Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans

by Garvey, John B.

  Fortunately and unfortunately, President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration almost simultaneously moved in with money and talent to recondition parts of the Quarter, giving special attention to the French Market, Jackson Square, the Cathedral, the Cabildo, the Presbytère, and the Pontalba Buildings. While no one would dispute the fact that a slum area was rehabilitated and that the land values began to rise, it was equally true that progress as envisioned by legislators in Washington had a different definition in New Orleans. WPA “progress” involved the demolition of some of the city’s earliest structures.

  Opulent lobby of the third St. Charles Hotel, circa 1925.

  The WPA’s main concern was to put food in the mouths of the hungry (workers on those projects were earning fifteen dollars to twenty dollars per week), but it began “making improvements” by eradicating some of the French Market’s oldest buildings. The Old Red Store (1830) was demolished and Gallitin Street on the riverfront, that “dark alley of mystery and murder,” was wiped out altogether “to relieve the city of an area of human decay.” According to Robin Von Breton Derbes, in New Orleans Magazine in 1976, this act was “the equivalent of demolishing Camp Street to get rid of Skid Row” (75-78).

  None of this was done, however, without a fight. Daily, the powers that be in the WPA and the Vieux Carré Commission locked horns: the WPA argued that slum clearance was its first concern while the Vieux Carré Commission insisted that the French Quarter retain its Caribbean character. But the WPA plowed forward.

  St. Louis Cathedral at Jackson Square. (Courtesy Kathy Chappetta Spiess)

  Improvements were made, however, and some would argue that they were for the better. Gallitin Street was replaced with the present air-steel sheds of the Farmer’s Market. Since a major restoration in 1975, the historic French Market’s buildings, distinguished by graceful arcades and stately columns, offer a glimpse of a scene of activity that has existed in the same place since the early 1800s. The Halle des Boucheries (built in 1813), the Halle des Legumes (1822), and the reconstructed Red Store are all part of the rebuilt French Market complex that authenticates early French Quarter architecture. One end of the market is tucked into the bed of the river; the other is at Jackson Square.

  Flagstone promenades, sparkling fountains, and old fashioned benches add touches of a bygone era. At the Jackson Square end is Café du Monde, with its inimitable coffee and beignets (without which no visit to New Orleans is complete).

  Just outside Café du Monde, the steps of the beautifully landscaped “Moonwalk” are decorated with fountains, lampposts, and benches and are well secured by guards so that the view of the river by night is safely visible and, in the opposite direction, the Cathedral, breathtakingly illuminated.

  Street Patterns

  The circuitous route that the river takes in meandering around the city of New Orleans affected the entire way of life of the city’s citizens. Only the Vieux Carré, laid out in a grid pattern, had straight streets. Beyond the Vieux Carré, property lines extending back from the river date back to the earliest land grants ever to exist in the city. Property lines ran perpendicular to the levee in long narrow strips, for good reason: all landowners needed access to transportation, and transportation was the river. Also, the only good land was on the natural levee; its value diminished as it approached the backswamps.

  But the river wrapped the city in concave and convex curves. On the land inside the convex curves, the streets were squeezed together. Cross-streets ran parallel to the river, running in straight lines toward the curve of the river, then shifting slightly in conformity with the curve as they crossed property lines, which later became boulevards: Melpomene, Jackson, Louisiana, Napoleon, Jefferson, Broadway, and South Carrollton.

  St. Charles Avenue (originally called Nayades) was the great boulevard running parallel to the river. It was actually the rear boundary line of the original land grants. It was inevitable that such a wide boulevard, situated on a habitable part of the natural levee halfway between the noisy riverfront and the backswamp, would become the main residential avenue of the American city.

