane University but left before graduating to serve in the Army in World War II. After the war he married and joined his father in the wholesale liquor business. In the early 1950s, Bosworth and his wife, Eileen Talbot Bosworth, built their first new home in the Lakeview area where the postwar housing boom was in full swing. Bosworth was impressed by the dynamic homebuilding industry and decided to invest in some building lots. Although he had no experience in construction, design, or the building trades, he was gregarious, well-liked, and well-connected around New Orleans, and through business and personal relationships was able to obtain financing for his initially modest projects. Bosworth moved from reselling single lots to buying larger tracts of property to subdivide, then to building houses on speculation. Putting all the parts together, he began to develop housing subdivisions in New Orleans and on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. In 1957, Bosworth made his first venture into a non-residential building project developing a large motel on Tulane Avenue. Named the Tamanaca after a luxury hotel Bosworth had visited in Caracas, Venezuela, the motel incorporated many of the features that characterized the new motor hotels that were being established in downtowns across America. In addition to free, convenient parking near guestrooms, the motel offered a restaurant, cocktail lounge, meeting rooms, swimming pool, and "a radio and television in every room".

The Governor House (the origin of the name is unknown; although Bosworth had numerous political connections, his family members say he was not close to Louisiana governors of the era) built on what Bosworth learned with the Tamanaca project. The Governor House likewise offered a range of comforts and luxuries. But Bosworth expanded the successful Tamanaca model to an almost full-service hotel with his Canal Street business. The first-floor lobby was small but decorated with a chandelier and staffed by professionals. There were meeting rooms, a restaurant, coffee shop, a cocktail lounge with evening entertainment, and a roof-top swimming pool. Rooms were equipped with color television sets (not the norm in the early 1960s), radios, and two telephones per room. Vestiges of motel self-service included the free parking, ice machines on every floor, and informality. The complex presented itself as more hotel than motel with its tight footprint and parking incorporated into the building. Its compact, multi-story building was typical of the adaptations that motels/motor hotels were making nationwide as they moved into city centers and had to adjust to zoning laws, expensive land, and tight urban grids. Guests turning into the Canal Street driveway would know immediately they were at a motel, not a hotel. Temporary parking spots were clearly marked with no valet parking available. Guests were to park, walk a few feet to the lobby, check in, then drive to their assigned spot and handle their own car unloading. While the front desk staff was trained to be welcoming and helpful, guests were on their own after registered. And, importantly for many guests, they were not obliged to dispense tips to a large staff.

1965 and After

Because of construction delays, the hotel did not open until 1965 although all major construction was completed by the end of 1964. From the start, the Governor House was a success, with a high occupancy rate and also attracting meetings and events. Bosworth hired a manager, but kept an office at the building. According to his widow and children, he was not interested in the day-to-day operations of the hotel and never thought of himself as a "hotel man." But the extroverted Bosworth enjoyed owning the motel where his friends and business associates could gather in the restaurant or bar for socializing and informal deal-making. Among the Governor House's regular guests were a rotating list of well-known professional golfers who happily accepted Bosworth's offers of free rooms. An avid follower of golf, Boswell even backed some of the players on the pro circuit. Well-known golfers of the era who stayed at the Governor House included future Hall of Fame member Raymond Floyd (born 1942) and Johnny Jacobs (born 1945). The hotel was also popular with politicians who socialized with Bosworth and also held events there. Former lieutenant governor Jimmy Fitzmorris (born 1921) was among the local politicians who frequented the motor hotel. The Governor House was also used by the AFL-CIO (Amercian Federal of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) for meetings and hosted national politicians such as Sargent Shriver (1915-2011), first director of the Peace Corps and one-time candidate for U.S. vice president.

In one respect the Governor House's timing exempted it from the civil rights battles of the era. While the Roosevelt, Monteleone, and other leading New Orleans hotels stubbornly held to their whites-only policies in the face of unfavorable publicity and escalating criticism and lost business, the Governor House opened its doors in a new era. The 1964 Civil Rights Law outlawed segregation in public buildings, relieving the Governor House of decision-making in racial matters. Although family members say Bosworth was unconcerned about accepting black guests, he was not forced into the public arena over the issue and was spared negative national publicity that other prominent New Orleans hotels received in the early 1960s.

