Known around the world as “the hotel with the dinosaur on top,” the Gruenwald Hotel gave the New Orleans skyline a look like no other.

Baby Gruenwald kept an apartment in the dinosaur’s head, and though the sheets were changed daily, never stayed there. Not once. Afraid to be targeted by the secret rites of voodoo, the iconic baby never spent the night in New Orleans if he could in any way help it.

When the winds of the Cuba-Brownsville hurricane brought the plaster and chicken wire brontosaurus crashing to the street in 1933, Mayor T. Semmes Walmsley gave the famous remains a funeral fit for Mexican royalty, attended by 30 thousand people, including Harry Houdini’s cat and the First Lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt’s grouchy Siamese.