Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans

About this audio guide

This guide to the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans starts with the modern art crowd that fills these brick doors during White Linen Night, then rewinds to the building's earlier life as headquarters for K and B, the corner drugstore chain every New Orleans childhood knew. You'll hear the company lore about how one shade of purple, picked almost by accident around 1910, became stamped on every product, uniform and truck the chain ever owned, growing toward two hundred stores before Rite Aid bought the company out in 1997. The brick walls and heavy timber overhead are original to that drugstore era.