Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans

by Garvey, John B.

  Arriving in St. Martinville from France in 1820, already an enormously wealthy man, Durand became the owner of thousands of acres of plantation land, which was to be even more valuable later on when it was planted with sugarcane. He built a magnificent home on the Bayou Teche and an allée of pine and oak trees that extended from the bayou to his mansion, which he called Pine Alley.

  After the death of his first wife, who had borne him twelve children, he became inconsolable. He visited her grave each day, swore never to marry again, and even had an iron statue of himself, kneeling, placed before her tomb. Within a year, however, Durand had remarried and, by his second wife, he fathered another dozen children.

  In 1850, as the story goes, when two of his daughters were to be married on the same day, he had imported from China many huge spiders, which he set loose along the allée of trees a few days before the wedding so that they had enough time to spin cloud-like webs across the canopy of the natural arcade, which Durand then sprinkled with gold and silver dust by a number of young slaves with bellows. The two thousand guests arrived, their gilt-decorated carriages rolling on Persian rugs spread beneath the cathedral nave of sparkling webs that floated above them in the breeze.

  During the Civil War, Pine Alley was devastated. The slaves ran away, and the Union army stripped the mansion and ruined the crops. The family scattered, and the house began to deteriorate. Some years ago, it was completely demolished. Of the three-mile alley, only a mile remains, leading back from Louisiana Highway 86. Still beneath a cathedral nave, the effect enhanced by the narrowness of the alley and the height of the trees, the road leads to nothing.

  Lafayette’s Visit

  In 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette visited New Orleans, an event that would long be remembered in the city. The legislature appropriated $15,000 to furnish an apartment in the Cabildo for the use of the Revolutionary War hero. He arrived on the steamboat Natchez from Mobile. The militia passed in review before him and he was fêted in Caldwell’s American Theater and the Théâtre d’Orléans.

  Creoles Versus Americans

  Between 1825 and 1830, the number of merchants doing business in the city grew from 60 to 272. The number of taverns increased more than seventy percent, a good sign of the prosperity and ebullient spirits of the times. The most impressive gains were made in the Faubourg St. Mary.

  Within a few years after the Americans began to settle in the area, the value of property equaled that of the Vieux Carré. The Vieux Carré was the retailing center of the city, but importers, exporters, and brokers proliferated in the American Sector.

  Competition between Creoles and Americans manifested itself in many ways. The Creoles objected to the use of English as the official language in the city and to the courts showing favoritism to the Americans in their decisions. The Americans, on the other hand, complained that all civic improvements were being made in the Vieux Carré and none in the suburbs.

  Each sector had its own public square: the Place d’Armes (later Jackson Square) in the Vieux Carré and Lafayette Square in the American Sector. Each had its opulent residential avenue: Esplanade in the Vieux Carré and St. Charles Avenue in the American Sector. Between 1830 and 1850, magnificent structures rose to change the skyline of the city. In the American Sector, the St. Charles Hotel, two blocks above Canal Street; City Hall (now Gallier Hall) on St. Charles Avenue; the University of Louisiana on Common Street; St. Patrick’s Church on Camp Street; and the new Custom House at the foot of Canal Street all dynamically changed the visual features of the area. In the Vieux Carré, the opulence was matched by the St. Louis Hotel on St. Louis Street; the United States Mint at Esplanade Avenue and the river; the Pontalba Buildings flanking the Place d’Armes; and the St. Louis Cathedral, rebuilt in 1850.

  Established in 1834, the Medical College of Louisiana on Common Street became part of the University of Louisiana in 1847, when a law school was added. It closed during the Civil war. The university received occasional state appropriations until 1883, when it was the recipient of a huge bequest from Paul Tulane. In 1884, it became the Tulane University of Louisiana; in 1984, the main campus moved to its present location on St. Charles Avenue. (Courtesy the University of New Orleans Library)

  Canal Street in 1850. From Henry E. Chambers’s History of Louisiana (1925). (Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

  Nineteenth Century Architects

  The Irish architect James Gallier Sr. was responsible for many of the magnificent edifices mentioned above, which are still revered today. He designed the St. Charles Hotel to outdo any other hotel in the world in terms of size and extravagance. It was completed in 1837 at a cost of $600,000. With its white dome, cupola, and flagstaff aloft at 203 feet, it was a commanding landmark, visible for miles upriver and down. Under its rotunda, slave auctions were held regularly.

