For more than a hundred years, the two-block Bell School campus anchored New Orleans’ Tremé neighborhood as a place for education, music training, and cultural development. Abandoned since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, these five extraordinary buildings have been given new life in phase one of a two-phase project that hopes to restore not only the bricks and mortar but also the former Bell School’s historic role as a center of the community. The Bell Artspace Campus project transforms the three largest buildings of the former Bell School into 79 units of affordable live/work housing for low- to moderate-income artists, cultural workers, and families. The project also reestablishes many of the former Bell School's creative and common spaces (e.g., band room, gym, and chapel building) for creative use by the Bell Artspace Campus residents and commercial tenants.
Phase one of the Bell Artspace Campus project was developed in parthership with Providence Community Housing, a non-profit that has built more than a thousand affordable housing units in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. Other supporters include both the City and the Housing Authority of New Orleans, Junebug Productions, New Orleans Master Crafts Guild, Make Music Nola, and Tremé4Tremé.