  Black and White Population Patterns

  It was the street patterns that determined the patterns of black and white population settlements. In early New Orleans, in spite of social segregation, there was no geographical segregation of blacks and whites. Slaves lived in the homes of their owners. Free blacks working for whites lived within walking distance of their employers, usually in small houses in back of the big houses owned by the whites. When the boulevards were divided into blocks, neighborhoods developed with an affluent white perimeter, enclosing a small nuclear cluster of blacks, which has survived into the present. The architecture of these cluster houses was not conspicuously different from that of poor whites. It was, in fact, a far less detrimental type of segregation than that which is found in most northern cities.

  Chinese in New Orleans

  After the Civil War, when slaves were no longer available for work in the cotton and sugar cane fields, the Chinese began arriving in Louisiana. Many remained in New Orleans, and in the late nineteenth century there developed a Chinatown of sorts near the present-day Public Library extending in the direction of Loew’s Theater, opium dens and all.

  Since weather was hot and humid in New Orleans, and since it was the style for businessmen to wear starched linen shirts and suits, Chinese laundries were popular with the male population and sprung up in every neighborhood. The Chinese also dried Louisiana shrimp, prepared in their own villages in the swamps below New Orleans. Many Chinese restaurants emerged. It is an ethnic group that has retained its own speech, culture, and attitudes more than any other to come to our city.

  New Orleans, a Railroad Center

  After the Civil War, the mode of transportation in the United States changed to railroads. New Orleans, complacent in her leadership on the river, was caught unprepared for the competition. In the decade before the Civil War, New Orleans had only eighty miles of railroads. During and after the war, steam locomotives hauled goods across the continent from the West to the Atlantic, stopping in Chicago and St. Louis, both of which surpassed New Orleans in populations by 1865.

  Between 1865 and 1945, New Orleans became a railroad center, almost in spite of herself. With her time-honored position at the junction of the Mississippi and the Gulf, she had the advantage of shipping goods not only out of the agricultural south but also in from Latin America as well. The Latin American connection provided two products greatly coveted by Americans: coffee and bananas. New Orleans became a prime port of entry for both.

  Bulk cargo, such as grain from the Midwest and coal from Illinois and Kentucky, continued to travel slowly down the river through New Orleans. They moved along, sometimes in a ten-to-one tow, like great floating islands. By the 1950s, trade on the river from the midwest had increased and, in fact, exceeded that of antebellum days.

  The Eads Jetties

  Colonel James Buchanan Eads, in 1879, completed a system of jetties at the mouth of the Mississippi River, making possible a deep water channel that would revolutionize navigation on the river.

  From the earliest days of settlement, the mouth of the river had always filled up with silt and logs, and engineers had worked unceasingly to dredge it out to allow passage for ships. After the Civil War, larger ships were built. Often, they became stuck on a sandbar for days or weeks, holding up the passage of other ships. Clearly, something had to be done.

  Eads visited the mouth of the river and declared that the way to open it to commerce was to build parallel dikes, or jetties, at the mouths of the passes, constructing a channel and causing the stream to flow faster. This faster current, he claimed, would scour its own deep-water channel. This provoked a storm of controversy. He took the proposal to Congress, where he struck a bargain with the legislators. He claimed that he was so sure he could produce and maintain a twenty-eight-foot channel that he would ask for $10 million if he succeeded but nothing if he failed. Af
ter much debate, he was given a contract to build a jetty at South Pass for $5.25 million and a $100,000 maintenance fee for 20 years.

  Work began in June 1875, and four years later, the channel was thirty feet deep and the bar had been swept into the Gulf. Eads had given new life to the river and saved the port of New Orleans, which had fallen from second to eleventh place in the nation. He also indirectly wrote the end to any plans for industrializing Lake Pontchartrain.

  The World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial of 1884

  The Cotton Centennial was an extravaganza organized by Mayor Edward A. Burke, state treasurer, lottery agent for Louisiana, and editor of the New Orleans Times Democrat. He convinced Congress to grant a loan of $1 million to the fair and to give a gift of $300,000 for government exhibits. The city government donated $100,000, and the rest of the capital was provided by the sale of private stock.