  Second Municipality Hall (later City Hall, then Gallier Hall), built on Lafayette Square by Gallier in 1845.

  The Second Municipality Hall, later City Hall and today Gallier Hall, was also designed by Gallier in 1845. This building was the seat of government in 1852. Its Ionic portico and Greek details can be matched only by temple-type buildings and churches in the northeast.

  The Custom House with its colossal columns, an Alexander Thompson Wood design, is said to have the finest Greek Revival interior in America. Work was begun in 1848, but it was not completed until 1881.

  St. Patrick’s Church at 724 Camp Street was built by the architect James H. Dankin for $115,000. It was built on the site of the small wooden church, which it replaced in 1838. It far surpassed every attempt at Gothic architecture on this side of the Atlantic.

  The Dankin brothers, James Gallier Sr., and Henry Howard were primarily responsible for the spread of the Greek Revival style of architecture in America. New Orleans Greek Revival architecture is comparable in quality to that found anywhere in the United States (Christovich and Toledano 1972, 95).

  The Beginnings of Theater in New Orleans

  Contrary to popular belief, the first theater in New Orleans was started in 1792 by two brothers from Paris, Jean-Louis Henry and Louis-Alexandre Henry. Their theater was the only theater in New Orleans for fifteen years (Le Gardeur 1963, 47). Louis, a carpenter, built the theater at approximately 732 St. Peter Street and acted in the cast for several years. Jean supplied the capital for the venture and became the business manager. According to New Orleans archives, notarial acts were signed in June 1791, transferring a piece of property measuring 64 feet by 128 feet from Louis McCarty to Louis Henry. Henry then sold half the lot, retaining a piece 32 feet by 128 feet on which he built the theater.

  Some interesting regulations for conduct in the theater were issued. By order of the state government, “. . . the performance shall never be interrupted by shouting, whistling, or in any other manner that might tend to force an actor to be silent . . . It is further forbidden to force the actors to repeat their lines . . . No one shall stand during the performance, nor put on his hat. . . . ” (Le Gardeur 1963, 4).

  In 1793, a certain Madame Dursoier was directing the troupe; she had engaged quadroon actresses and was acting in the cast herself. A possibility exists that they all could have been refugees from the riots in Port-au-Prince, Saint Domingue, in 1791 (Le Gardeur 1963, 10). In New Orleans in 1794, there was also in the theater a Denis-Richard Dechanet Desessarts (godfather of Jean Henry’s son), another actor formerly connected with the Saint Domingue theater.

  On May 22, 1796, the one-act comic opera, Silvain, was performed. It was the first recorded performance of an opera in the city.

  The theater was closed late in 1803 because of insufficient revenues. When it opened in 1804 under the American regime, the cast was made up largely of refugees from Saint Domingue. The continuous history of drama and opera in New Orleans dates from that year.

  The old French Opera House, built on the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse Streets in 1859, burned down in 1919.

  Louis-Blaise Tabary has long been credited wi
th beginning the theater in New Orleans. This he did not do, according to historian René Le Gardeur Jr., who has made an extensive study of records of the period. Tabary’s name first appears in city records in 1806, when he published a prospectus for a new theater to be built on Orleans Street between Royal and Bourbon Streets. The first brick was laid by Governor Claiborne in October 1806, but Tabary had to abandon the project for lack of funds, and it was later taken over by others. This was the Théâtre d’Orléans, the first of two by the same name on the same site. Tabary was, however, a pioneer in this effort, and he gave twenty-six years of service to the development of theater in New Orleans, an accomplishment which, in and of itself, is worthy of notice. The second Théâtre d’Orléans opened in 1819 with the performance of Jean de Paris.

  For eighteen years beginning in 1819, John Davis, who operated the Théâtre d’Orléans, staged ballets, concerts, operas, and plays in that theater. Davis gave up his control of the opera in 1837.

