William Fitzner

He was a favorite architect within the growing German community and outside of it in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and won commissions for a wide variety of building types.

[3][4] Most prominently, Fitzner became known for his breweries, a characteristic building type widely associated with German communities throughout the United States, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest in places such as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati.

He also designed banks, cotton mills, factories, warehouses, hardware stores, St. Mary's Dominican Convent on St. Charles Avenue near Carrollton, and churches.

[6][7][8] Fitzner also became known for numerous mansions and well-appointed villas for wealthy clients in the Garden District in Uptown New Orleans and elsewhere in the city, many of which have survived and are still used as fashionable private residences, though some have been altered and updated significantly since their construction.

[9][10] He became proficient in a variety of different styles, using, for example, the picturesque Queen Anne aesthetic for the Anders Ugland House at 1335 Calhoun Street in the Blytheville neighborhood in 1896.

On a building site on Fulton Street in New Orleans in July 1886 he actually got into a contract dispute with one of his construction supervisors, Charles Kehl.

Sadly, Fitzner's reputation was not always widely known into the twentieth century, even by his descendants, one of whom in 1984 reported that he only knew that his grandfather had built a few structures in New Orleans many years prior.