May 26, 2022 KEYWORDS Arkansas / Louisiana / Mississippi / New Orleans / Oklahoma / Snapshot / Texas Order Reprints No Comments

Impetus (formerly Palmisano) is serving as the design-build contractor on the renovation of the 17-story, 232,000-sq-ft Kimpton Hotel Fontenot, located in the Central Business District of New Orleans.

Photographer Chance Newman flies a DJI Mavic 2 Zoom drone weekly to capture progress. While doing so in January, he hoped to capture the crane, shown top right, and the first of the permanent steel structure being erected. “The permanent steel is the darker non-round members as seen at the top of the picture,” he says. “This site is tricky to fly because there are towers on two sides of the building, one of which is 442 ft tall. It is also in the middle of downtown where there is a lot of interference making it difficult to acquire GPS satellites for reliable flights.”

The project owner is JMI Reality LLC, and the designer is Delawie Architects. Completion is scheduled for October.

“I like that you can see the historical facade and the building stripped to its bones,” Newman says. “All the existing structure is gone at this point, and the new structure to hold the facade in place is being put in.”