  Meanwhile, in 1835, in the American Sector, James Caldwell had built the St. Charles Theater on St. Charles Avenue near Poydras Street.

  Charles Boudousquié was the impresario of the French Opera House, which was built in 1859. He brought a troupe that included Julie Calvé to the city during that period. The French Opera House, on the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse Streets, built by James Gallier, burned to the ground in 1919.

  Municipal Developments

  By the 1830s, one could ride “in omnibus” with a dozen other passengers for one bit (half of a quarter). Such a vehicle ran along Tchoupitoulas Street from New Orleans to Lafayette City, a distance of three miles. The driver, perched high in front, blew a bugle as the signal to start. Passengers could sit inside the carriage or on top.

  Banquettes (sidewalks) were made of flatboat gunwale in the 1830s. By the 1850s, some were composed of broad slabs of slate. Streets were of mud or dust, kept in fair condition by chain gangs of convicts.

  Sanitary conditions in New Orleans were deplorable until the Civil War. Female vendors in open markets cleaning fowl or fish dropped the entrails onto the earthen floor, where they were trodden underfoot, as they had been for a hundred years. In areas such as Connaught Yard, a collection of boarding houses on Girod and Julia Streets at the river, refuse of every description and “night filth” were thrown daily into the streets from upstairs windows with a prayer that the rain would wash them away. Such areas were extremely prone to disease.

  James Caldwell introduced street lighting in the American Sector in the form of gas lanterns suspended on ropes or chains and hung diagonally across intersections from poles. His imported English gas-making machine, which he had used to light his American Theater on Camp Street in 1824, enabled him to begin a gas company that provided street and household lighting to the city.

  Railroads and Canals

  In 1831, the Pontchartrain Railroad, the first railroad west of the Alleghenies, began running from the lower end of the French Market along Elysian Fields Avenue, all the way from the river to the lake. Businessmen in Faubourg Marigny hoped to develop a port on the lake, but this never materialized. The railroad connected the city with Milneburg, a small community on the south shore of the lake. The train, affectionately called Smoky Mary, chugged and snorted along at the great rate of ten miles per hour, scattering cinders and dust and transporting picnickers to a wharf at the lake’s edge. There, several two-room camps, which could be rented by the day, had been built out over the lake on stilts. This railroad was part of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad.

  In 1835, the New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad connected the town of Carrollton to New Orleans. It operates today as the St. Charles Streetcar, the oldest continuously operating car line in America.

  The New Basin Canal

  Perhaps the greatest engineering feat accomplished in the Faubourg St. Mary and certainly the one which would do most for its economy, was the building of the New Basin Canal, opened for traffic in 1838. Two New Orleans entrepreneurs, Maunsel White and Beverly Chew, are credited with organizing the New Orleans Canal and Banking Company, which was chartered by the Louisiana legislature in 1831 (when the capital of Louisiana was in Donaldsonville). The company was to build a canal six miles long, sixty feet wide, and six feet deep, at a point “above Gravier Street” to Lake Pontchartrain. There was to be a turning basin at the city’s end, allowing ships to return to the lake, bow first.

  The need for the canal had been growing as the American Sector grew. In 1828, there was not a paving stone in the Faubourg St. Mary. The site of the future St. Charles Hotel was a pool of stagnant water. There was not a wharf in the suburb. Drayage fees from the wharves on the riverfront in the Vieux Carré and from the Carondelet Canal (the Old Basin Canal) were enormous. The Carondelet Canal gave the Creoles access to Bayou St. John and thus to Lake Pontchartrain. It allowed them to control trade with coastal cities of Biloxi, Mobile, and Pensacola and with cities north of Lake Pontchartrain: Mandeville, Madisonville, and Covington.

  Carondelet Canal (Old Basin Canal), circa 1900. Ran along Lafitte Street from Basin Street to Bayou St. John. Existed from 1795 to the 1930s. (Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

  The population of Faubourg St. Mary continued to expand upriver and farther away from the old canal. It became increasingly difficult for the Americans to make use of that waterway. A new canal in the American Sector would allow them direct access to Lake Pontchartrain and competition in the Gulf Coast trade.

