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NEW ORLEANS – New Orleans chiropractor and real estate developer Sylvi Beaumont was looking for a Katrina restoration project when she discovered this ornate old Canal Street building.

“I walked in, and I said, look at these bricks, look at these thick walls,” Beaumont said. “This is salvageable to me.”

But she learned she had bought a piece of history. Built in 1911, when Martin Behrman was mayor, it was originally the Canal Street library, located just across from Warren Easton High School.

New Orleans was a very different place then. The bustling times of the roaring 1920s were followed by the Great Depression.

“It was a time when people were in despair,” said artist Jeanne Louise Chauffe.  “They were humiliated. They had to stand in line to get food, people that were like you and me.”

The Works Progress Administration gave jobs to millions of Americans who built projects like the roads and bridges in City Park. The WPA employed many artists.

“We’re feeling some of that hurt today,” Chauffe said.  “I mean it gave people a sense of hope, and it allowed them to dream of better times.”

And in the old Canal Street library, the WPA hired artist Edward Schoenberger, who painted this mural in 1941, 50 feet long by 9 feet high, with a series of scenes tracing the history of human communication from paintings on the walls of caves to modern printing presses.

But when Sylvi Beaumont bought the building, the mural had been wrecked by renovations and vandalism.

“I didn’t think it could be restored,” Chauffe said. “A third of it was covered, completely covered in paint and plaster. So I’m looking at it, and I said, oh my gosh, just to uncover this, am I going to have any pigment left?”

Chauffe spent more than five months painstakingly restoring the mural, patching holes, removing layers of paint and plaster that covered sections.

“I’m literally moving my fingers like this,” she said with a ruefull laugh, “and since I tend to be a hyperactive person anyway, this is a very hard thing for me to do all day long.”

And Chauffe did it while perched on scaffolding in a building without air conditioning through the worst of the summer heat.

“I’ve never done something with this historical importance,” she said.

At some point did she feel like Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel?

“Possibly. I think I was hotter than he was,” she said with a laugh.

You can see there is still some renovation work left to be done inside. But in a few months, they will be completed, then the building will be reopened, and the mural will be there to inspire and teach a little history to a new generation of New Orleanians.

“I’m so happy. I’m so pleased. I didn’t think it was possible,” Beaumont said.

Chauffe even discovered the sense of humor of original artist Edward Schoenberger, in a tiny inscription.

“Cleaning the mural I discovered this: ‘If you can read this, then you are too damn close.’”

Now future generations can enjoy the entire panorama of a piece of history.