The hotel suffered a major setback in December of 1966 when part of the roof and sections of several floors suddenly collapsed. There were no deaths or serious injuries and the damage was attributed to a faulty I-beam installation. Repairs were made and the hotel reopened in 1967. The success of the Governor House was followed by several new hotels in the Canal Street central business district area. The first chain motel arrived in 1968 with a Howard Johnson's on Loyola Avenue. In addition the Roosevelt, Jung, and New Orleans (formerly Marbrec) hotels embarked on major expansions with "motel-like features" in the same era. Bosworth sold the hotel in the late 1960s to the Travelodge chain. It changed hands twice more, becoming a Days Inn, then renamed the Canal Street Hotel. The building was not updated nor reliably maintained for many years and was closed by the city of New Orleans for safety issues in 2009.

History & Development of Hotel Business in New Orleans

New Orleans was established by France in 1718 to be a provincial capital, major seaport, military center, and commercial trading nexus. Placed as close to the mouth of the Mississippi River as possible, the new city was immediately thrust into the role of gatekeeper for river commerce. New Orleans was subsequently a Spanish colony (1762-1800), briefly a French colony again (1800-1803) and finally ceded to the United States in 1803. Through all these regime changes and shifts in economic and political climates, the raison d'etre of New Orleans remained the same, a port city enmeshed in local, regional, and international trade.

Even when little more than a muddy village, New Orleans developed a cosmopolitan infrastructure to serve the commercial-shipping-government administrative functions that expanded throughout the next 300 years. Part of that infrastructure was hotels or temporary lodgings for the constant stream of visitors to the city. In the early decades, travelers found lodging in taverns, private homes, religious houses, military barracks, and even on board ships. The nascent lodging industry grew steadily and in 1799 the city's first purpose-built hotel opened on Chartres Street, the Hotel d'Orleans. This was only five years after the first hotel was built in the United States, the City Hotel in New York City. Boston did not get its first hotel until 1806, the Exchange Coffee House, and Philadelphia in 1807, with the Mansion House. In New Orleans, the lodging-hotel industry established itself in the city's earliest decades as a profitable, dependable business, and one that was woven into the fabric of the community.

Throughout the nineteenth century, New Orleans hotel buildings became ever more grander and more numerous, with its premier hotels attaining a centrality in the social and cultural life of the city. The St. Louis Hotel (1835), in the Vieux Carre, and the St. Charles Hotel (1837), on St. Charles Avenue, were emblematic for not just their grandiose architectural presences and luxurious fittings but as avatar of the city's two ruling populations, the Americans and Creoles. Americans, meaning the largely Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking Protestants from the United States, built and claimed the St. Charles, the first important building west of Canal Street. Creole New Orleans planted its flag on the St. Louis Hotel, a magnificent neo-classical building by J.N.B. de Pouilly. The St. Louis was such a symbol of the community that its image was used on the $50 banknote issued by the First Municipality (the French Quarter) when New Orleans divided itself into three self-contained city governments from 1836 to 1854. Although all New Orleanians were Americans after 1803, the displaced Creole elite - the Catholic, French-speaking descendants of French and Spanish colonists - were unwavering in their insistence on their separateness and importance.

The city's vigorous antebellum commerce based on cotton and sugar gave rise to an equally vigorous hotel industry that ranged from the grand (such as the St. Charles and St. Louis) to more utilitarian hotels to rooming houses, small inns, and rooms in private homes. The city's nineteenth-century lodging infrastructure was among the nation's most sophisticated, according to David R. Goldfield, historian of the antebellum urban South. He has written that, "New Orleans possessed some of the most opulent hotels in the nation." But even more importantly, the city's hotel industry was carefully attuned to the marketplace which was tied to the agricultural seasons. New Orleans, according to Goldfield, "probably alone among Southern cities had sufficient accommodations for the crush of fall and spring trade."

The hotel industry's fortunes rose and fell with the city's economic status, but many hotels and lodging places were remarkably long-lasting. During the Civil War, New Orleans was virtually untouched by fighting. In April 1862 the Union Navy took control of the mouth of the Mississippi River after a brief battle and sailed up river to New Orleans. The city surrendered to the Union forces without a fight, sparing New Orleans from wartime destruction. The hotels were soon filled with Union soldiers, sailors, government officials, and Northern businessmen. After the war, the city's hotels continued much as they had in the antebellum period, as social and commercial centers as well as their primary function as lodging. Several major hotels were built in the late nineteenth century, including the Lafayette in 1885, the DeSoto (later to be part of LePavilion) in 1894, and the Grunewald in 1893, which became the Roosevelt, the city's premier hotel. The original 1837 St. Charles Hotel burned twice and was rebuilt for the final time in 1890.

