The Cornstalk Hotel

This guide to the Cornstalk Hotel in New Orleans starts with a Philadelphia catalog from the late 1850s, where a buyer could order a cast-iron fence the way they'd order a chair. It takes on the fence's famous legend, the story of a lovesick husband who supposedly designed the cornstalk pattern to comfort a homesick wife from Iowa, and traces that tale back to a completely different house across town in the Garden District. You'll hear about Robert Wood's ironworks in Philadelphia, which kept thousands of patterns in storage and shipped this same design to more than one paying customer. Look closely at the fence posts, cast to look like little pumpkins, a detail that took a patternmaker weeks to carve before any iron was poured.