Hey Blake,
With lots of talk about statues these days, I have a question about one on Canal Street that I think we can all support: Ignatius J. Reilly. Who was the artist and when was it placed there?
Dear reader,
The statue of Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces,” has been on Canal Street since 1997. The opening scene of the Pulitzer Prize-winning work famously places Reilly on Canal Street, waiting for his mother under the clock at D.H. Holmes.
The D.H. Holmes department store opened at 819 Canal Street in 1849. After it closed in 1989, the property was redeveloped into a hotel. It was known as the Chateau Sonesta when it opened in 1995. It is now the Hyatt Centric French Quarter.
The D.H. Holmes clock, a meeting spot for generations of New Orleanians, had been stolen in 1989 by two Kenner men “for safekeeping,” they said. It was returned to the hotel and restored to its spot outside.
Around the same time, the idea for an Ignatius Reilly statue came from the hotel’s developer, Pres Kabacoff. "New Orleans is steeped in literary tradition,” he told The Times-Picayune, “and the idea of putting this outrageous protagonist from the novel — a novel that means New Orleans to many people — out in front of the hotel…was an image I thought made a lot of sense for the city."
Local sculptor Bill Ludwig was commissioned for the work. The statue is modeled after actor and radio/TV personality John “Spud” McConnell, who has portrayed Ignatius many times in local theaters. "McConnell was the closest thing we were going to get to an Ignatius that existed,” Ludwig said. “I saw him onstage and loved what he did. He'd played the part, he'd studied it, he had been Ignatius."
The sculpture was unveiled in October 1997. Ludwig’s other local sculptures include the Louisiana Vietnam War Veterans Memorial at the Superdome and the statue of Malcolm Woldenberg and his grandson at Woldenberg Park. Ludwig died in 2011.