  Work was begun in 1832. The canal took six years to build. It cost $1,119,000, exclusive of the land, and it took the lives of eight thousand workers, who died of yellow fever and cholera digging in the mosquito-infested swamps. It was a project of relatively greater difficulty than that of the Panama Canal given the differences in technology and equipment. Altogether, it was an awe-inspiring task.

  There were no dredges in those days, so the digging had to be done with hand shovels. Mud was shoveled into wheelbarrows, which were rolled up inclined planks to the banks of the canal. The most primitive pumps were constantly in use to keep the ditch free of water. Ancient roots of giant, water-soaked cypresses had to be hacked through with hand-axes, because dynamite had not yet been invented. Pilings for the wharves were forced into the soil by tons of stone loaded onto their tops.

  Laborers, mostly Irish and German immigrants, earned $20 per month plus room, board, and whiskey money, which amounted to $6.25 monthly. They worked through the heat and humidity of six interminable New Orleans summers in the swamps of Metairie Ridge.

  When the canal was opened in 1838, there was a turning basin where the Greyhound Bus Station and the Union Passenger Terminal are today. The landing was two blocks wide on Circus Avenue (now Rampart Street) between Julia Street and Triton Walk (now Howard Avenue).

  New Basin Canal, circa 1929. Had its turning basin at S. Rampart Street between Howard Avenue and Julia Street. Ran from S. Rampart to the lake from 1838 to 1961. (Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

  From the beginning, the New Basin Canal flourished. Howard Avenue in the 1850s, stretched from the turning basin of the new canal to the river and was lined with business houses of traders, speculators, agents, and merchants dealing in manufactured goods from everywhere in the United States. Merchants ran back and forth between the river and the basin as ships arrived and departed. Itinerant merchants joined their ranks, staying at the Washington Hall or Piney Woods Hotel, rushing out to buy and sell “on the levee,” where fortunes were made and lost.

  Not only businessmen derived benefit from the New Basin Canal. Pleasure seekers took the ride on mule-drawn barges from the city to the New Lake End, where there was little more than Dan Hickok’s Hotel at the site of the present day Southern Yacht Club. The flag-bedecked boats consisted of a cabin and a covered upper deck. Bands played for the entertainment of passengers. Tolls were collected from pedestrians on Old Shell Road and from boats on the water: 6½ cents for a man on horseback, 12½ cents for a bicycle rider, 37½ cents pe
r ton on the waterway.

  In 1946, a century later, the order came in to fill in the canal to make way for the Pontchartrain Expressway. The work was completed in 1961. A wide, green expanse still exists on the route of the canal between Veterans Highway and Robert E. Lee Boulevard, the only reminder that a canal once ran there.

  The Three Municipalities

  In anticipation of the New Basin Canal’s completion, businessmen of Faubourg St. Mary requested a charter in 1836 for an independent city, such as had been granted in 1832 to the City of Lafayette. Alternatives were discussed, but the differences between the Creoles and the Americans had only sharpened into hostility in the past several years. In 1836, the municipal government of the city of New Orleans ceased to exist. The city split into three autonomous municipalities, each with its own recorder, who was the chief executive in his own municipality, and its own council. Each handled its own affairs, improvements, and taxes. Once a year, the general council, composed of aldermen from the three municipalities, met with the Mayor in City Hall (the Cabildo), to deal with matters having to do with the city as a whole (parish prison, old debts, license revenues, etc.).

  The Vieux Carré was the First Municipality, Faubourg St. Mary was the Second, and Faubourg Marigny was the Third. Faubourg Marigny was less affluent than the other two. There was less rivalry between Faubourg Marigny and the Vieux Carré, because many of the residents of Faubourg Marigny were displaced Creoles.

  By 1852, it was clear that such an arrangement was both inefficient and expensive. All jobs and efforts had to be duplicated. Tension between the communities had relaxed somewhat, so the municipalities reunited by a charter of the legislature. Faubourg St. Mary became the First District of the City of New Orleans; The Vieux Carré, the Second District; and Faubourg Marigny, the Third. Under the same charter, the City of Lafayette was annexed and became the Fourth District.