Early Twentieth Century New Orleans

Despite its extensive and varied hotels and rooming houses, New Orleans was unprepared for the demands that World War I placed on it. As with many American cities, especially transportation centers, the 1914-1918 war created a new urgency in transient housing, requiring many more rooms than were available. The number of commercial sites offering rooms for rent increased almost overnight with established hotels adding space and many small storefront businesses hastily remodeling their second and third stories as "hotels." After 1918, the momentum generated by the war continued, but did not reproduce the tradition of grand downtown hotels. The early stages of automobile dominance were unfolding in the 1920s which resulted in a building boom for early motels, then called auto courts, tourist camps, or tourist courts. The eastern and western highways into New Orleans were virtually colonized by these small enterprises, usually family-owned and operated. Oriented toward automobile travel, the tourist courts offered easy parking, modest rates, and informality. Chef Menteur Highway, the Old Spanish Trail-U.S. Highway 90 to the east, and U.S. Highway 61 (later named Airline Highway) to the west, saw a steady increase in motels from the 1920s through the next three decades.

The popularity of the auto courts barely registered with the city's mainstream lodging businesses. New Orleans's downtown hotels did not consider the motels competition. In the 1920s, two large hotels were built in New Orleans, the LaSalle (1923) and the Marbrec (1928), both on Canal Street. These two buildings were the last large-scale hotels built in New Orleans until after World War II. The tourist courts continued to grow on the city's perimeter while numerous small hotels and rooming houses were found in all parts of New Orleans.

In the geography of New Orleans, the French Quarter and the business district were adjacent but decisively separated by Canal Street. Both these areas had high concentrations of hotels, but a very distinct division was made between "downtown hotels" and "French Quarter hotels." Downtown hotel meant a traditional, formal hotel with an impressive lobby, meeting rooms, and a large staff. A French Quarter hotel denoted not just location, but a somewhat more informal institution that catered to leisure visitors. (The definition was somewhat protean however; the Monteleone Hotel two blocks off Canal in the French Quarter was seen as a downtown hotel by virtue of its size and level of service). The downtown hotels were viewed as places for businessmen, where serious business could be conducted, while the French Quarter hotels were for tourists. The downtown hotels monopolized the lucrative trade in business travelers, conventions, and upscale tourists. There was, of course, much traversing of this unwritten boundary, but by 1930, the New Orleans hotel business assumed a pattern that would persist for the next three decades. The financial constraints of the Depression, followed by World War II, brought almost all construction to a halt, leaving the hotels established by 1930 unchallenged. The downtown or elite hotels were: DeSoto Hotel, 1894; Jung Hotel, 1907; Lafayette Hotel, 1885; LaSalle Hotel, 1928; Marbrec Hotel, 1923; Monteleone Hotel, 1907; Roosevelt Hotel, 1893 (universally acknowledged as the city's leading hotel); and St. Charles Hotel, 1890. In the 1930s, the Pontchartrain Hotel, in the Lower Garden District, joined the top rank hotels when it changed from a residential hotel to accepting short-term guests.

World War II and the 1950s

World War II repeated the problems and opportunities of World War I for New Orleans. The city's hotels, motels, and rooming houses were overwhelmed by the deluge of travelers, soldiers, sailors, war workers, government officials, and others who poured into the city. Again, entrepreneurs looked for ways to capitalize on the need for temporary housing. Many new rooming houses appeared overnight and other buildings were pressed into service. Even with these measures, it was soon obvious that New Orleans could accommodate many new hotels. The war provided another stimulant to the city's postwar climate by boosting tourism. Many of the wartime visitors were eager to return to New Orleans and influenced others to come with their stories of the city's joie de vivre, French restaurants, music, nightclubs, and raffishness. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, New Orleans tourism soon outstripped all pre-war norms. With the postwar affluence, ease of travel by car, and Americans' increasing appetite for travel, New Orleans was hard-pressed in some ways to accommodate all who wanted to visit, particularly during the biggest yearly events, Carnival and the Sugar Bowl college football game. If tourists were sometimes disappointed in the availability and type of lodgings available, commercial appalled by what they saw as the city's provinciality. As the executive of one shipping line complained to the new reform-minded mayor deLesseps Morrison in 1956 about the frustration in trying to hold high-level meetings or bring important business associates to New Orleans: "We must not only call every leading hotel in town to secure accommodations but usually find that the final answer is no."

