The historic brick firehouse at 514 Jackson Ave. — for decades a quiet landmark in the Irish Channel and more recently the site of a Banksy mural — has been sold to Miami businessman and philanthropist Jeffrey Miller for $1.25 million.
The seller, New Orleans artist Jaohn Orgon, had owned and lived in the building for years, using it as both a residence and studio. Orgon originally purchased the firehouse in the spring of 2005 for $175,000.
Miller said via text on Friday that he is not yet ready to disclose his plans for the firehouse, including whether it will remain a private residence or be developed as a venue or for some other commercial purpose. Other historic firehouses in the city have been converted to private residences and businesses like hotels, coffee shops and restaurants.
The Jackson Avenue building’s recent claim to fame was as the site of a 2008 mural by the pseudonymous British street artist Banksy, whose preserved works have fetched as much as $25 million at auction. The firehouse’s six-foot-tall stencil depicted a stick figure pleading with the city’s late anti-graffiti crusader, Fred “The Gray Ghost” Radtke.
Installed behind a protective fence, the piece became one of the longest-surviving examples of Banksy’s post-Katrina works before Orgon removed it earlier this year, just ahead of the property sale. That section of wall — roughly 5,000 pounds of brick and mortar — was cut free and cradled in a steel frame before being hauled away on a flatbed truck to the Louisiana State Museum for safe keeping.
In April the process had begun to remove a 2008 painting by the British graffiti superstar Banksy from the wall of of a 19th-century fire station on Jackson Avenue
Long before its turn as a street-art landmark, the two-story structure served for decades as Engine 22, a New Orleans Fire Department station that operated at the site from roughly 1925 to 1973. Records and the horse stables at the back of the property suggest the building itself may date to the mid-19th century, though the exact construction date is uncertain. Today, it’s listed by the Historic District Landmarks Commission as a contributing property within the Irish Channel Historic District.
Philanthropist investor
Miller, whose son Lenny who is a fourth-year student at Tulane’s Freeman School of Business, has had a growing presence in New Orleans in recent years. In 2023, he purchased another historic property: a five-bedroom, 5,000-square-foot mansion at 17 Richmond Place, for $2.35 million. The Queen Anne-style house was built in 1905 for Henry Louis Favrot, a prominent lawyer and state senator, and was the first constructed on that exclusive Uptown street.
Earlier this year, Miller and his wife, Tina Beltran Miller, a professional golfer, donated $1 million to Tulane University’s Innovation Institute, creating the Miller Family Endowed Fund, which supports entrepreneurial programming, pitch competitions, and proof-of-concept awards.
On July 15, a work by renowned English graffiti artist Banksy was cut from the wall of a historic fire station in the Irish Channel neighborhood and trucked away by the owner of the property
Miller’s business interests span real estate, banking, and energy. He founded Krillion Ventures, a $100 million venture capital fund backing technology startups in Miami, New York, Boston, and San Francisco. The son of Leonard Miller, who grew a small homebuilding firm into Lennar Corporation, the second-largest home construction company in the U.S. now worth about $30 billion, Miller has long combined entrepreneurship with civic engagement.
His philanthropic interests include The Miller Foundation, the family’s charitable arm, through which $150 million has been donated to the University of Miami, including the naming of the Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine. He is a notable supporter of music initiatives in Miami and chairs the Dean’s Advisory Council at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. The Jackson Avenue property was bought through a company called Nitetrippers LLC, an apparent reference to Dr. John’s backing band.
For his part, Orgon is perhaps best known for founding the NOLA Art House, an artist collective and residence located in an antebellum mansion at 1614 Esplanade Ave. in the historic Treme neighborhood. Established in 2005, the Art House provides affordable housing and studio space for professional artists, fostering collaboration and creative exchange. Its parlors, hallways, and backyard host exhibitions and installations.
The Art House is particularly noted for its multi-story interactive treehouse, created by longtime resident Scott Pterodactyl and other artists associated with the collective known as Home-made Parachutes, constructed almost entirely from salvaged materials in the post-Katrina years.
Secret post-Katrina visit
The mural came to be painted at the Jackson Avenue firehouse during Banksy’s secret 2008 visit to the Big Easy, when he created small murals across the city to lift spirits and attract tourists during the post-Katrina recovery. Many were later painted over, removed, or demolished. The Gray Ghost mural at Jackson Avenue became particularly noteworthy because it survived for 17 years, largely protected by a fence and later a transparent panel.
Orgon may have glimpsed the elusive artist while scaffolding wrapped in tarps concealed the work, though he later admitted he didn’t know who Banksy was at the time. The mural is one of a handful of Banksy works salvaged for long-term preservation in New Orleans, along with Looters and Child on a Swing at the International House Hotel, a Bart Simpson mural at Habana Outpost, and recent removals of Gray Ghost and Umbrella Girl for restoration in early 2024.
The sale of the firehouse to Miller has ensured that one of the city’s few remaining Banksy murals will be preserved, highlighting the building’s unusual role at the intersection of local history, contemporary art, and civic legacy.