Delirious New Orleans

by Stephen Verderber

  This fire station on Lafayette Avenue in Gretna was in full glory on the day this photo was taken, preKatrina. The equipment was on display, gleaming from a fresh wash that morning, as were the large storefront windows. Pride and self-confidence were unmistakably in the air. This moderne station, built in the 1960s, was, for fire stations in New Orleans, unique in its design, with a gently sloped roofline (metal gabled roof added later), expansive windows, and elaborate brickwork. The scene, sadly, changed significantly after the hurricane. The fire trucks retreated, not unlike the heads of turtles in the face of uncertainty.

  10.06.05

  11:45 AM

  08.15.05

  10:47 AM

  10.06.05

  12:25 PM

  Gretna Gun Works, Inc., Lafayette and Third

  The entire world saw televised images of looting in the downtown area during that harrowing first week after the hurricane flooded 80 percent of the city. In the first three days alone, looters cleaned out virtually all the firearms and ammunition from every gun store. New Orleanians watched horrified along with the rest of the world as a city fell into anarchy. “What could be next?” observers and evacuees alike asked aloud as a wave of disturbing events unfolded. Was this handgun on the façade really the last available weapon left to steal in the city?

  2

  Commercial Vernacular Architecture in New Orleans

  There are only two kinds of levees—those that have failed and those that will.

  —NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF STATE FLOODPLAIN MANAGERS, 2005

  THE PATCHWORK QUILT OF NEIGHBORHOODS that is New Orleans remains a source of fascination to residents and visitors alike. The courtyards, gardens, parks, housing, churches, civic buildings, and cemeteries of the city have been the subject of scholarly interest for many generations. This inventory has been documented in particular with respect to the legacy of New Orleans “high architecture.”1 Federalist, Greek revival, late Victorian, Richardsonian Romanesque, and the other styles are prevalent throughout the city’s urban core. The language, or vocabulary, associated with these architectural styles and building typologies, some indigenous to New Orleans and others imported and adapted, is extensive and well known in American architectural history and within the canon of the history of American urbanism.2 Moreover, this inventory is appreciated internationally for the unique heritage it represents.3 The story of New Orleans’s architectural and urban landscape is difficult to convey with any accuracy without also describing the multiple cultural dialects it expresses. It is a narrative interwoven with the lives of builders, patrons of civic life, philanthropists, and political power-brokers as well as a cast of exotic and quixotic characters who have inhabited New Orleans throughout the city’s history.4

  Any architectural, urban design, or landscape design language of New Orleans, however, remains incomplete—fragmented—if centered only on the city’s high architecture—only those buildings and places that represent the values and accomplishments of the elite classes through the past three hundred years. These were the buildings and places built by and for the wealthy and influential. The literature on New Orleans’s high-style built environment has largely neglected the everyday vernacular of the folk architecture of the ordinary environment. Some aspects of the everyday vernacular, including shotgun houses, double shotguns, camelback shotguns, Creole cottages, former slave quarters, and various offshoots, have received scholarly attention, and these typologies have been well documented. This attention has most often focused on housing types built by and for working-class immigrants in the Irish Channel, Ninth Ward, Faubourg Marigny, and Bywater.5

  Similarly, typologies associated with the high architecture of banks, schools, churches, and so on have been well documented by historians and preservationists.6 It is not the intent to reinvent those wheels here, and it goes without saying that that research remains extremely valuable and will be an extremely important resource in the rebuilding of the post-Katrina New Orleans. But what about the flip side of the coin? What about all of the poor-cousin, offbeat, funky, quirky, on-our-own buildings, artifacts, and places that over the years have been dismissed as incidental and therefore inconsequential by historians and preservationists?

  This discussion is therefore a reaction to that dismissive attitude, but it is not necessarily revisionist, either. It is not an attempt to revise our view of this substantial body of past work. It is centered instead on the intersection of popular culture and architecture. It is about irony, fragmentation, and schism. It is about the everyday places that are celebrated within a community. It is about how that which is celebrated by one neighborhood can be completely ignored by a nearby neighborhood. It is about architecturally modest yet insightful shrines to the human struggle for self-empowerment. It is about appreciating that which is authentic within an inclusive language of the everyday vernacular.

  One definition of shrine is, in part, “any structure or place consecrated … a place or object hallowed by its history or associations … a receptacle for sacred relics.”7 There has been little research on New Orleans’s everyday commercial vernacular folk architecture. From the inception of New Orleans as a French trading outpost and strategic military installation on the Mississippi River up to 1945, any mention of this inventory of outsider buildings and places has usually been off-the-cuff. Pictures of, say, the White City amusement park are rare finds today. Few if any scholarly analyses or popular texts have singularly focused on New Orleans’s twentieth-century commercial vernacular folk architecture. Perhaps this is because New Orleans has always preferred to think of itself as a pre-automobile city, not unlike an aging film star remaining locked in her past.

  The Role of New Orleans in American Commercial Vernacular Architecture

  Despite the general inattention to this subject in New Orleans, a sizable literature exists on the architecture of the American roadside. New Orleans possessed outstanding examples of both pre-auto and auto-age sensibilities. The national literature on the subject might best be characterized as three streams of inquiry; the first centers on nostalgia for the road and the bygone era of two-lane highways, before the start of the construction of the interstate highway system in 1956. These books tend to glamorize the road and traveling by automobile. “See the USA in a Chevrolet” was a slogan that immediately symbolized the umbilical link between the automobile and the American psyche. As prosperous Americans became obsessed with their cars, they became less and less interested in the old, walkable, inner-urban neighborhoods where they grew up.