New Orleans hoteliers turned a deaf ear to the scarcity complaints. They were not only satisfied with the status quo but actively worked to discourage the construction of new hotels in downtown and resisted pressures to expand their own businesses. Led by the politically connected and savvy owner of the Roosevelt, Seymour Weiss, the established hotels were very profitable through their high occupancy rates and low overhead with non-union, primarily African American employees. They saw no advantage in making expensive additions or upgrades when they had no competition. The major hotels even refused to participate in standard travel industry practices such as allowing travel agencies to book rooms or to participate in package tours. From the point of view of the elite New Orleans hotels there was no reason to pay commissions or offer group rates when their establishments had more bookings than they could accommodate. Because of the chronic shortage of hotel rooms, in the 1950s, New Orleans turned away more than 50 percent of the conventions that proposed coming to the city.

In contrast to the calcified hotel business in the city's core, the motel building was flourishing. Chains made their first appearance in the outlying areas when a Wigwam Village motel and an Alamo Plaza Hotel Court were built on Airline Highway in 1940. But a sea change occurred both locally and nationally when a change to the U.S. tax code made motels dramatically more profitable. To stimulate the sluggish economy, the 1954 Tax Code introduced a tax break for the real estate market to allow "accelerated depreciation" for new construction. Instead of depreciating the cost of a new building over 40 years, the timeline was sharply reduced. Using the 1954 Tax Code, a builder could put up a motel, write off 67 percent of the cost in five years, then sell the building at a profit. In New Orleans, the rapid development of the Tulane Avenue motel corridor is a powerful illustration of the tax code's impact. While motels had been built on Highway 61, west of New Orleans, since the early 1920s, there were very few motels in New Orleans proper until the 1950s. Tulane Avenue, the Highway 61 segment that extends almost into downtown New Orleans, became a magnet for motel building after 1954. Up until that date, there was one motel on Tulane Avenue, the B&C Motel, 2336 Tulane Avenue, built in 1946. After 1954 (the year of the Tax Code change) 15 motels were built in rapid succession:

1955: 2
1956: 3
1958: 2
1959: 1
1960: 2
1963: 1
1964: 2
1966: 1
1968: 1

In the 1950s and 1960s, New Orleans's shipping and industrial base was declining, but its attraction for tourists and conventions was rising. Combined with the Tax Code financial impetus, building a new hotel in the city had obvious and immediate rewards. The Tulane motels showed that tourists and even business travelers were willing to pay near-hotel rates for new, modern accommodations. The key difference between hotels and motels was, of course, the "M", motorcars. The accommodation of automobiles and rapid highway travel was the raison d'etre of motels. From the earliest tourist courts of the first decades of the 20^th Century, these roadside inns rapidly adjusted to the needs of automobile travel. The long-established hotel procedures were dispensed with almost overnight. Instead of an impressive lobby, staffed with porters and greeters, who welcomed guests, took charge of their luggage, and formally signed them into residence, motels offered a quick check-in at a modest reception area (sometimes just a window). Guests drove to the front door of their room and unloaded their own baggage. The needs of the automobile were the focus of motel design, reversing the hotel model of dismissing transportation (whether carriages or cars) immediately to some unknown garage or barn area. Motels advertised their subservience to automobiles with wide, gaudy drive-in entrances and promises to travelers they could park at their own front door. Other guest accommodations were secondary to accessible, free parking.

In New Orleans, the allure of motels was vividly illustrated by the success of the increasingly luxurious establishments on Tulane Avenue. But despite the advantages of inexpensive, ample land and easy access to the city core, Tulane Avenue was still a secondary location. For many entrepreneurs, builders, and developers the logical next step was to build new, modern accommodations in the two most desirable parts of New Orleans: downtown and the French Quarter.

The Hotel Building Boom

The French Quarter was not a welcoming district for new construction or massive renovations of extant buildings. The Vieux Carre had been designated a protected historic district with legal regulatory powers by the state and city in the 1930s. Because of the lack of construction during the Depression and World War II, the Vieux Carre Commission had not been seriously tested in its first decades. Starting in the late 1940s and growing through the 1950s pressure for new hotels in the French Quarter became a hotly debated civic issue. The competing goals of preservation, revitalization, and commerce seemed to find resolution with the 1958 construction of the Royal Orleans (now the Omni Royal Orleans). It was built on a vacant lot, the site of the old St. Louis Hotel, with an exterior design, size, and massing that harmonized with the surrounding buildings. The interior was new and equipped with all modern conveniences. The hotel was completed in 1959 and was so successful its owners immediately launched a campaign to add another story to the building.

