Edited with Google AI
By Ed Avis
New Orleans is one of those cities with a distinct personality. Jazz, po’boys, Krewes, booze. And it’s a survivor – hurricanes try to wipe it off the map once in a while, but have not yet succeeded.
City Blueprint, a new IRgA member from the Big Easy, fits in perfectly. The shop, which was founded in 1973 by Jim Mahoney, has a location on Poydras Street in New Orleans and another in Mandeville, which is across Lake Pontchartrain from the city. Jim’s sons, David and Bob Mahoney, are now co-owners.
The company has reproduced construction documents for more than half a century’s worth of construction in the city. The company’s main client base is still the AEC industry, according to Matt Nichols, who has worked at City Blueprint for 26 years. Nichols doesn’t really have a title – he’s a sales rep, he researches new markets, and he has done installs.
“I think ‘technical sales rep’ is my official title. That’s what’s on my card,” Nichols says. “But you know, we’re a small business, so I wear a lot of hats.”
Like many businesses in New Orleans, City Blue was deeply affected by Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into the city in 2005. The company had opened the Mandeville office just a year or two before.
“The Mandeville office actually saved us, because our main office was severely damaged in Katrina,” Nichols says. “We had three or four feet of water in our building. Eventually we put a doublewide trailer out front, but it took us, I don’t know, a year or so to get back in. If it wasn’t for the location in Mandeville, by God’s grace, it may have been the end.”
The hurricane was a technological turning point for City Blue. The company had had a solid Xerox digital business for years, but, unlike most blue printers by that time, its fleet of diazo machines was also still profitably cranking out bluelines.
“When we finally got electricity to our building after Katrina, and we were getting ready to move in, I remember it distinctly, because David Mahoney was like, ‘Well, we gotta get down there and get those blue line machines running,’” Nichols says. “And me and his nephew, who’s been here 24 years, said, ‘No, don't do it!’ So we never turned them on again.”
Here’s another way Katrina changed City Blue: Everyone stopped wearing ties!
“We all wore ties up until Katrina,” Nichols laughs. “I actually got my tie caught in a scanner one time. I was leaning over to get prints out the back and the next thing you know, I feel like, ‘What’s going on!?’ Katrina changed a lot of things.”
A characteristic of New Orleans that many overlook is its wealth of institutions of higher education. City Blue fits in there, too.
“Higher education is a good field us,” Nichols says. “Scientific institutions like Tulane and LSU Medical Center, amongst others, do research and we print out a lot of their scientific posters for conferences and events like that.”
For color work, the company uses HP DesignJets and PageWides. In addition to the scientific posters, they print a lot of jobsite signage. They also deal HP and Xerox equipment.
They have grown their digital AEC work with a plan room through ReproConnect. The plan room is profitable, Nichols affirms, as they charge the project owners when they post jobs and they generate revenue from prints that result from those projects.
So next you’re visiting New Orleans, before you head over to Bourbon Street, stop by City Blueprint and welcome them to the IRgA!