Preservationist and architect Raymond J. Boudreaux, who helped to lead the long-running fight against a riverfront expressway through the French Quarter, died Thursday at his home in Bayou St. John. He was 97.

Up until his death, Boudreaux continued to revisit the successful struggle to block the expressway, which was killed by federal officials in 1969. He was emphatic about the key role of the Vieux Carre Property Owners & Associates, or VCPOA, which later added "Residents" to its name and became VCPORA.

“I am firmly convinced that if VCPOA had not existed when the serious effort was made to construct the expressway, we probably would have an elevated roadway on the riverfront today and diesel soot on our beignets at Café du Monde,” he wrote in a 2019 letter.

His advocacy went far beyond the expressway. He stood in front of bulldozers at the mouth of Bayou St. John until a court order was delivered that barred the construction of Lakeshore Drive at ground level in a way that would have effectively dammed the bayou.

He supported creating a linear riverside park in the French Quarter but opposed construction of the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas, comparing its design to “a mayonnaise manufacturing plant in Duluth.”

He was part of a stalwart group of preservationists who feared that the French Quarter and other historic areas of the city could be destroyed in the name of progress. “He was the last of that generation of protectors of the Vieux Carre,” said Nathan Chapman, a past VCPORA president.

Boudreaux was the organization’s president for four years starting in the late 1960s and served a total of 25 years on the board, guiding many of his successors. “He’d say, ‘There’s no right way to do the wrong thing.’ He preached that,” said Gary Williams, a past president.

Boudreaux graduated from Tulane University in 1949 with a degree in architecture. He and his firm helped to design the original, open-air version of Lakeside Shopping Center and the law school building at Loyola University; they also led the renovation of the Louisiana Supreme Court building on Royal Street.

He also spent years on what he called his biggest do-it-yourself project, his house on Moss Street, a decrepit Creole cottage that he renovated with a modernist interior. A friend said that Boudreaux worked on the house on weekends and holidays for seven years. 

He often described his home as his sanctuary and a “nest for two,” designed for him and his wife of 56 years, Hilda Voss Boudreaux, who died in 2009. Because the two of them were fond of walks in City Park under its live oak trees, he served on the Friends of City Park board.

Boudreaux was motivated to preserve the buildings of the French Quarter for architectural reasons. But his love of the Quarter and its culture was deep, dating back to his childhood, when he lived on Gov. Nicholls Street there.

His Cajun father worked for the railroad; his mother was one of nine children of an Italian immigrant family in the Quarter, then a heavily Italian enclave sometimes called “Little Palermo.”

His fondness for peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches dated back to those days, when an uncle unloading fruit-company boats on the riverfront would bring home bunches of bananas, said his niece, Renee Boudreaux. All his life, he craved French bread baked in brick ovens, which he got as a child from French Quarter bakeries.

Boudreaux relished operatic music and good food, beauty and rich culture, said Audrey Evans, a neighbor who became his companion after his wife’s death.

His position was that New Orleans and his beloved Vieux Carre were unique in a way that developers could never understand if their primary focus was profits. “You don’t apply normal operational standards to a one-of-a-kind thing,” he said in 1975. “There are values in the French Quarter which cannot be defined in terms of money.”

Survivors include his niece and a brother, Louis Boudreaux, of Simonton, Texas. There are no plans for a public funeral or memorial service.