  The display covered 249 acres in a rural track between the edge of Uptown and the recently annexed City of Carrollton (later, the site of the fair would be moved to Audubon Park). The site was about two miles long from the river to the backswamp, with St. Charles Avenue and the Carrollton Railway to Canal Street cutting squarely across its middle.

  The Fair boasted an area of fifty-one covered acres in the five main buildings and the most dazzling display of electric lights ever seen anywhere. It could be reached from Canal Street by six street railroads or by steamers on the river, which left the foot of Canal Street every thirty minutes. An electric railroad three miles long encircled the entire fairground, and one of those cars passed every few minutes. But, in spite of art galleries, industrial displays, restaurants, railroads, and rolling chairs, the Fair, built at a cost of $2.7 million, was a financial failure. It lost $500,000, and the walkways for tourists became seas of gumbo in the New Orleans rains.

  In 1915, the last of the World’s Fair buildings were demolished by a hurricane. Now, the only remaining evidence that there ever was a fair at the site is a huge boulder in the middle of Audubon Park Golf Course. It resembles a meteorite but actually is a sample of iron ore from the state of Alabama. The fair entrance on Exposition Boulevard and St. Charles Avenue is still in use as a path through the park to the former site of the Exposition.

  When the exposition ended, the state turned the fairgrounds on the river side of St. Charles Avenue (the site of the former Foucher and Boré plantations) into Audubon Park. It is today a 340-acre park abounding with ancient oaks and lagoons still enjoyed by golfers and picnickers. On the other side of St. Charles Avenue, the land became the campuses of Tulane University and Loyola University. Loyola University at 6300 St. Charles Avenue was established in 1912, an outgrowth of Loyola College of 1911. Tulane University, financed in 1884 by a bequest from Paul Tulane, was a merger of the Medical College of Louisiana (1834) and the University of Louisiana (1947).

  The effects of the fair, though not a profitable venture, are still very much in evidence in the city. A flourishing late Victorian architectural boom came in the wake of displays at the fair. The new park and university area was created, around which grew one of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods.

  The Rebuilding of the Port

  The Board of Commissioners of the Port of New Orleans, created in 1896, known as the Dock Board, had unprecedented authority as designated by the state legislature. It had complete jurisdiction over all water frontages in Orleans Parish and considerable portions of the river and canal frontages in adjacent parishes. It could expropriate property, demolish and rebuild structures, operate facilities, and lease them at will. A landmark law had created this autonomous body, because legislators realized that the port was New Orleans’s number one industry, and the health of the port was the life of the city.

  In 1901, the Dock Board began demolishing structures and rebuilding according to the latest standards. Within ten years, most of the port had been totally rebuilt with cotton warehouses, bulk storage facilities, and one of the biggest grain elevators in the world.

  The Italian Massacre

  On October 15, 1890, Police Chief David Hennessy was shot while walking along Girod Street. He died the next morning. The chief, appointed as part of Mayor Shakspeare’s reform program, had ruthlessly pursued members of the secret Sicilian murder associations in the city.

  For some time, a war had been in progress between the Provenzana and Matranga families to control the produce business on the city wharves. Hennessy had met with the families to demand that the violence be stopped. But there was a vendetta against Hennessy that dated back to the beginning of the decade, thus making his efforts futile.

  In 1881, Hennessy had captured the Sicilian bandit Esposito, who was then in New Orleans, and returned him to New York, from whence he was extradited to Italy. Indicted for eighteen murders and other crimes, Esposito was sentenced to death, but his sentence was later commuted. Vendettas against all who informed on Esposito had been carried out. Hennessy’s role in these events had never been forgotten.

  After Hennessy’s assassination, nineteen Sicilians and Italians were arrested and indicted. Ten were later charged, and nine named as accessories. On March 13, 1891, the jury acquitted some defendants and declared a mistrial for the rest. The people of the city were incensed.

