Hey Blake,

I was born and raised in New Orleans, but now I live in Chicago and work as a trader at the Chicago Board of Trade. I did some research on the New Orleans Board of Trade (NOBOT) and found that it closed in the 1960s and can now be rented out for parties and such. I was wondering if you knew some details of what was traded there and how it compared in size and volume to the exchanges popular today. One last thing, why did it close? If it was still open, it might be nice to be able to work back home.

Joe Gulotta
Chicago

This cast-iron fountain from Spain greets visitors in the courtyard in front of the New Orleans Board of Trade.

Dear Joe,

Your Chicago Board of Trade -- still very active -- is the world's oldest futures and options exchange and dates back to 1848. It was always much larger than the NOBOT.

It was in 1880 that the Produce Exchange was founded, but the building wasn't constructed until 1883. Only in 1889 did it acquire the name of New Orleans Board of Trade.

Between the end of Reconstruction and the 1890s, New Orleans made giant strides, and the port showed steady increases in shipment abroad of the staples, cotton and cottonseed oil, the trade of coffee and sugar, exports of grain and imports of tropical fruit. The railroads played a major role in the city's grain trade and its ability to deliver huge quantities of bananas and other tropical fruits to the interior of the country. In the 1880s, there was a failure of grain harvests in Great Britain and Europe. This was fortunate for New Orleans because America was needed for its abundant wheat fields. New York and San Francisco were first and second, New Orleans ranked fifth in the nation in wheat exports.

Members of the original Produce Exchange of 1880 were active in politics and quarantine matters as well as commerce. To form a broader group, they united with the Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants and Manufacturer's Association to form the Board of Trade. The members of the Cotton Exchange and the Maritime Association also merged into the organization in 1898.

This new BOT became the voice of the business community and played an important role in the development of commerce. Among other things, it brought a Navy yard and dry dock to the city, secured public ownership of the wharves, and helped create the Louisiana State Railroad Commission. Although they did not come until the 20th century, a public belt railroad, a bridge over the Mississippi River and a railroad union terminal were improvements suggested by the board.

A major renovation of the BOT building took place in 1951, and trading continued on the floor until the end of the 1960s, when it stopped on a large scale as it did not warrant the expense of maintaining the trading board and other facilities the Board owned.

At various times in its history, there was active trading of sugar, cotton, plywood, coffee and major stocks. For a while, the New Orleans Commodity Exchange began using the BOT building for its trading activities -- involving rice mostly -- but that ended in 1984 when the Exchange moved to Chicago.

Today, the NOBOT is a nonprofit organization with multiple purposes such as promoting the interests of commerce and trade, helping to move goods through the Port of New Orleans, maintaining a Marine Exchange to keep track of all ships entering and leaving the Mississippi River, and providing an active organization that allows the business interests of New Orleans to come together for the betterment of all.

The NOBOT building, which was last renovated in 1993, has several interesting features. The clerestory has a mural dome that was hand painted by a local artist in 1932. It took Alvin Sharpe about three months to complete the canvas, which was glued to the dome and then painted. Another feature is clocks, which have been in place since the construction of the building, that tell the time in New Orleans, New York and Rio de Janeiro, all important cities in the coffee trade. There also is a cast-iron fountain from Spain, which was purchased especially for the Board of Trade Plaza, which was dedicated in 1968.