Ellen Biddle Shipman (1866-1950) was a landscape celebrity, designer to the stars, and the visionary behind Longue Vue’s masterful design and National Historic Landmark status. A single mother and pioneering entrepreneur in a field dominated by men, she would become a mentor to scores of younger women through her all-female design firm, based in New York and serving hundreds of clients around the country during the 1920s and ‘30s.

Shipman met Edith Stern at a garden club gathering in 1934, and a close personal and professional friendship began. By 1942, Shipman had redesigned Longue Vue’s entire eight-acre site – including the interiors of the new house she convinced the family to build. The architects? William and Geoffrey Platt, hand-picked by Shipman and sons of her mentor, Charles Platt.

Together, Shipman and Edith Stern also enlisted the help of famed botanist and author Caroline Dormon to choose plant material for Longue Vue’s Wild Garden, known for its extensive collection of native plants.

Following Edgar’s death in 1959, Edith maintained the property on her own and continued to activate it as a headquarters for garden clubs, cultural events, and political activism. She opened the gardens to the public on a regular basis beginning in 1968 and began to convert the house into an historic museum in the late 1970s. She moved into an off-site apartment to make way for public access, leaving nearly all of the original furnishings and decorative arts collection. Longue Vue opened as an independent non-profit museum in 1980, several months before Edith’s death – allowing her to realize her vision.

The Shipman Collection is a multifaceted effort that will preserve, conserve, and where necessary restore Ellen Biddle Shipman’s masterpiece design at Longue Vue in tandem with research, outreach, and advocacy efforts to bolster public awareness of her importance and legacy. The intention is for Longue Vue to become a research repository and hub for all things Shipman related, becoming a valuable tool for advocacy both at our site and beyond. Major deliverables include preservation and restoration of Shipman’s gardens, pathways, and interior design at Longue Vue, the creation of The Shipman Reference Library in both physical and digital formats, and a concentrated outreach and communications campaign culminating in a 2030 retrospective and the launching of The Shipman Society.

Ongoing projects include:

• Archival stabilization and digitization

• Preservation of key pathways and masonry elements throughout the gardens

• Fountain restoration

• HVAC updates and improved interior climate monitoring system

Preservation efforts have been made possible in partnership with The New Orleans Tourism and Cultural Foundation (NOTCF), The RosaMary Foundation, The Keller Family Foundation, and The National Park Service (NPS).

While at Longue Vue, look for key Shipman design techniques and fall in love with this titan of American design! Here are a few top picks:

• Shipman was known for creating axial sightlines within the gardens and the home, or “axial views.”

• Each window of the home offers stunning garden views that create a sensation of seamlessly blended interior and exterior spaces.

• She considered the garden “the most important element of a home” and conceived individual gardens as clearly defined exterior spaces, or “garden rooms.”

• A painterly expressive romanticism stood out among Shipman’s more formalist contemporaries.

Click here to check out an article on Ellen Shipman from The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

In addition to the physical beauty of the estate, Longue Vue carries an extraordinary family legacy. Edith and Edgar Stern were raised with the Jewish principle of Tzedakah: Instead of “charity,” Tzedakah honors “sharing,” pointing to the reciprocal benefits of philanthropy in place of a benefactor-beneficiary one-way transaction. This captures perfectly how Edith and Edgar lived and gave. They invested time a resources in Dillard University, Flint-Goodrich Hospital, the Pontchartrain Park subdivision, Newcomb Nursery School, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and Metairie Park Country Day School, among many other causes. They addressed access to education for African-American students. They addressed equity in healthcare and housing. They sought to support free creative expression. They also worked to advance voting rights, transparency in government, and to share their evolving understanding of and concern about the evils of racist structures and systems.

Upon Edith’s death in 1980, their private residence became a nonprofit historic house museum, open to the public – and the wide range of causes Edith and Edgar addressed became a gift and a challenge to those of us tasked with continuing their legacy. Today, we host programs, exhibits, and events that address our century’s pressing issues, including environmental responsibility, broad access to quality education, and most recently, public health, safety, and equity. We believe that Longue Vue is uniquely positioned to serve our community by engaging these topics in a controlled, open-air, and inspiring setting.