Two more new construction hotels followed fairly quickly. In 1961, the Provincial Motel (1024 Chartres Street) opened on the site of an ice plant that had burned. It was also was designed in what was being called French Quarter Revival style, with modern rooms, a courtyard swimming pool, and ample parking. The next year construction began on the Vieux Carre Motor Lodge on the perimeter of the French Quarter (920 North Rampart Street) also on a vacant lot. This hotel opened in 1964 with the now familiar French Quarter Revival facades and modern interiors. The French Quarter hotel momentum slowed as vacant lots in the dense French Quarter were quickly used up. Concomitantly, requests for the demolition of buildings and complete remodeling of extant historic buildings were vigorously opposed by Vieux Carre residents and preservationists. The preservation versus construction debates intensified and in 1969, a moratorium was issued by the city on any new hotel buildings or conversions in the Vieux Carre.

On Canal Street and in the central business district, there were no historic building regulations for developers to consider, but land was expensive and the returns-on-investment dictums meant larger, expensive buildings. But Canal Street and the business district were still very appealing to developers and builders. This was in contrast to many American cities where the downtowns were beginning their slide to deterioration and irrelevance. In the 1960s, the Canal Street corridor remained a vibrant magnet for business and entertainment, buoyed by the undiminished attraction of the French Quarter to both locals and tourists. Canal Street was looked on by many urban scholars and cultural critics as a hopeful beacon for the future of downtowns. In the mid-1960s, two eminent architects and cultural critics engaged in a high-profile debate over Canal Street's meaning and future. Peter Blake in God's Own Junkyard (1964) pillaged Canal for what he called over-commercialization and civic neglect. Robert Venturi took the polar opposite view in his influential book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), extolling Canal as a vibrant example of city life. Meanwhile, the dean of American cultural geography, Pierce F. Lewis, pointed to Canal Street as a defining element of New Orleans and gauge of its downtown vitality. Despite the rich potential for a new Canal Street business district hotel and the success of new hotels in the French Quarter, there was no change in the status quo until 1964, when the Governor House Motor Hotel was built.

Building Description

The Governor House Motor Hotel (herein referred to as the Governor House) is a six-story motor hotel on New Orleans's most prominent street, Canal Street, and located beside the elevated Interstate 10 roadway. When it was built in 1964, the Governor House was the first motor hotel (or motel) in the downtown area, known as the Central Business District. The steel-frame building is clad in old brick and designed in the French Quarter Revival Style, making prominent use of iconic elements such as French doors, shutters, arched openings, and balconies. The French Quarter motif is an instant billboard for the hotel, inviting guests by invoking the romance and charm of New Orleans's historic past. The building's exterior has not been altered since the hotel opened in 1965. The interior has undergone periodic updating but the building's centerpiece, the four-story atrium surrounded by guestrooms, is intact.

The building is a steel frame, six-story motor hotel on a site in downtown New Orleans. The building takes up slightly more than 25 percent of Square 404, the block bounded by Canal Street, South Claiborne Avenue, South Robertson Street, and Cleveland Avenue. Although it is a low-rise building, the hotel is a prominent presence on Canal, the city's defining roadway. It is also a visual anchor from Interstate 10, a massive traffic conduit which was built over Claiborne Avenue. From their vehicles, drivers and passengers are eye level with the Governor House Hotel's distinctive design.

The footprint of the building is slightly rectangular with a small attached rectangle on the south-southwest corner (a three-level extension of the parking garage with a swimming pool on the open-air third level) seen from above. The hotel, the main part of the building, opens onto Canal Street. The Canal and South Claiborne facades are built up to the sidewalk. The rear portion of the building is a two-story parking deck and garage. The Cleveland Avenue and South Robertson Street elevations are obscured by high-rise buildings that fill the rest of the square. The building has 35,150 square feet of space. The core building at 1630 Canal has 217 guest rooms spread over the top four floors. The ground floor (first floor) has a lobby area and space for restaurants, kitchen, retail shops, offices, storage, and maintenance spaces. There is also a large garage drive-in area with two side-by-side entrances where guests could park while checking in or out. The open parking space connects to the car parks in the rear of the hotel. The sixth floor is the roof with a variety of enclosed separate spaces designed to serve as meeting rooms and a bar.