  Just at this time, two ships arrived in port with eighteen hundred Sicilian immigrants. Stories spread throughout the town that the Italians would take over the city. On Friday, March 14, 1891, the morning paper announced that all good citizens were to meet at the Henry Clay statue on Canal Street in order to remedy the failure of justice. The crowd assembled, speeches were made, and a march began to the prison on Treme Street behind Congo Square (now Armstrong Park).

  The sheriff left the prison. His subordinates locked in all other prisoners but opened the cells of the Sicilians, telling them to hide wherever they chose. The mob battered down the wooden gate and found the Sicilians crouching and begging for mercy. The maddened crowd shot the Sicilians one by one, dragged them out, and hung one from a lamppost at Treme and St. Ann Streets and another who had shammed death in a pile of corpses from a tree in front of the prison on Orleans Street. The affair became an international incident, arousing conflicting opinions across the nation. President Benjamin Harrison called the massacre “deplorable and discreditable,” and the United States government paid an indemnity of $25,000 to the Italian government (Harrison 1891). The people of New Orleans fumed, but the matter was ended.

  Crowds gather around the parish prison on Treme Street after the mob execution of the Italians in 1891. (Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

  The incident resulted in the indictment of the entire Italian community in New Orleans, most of which consisted of law-abiding citizens who were as frightened of the Mafia as the rest of the population.

  Italians had been immigrating to New Orleans since the French colonial period. Other large migrations had occurred before and after the Civil War. Those who came during the Civil War had left Italy after its unification (1860-70) as exiled refugees as well as peasant farmers seeking better conditions. Many were uneducated and unskilled. Those who arrived after the Civil War had been recruited by Italian merchants and steamship agents (supported by the Italian government) as laborers for the sugar plantations of Louisiana, public improvements, and railroad construction. This was a profitable endeavor, not only for the agents, who received a commission, but also for the plantation owners and construction companies who thus obtained cheap labor. From the plantation sites, many of these Italian laborers found their way to New Orleans, where prejudice and hostility due to their association with the black community relegated them to an inferior position in New Orleans society.

  Living in the Vieux Carré, the Italians worked primarily with the importation, distribution, and sale of citrus fruit, mostly handled in the French Market. Their business interests later extended to wine, liquor, and truck farming.

  After the incident of the Italian Massacre, racial conflicts between Italian and Anglo-ethn
ic groups grew worse. Italians found refuge in their own benevolent organizations, which sought to treat ill health with a free medical clinic; provide financial assistance for a religious orphanage and school, the Italian Hall on Esplanade Avenue; and serve as the social and cultural center of the Italian activities through the 1950s.

  Storyville

  Perhaps the best known “reform” during the administration of Mayor Walter C. Flower from 1896 to 1899 was the establishment of Storyville. The ordinance creating Storyville, an area bounded by Basin Street and running down cross streets Iberville, Bienville, Conti, and St. Louis, did not declare it an area of legalized vice. Instead, it specified the area outside of which prostitutes could not live or work.

  Prostitution was therefore illegal outside of Storyville, but according to the wording of the ordinance, neither legal nor illegal within it. But since everyone knew it was there, the city obviously had a right to control it.

  Prostitution in New Orleans had existed since the foreign reigns of Louis XIV and XV. Those monarchs had sent hundreds of prostitutes to the colony. The Mississippi Company of John Law had a reputation of kidnapping “women of bad repute” and shipping them to Louisiana as colonists.

  After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Mississippi River commerce increased enormously, bringing into the city the rough, bawdy keelboatsmen with their pockets full of money, ready for their whiskey and women. To fill this demand, a stream of prostitutes converged upon New Orleans. Such women were barred from living or working in the city itself (the Vieux Carré), so they moved outside the city to the basin of the Carondelet Canal, where “with their own hands and the help of levee loungers and General Jackson’s forces, they dug a drainage ditch, erected shacks and shanties for themselves, and hung out their red lanterns. ‘Basin Street’ was opened for business” (Rose 1978).