The street facing Canal and South Claiborne facades of 1630 Canal are similar, designed in the French Quarter Revival style, using the same materials and massing. The Cleveland Avenue side of the building (the rear) is partly covered by the parking areas. On the South Robertson side of the building, only the south facade of the three-level car park section is visible between the abutting buildings. It is towered over by the 14-story ODECO Building to the east and an eight-story parking garage to the west. To achieve the historic French Quarter Revival style, the Canal and South Claiborne facades are faced in old brick. The Canal Street entrance area emphatically announces its design intentions with a Greek Revival-inspired four-story temple front and pedimented gable that spans approximately 20 percent of the building's facade. The temple front is flanked by repeating three repeating floors of French door openings with continuous cast iron railings. On the upper two floors (third and fourth stories) the French doors have full-length green shutters further accentuating the historic design. The mansard roof is punctuated with dormer windows that align with the French door openings below. The South Claiborne facade is more modest, without full-length French door openings, but continues the motif of repeating rows of windows with shutters and the mansard roof with dormer windows. The two openings on each end of the second through fourth floors has full height openings consisting of double-hung windows and an inset panel below. The old brick veneer makes a brief appearance on the Cleveland Avenue (rear) side of 1630 Canal with a faux brick firewall that protrudes above the roof line. Above the two-level car park, the Cleveland facade is open to four stories of walkways with repeating pattern of uniform doors and horizontal windows. The walls are smooth plaster The distinctive patterned railings used throughout the hotel line the walkways. The car park levels, on the Cleveland side, have both covered and uncovered parking.

The ground floor lobby is a small, utilitarian space at the center of the ground floor. It has exterior openings to Canal Street and to the covered parking area on the north side of the building. The majority of the space on the first floor is given over to a restaurant area on the south side of the building and offices and work areas to the rear of the lobby. The mezzanine floor, also a modest space with minimal decoration, is divided into meeting rooms.

The guest floors, which begin after the mezzanine with the second floor, are defined by an open atrium that rises to the roof. The main elevator bank (with two units) and large stairwell are at the center of the open area, dividing the space visually but the atrium is a single area. The atrium is covered by a skylight at the roof level. The walls of the atrium are clad in glazed mosaic tiles. Guest rooms ring the atrium opening onto narrow continuous walkways. Each room has a main door and a utilitarian two-by-two horizontal window unit that looks out on the hallway. There is a second elevator shaft at the rear of the hotel section providing access to the parking area as well as rooms.

Floors two, three, four, and five are almost identical in layout. Railings on the walkways repeat the angular design used in the exterior balcony railings. Some rooms also have doors to the car parks at the rear of the building. The guest rooms are largely intact. They have been perfunctorily updated in the past, but all the rooms are dated with rusting and/or unusable bathroom facilities.

The swimming pool is located on the roof of a section of the parking area. This section of the building is the unusual small rectangle that is attached to the southwest corner of the main building's open car park. The pool is rectangular with a sloping floor that goes from two feet to eight feet in depth. The pool is roughly centered in a concrete patio that covers the roof area. The patio is surrounded by a low concrete wall with a cast-iron fence. The only other feature of the patio-pool space is the pool house, a small building that provided a snack bar and restrooms. It is a one-story, stucco over concrete building with a steep end-gable roof. The pool has not been in use for more than seven years. The hotel pool was originally on the roof of the main building but after the 1966 collapse, it was removed. During the reconstruction, the pool, patio, and pool house were rebuilt on the three-story car park annex where they sit today. There are no alterations to this area since it was constructed in 1966.

The exterior of 1630 Canal Street has retained its original design and appearance. The interior has undergone remodeling and changes since its 1965 opening but the basic layout of an atrium-centered hotel is intact. The roof had to be rebuilt after the 1967 partial structural collapse, but was constructed to match the original plans. The atrium has always been covered with some sort of translucent material and it is likely that this material has had to be replaced a few times over the last 51 years due to sun damage.

The building is currently unoccupied. It was closed as a hotel in 2009 by city authorities, citing a number of safety issues. Since that time the Governor House has received some baseline maintenance and has been secured against intruders. Overall, the building is sturdy but with many condition problems. In addition to aging and non-working mechanical elements, interior and exterior windows have corroded steel frames and the building is not sufficiently protected against the elements. Some makeshift steel support structures have been added (for shoring) by previous owners but more substantial repairs are needed.