  Chester Liebs’s Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture (1985) remains one of the best treatments of the subject.8 Related scholarship on commercial vernacular architecture includes histories of the neon signs of fast-food roadside restaurants, the architecture of motels, gas stations, travel lodges and resorts, funky and bizarre signs, 1920s and 1930s stainless-steel diners, and the rise and fall of the American movie palace and drive-in theater.9 Dozens of Web sites have been established by devotees of these subjects, and their creators are people who share a passion for the American roadside and its colorful history. Among the most extensive of these Internet sites is Debra Jane’s Roadside America, where she presents many of her more than five hundred photographs categorized by state and building type.10

  A second stream of inquiry centers on saving vintage signs, particularly along America’s highways. These include both neon signs and unusual, iconic sculptures that are either freestanding or affixed to structures. These one-of-a-kind roadside attractions are among the dwindling examples of the fixtures of the commercial establishments that dotted the American roadside landscape from 1920 to the present, particularly from 1920 to 1940, and from 1945 to 1975. Scholars have also examined the aesthetics and functions of derelict, in-ruins vernacular and populist artifacts, such as rusted-out “dead” neon signs and related artifacts.11 Among the most studied signs and roadside commercial places are those in Los Angeles along the city’s vintage commercial st
rips, such as Sunset Boulevard and Wilshire Boulevard.12

  A third stream of inquiry, perhaps the most architectural of the three, focuses on specific commercial vernacular building types. This area is centered on the prefranchise and early franchise eras of American mass-consumer culture: fast-food restaurants, diners, movie palaces, motels, gas stations, department stores, resorts, spas, and related commercial building types. Book-length treatments of various building types have appeared, including Paul Hirshhorn and Steven Izenour’s White Towers.13 The rise of suburbia and the effects of suburban sprawl across the postindustrial American landscape are within the scope of this area of inquiry as well. National organizations, most notably the Society for Commercial Archeology (SCA), have assumed a leadership role in heightening public awareness of the significance of this facet of the American built environment.14 More recently, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has become active in increasing awareness of the need to save these rapidly disappearing examples of American roadside consumer culture.15

  New Orleans had all types of commercial vernacular architecture in abundance, and remains today a remarkable place to study the pre-auto-age American city as well as the American metropolis in the age of the automobile and the road.

  The Pre-Auto Age

  In New Orleans, an ancient city by American standards, all of the American city’s many periods of development can be studied firsthand. Therein lies the second reason why a book on this subject was needed: in the pre-auto age of the city’s growth and development, the land situated nearest to the Mississippi River was settled first because it was the highest ground. The streetcar line running along St. Charles Avenue connected the Vieux Carré (literally, “Old Square,” known in English as the French Quarter) and the downriver French-speaking faubourgs (suburbs) with the burgeoning English-speaking American Sector along the upriver (Uptown) side of Canal Street. The streetcar line also fostered much new development. Streetcar lines soon ran along dozens of other neighborhood arteries. Seventy-two streetcar lines were in operation by 1945.

  As the back sections of Uptown and Mid City were dredged from the “back of town” swamps and became available for development, new streetcar lines were created, and existing lines were extended to reach out to these new neighborhoods. These included the City Park area, Gentilly, Ninth Ward, Esplanade Ridge, and Broadmoor. On the west bank of the Mississippi, the early commuter communities of Algiers and Gretna were built in the mid-to late nineteenth century. Streetcars also served them and fostered access to downtown across the river by ferry. The purchase of autos by more and more families expedited the growth of these neighborhoods. Commuters could still choose public transit as a way to get downtown, but it was almost always the slower option, since streetcars stopped at every major intersection; people seemed to prefer the newfound personal autonomy of commuting to work in their own cars.

  Later, although the freeways and strips eventually became clogged with multitudes of drivers in New Orleans and in other large American cities, the allure of auto commuting did not diminish. New Orleans, unlike nearly every other major American city, however, maintained a modicum of streetcar service (the St. Charles line) during this period. The Canal Street line disappeared in 1963. In time, the St. Charles line took on historic significance. The car barn on Willow Street which served this line also took on historic status.16

  2.1: Canal and Carondelet Streets, New Orleans, 1906.

  Still, it remains curious that specialists in the field of commercial vernacular architecture overlooked the seminal importance of New Orleans. In bustling late-nineteenth-century New Orleans, visionary advertisers knew that they could reach many potential new customers through the use of architecturally scaled advertisements. Large billboards were erected on the façades of commercial buildings on main streets across America. The New Jackson Square Cigars sign on the front façade of the building at the corner of Canal and Carondelet was visible to anyone moving between the Vieux Carré and the American Sector on the other side of Canal (Fig. 2.1). Passersby were in horse-drawn carriages along with pedestrians and streetcar passengers.

  This advertisement was among dozens that had appeared on façades and rooftops along Canal Street by 1900, although there is evidence of this practice having occurred as early as the 1840s.17 During the early twentieth century, it was generally considered crass to advertise directly on buildings. Exterior advertising had been limited to pedestrian-scaled signs suspended from second-story galleries on building fronts in the Vieux Carré and in the central business district. This tradition continues today. Some signs were suspended far above the street in order to be viewed from afar. Such was the case with the Camel cigarettes figure suspended above Royal Street, looking toward Canal Street, in a 1907 photograph (Fig. 2.2). The use of a suspended figure was a clever way to sidestep the garish effect of such advertising on the ornate hotels and commercial establishments along Royal, which continues to serve today as one of the city’s premier commercial streets. When electricity was introduced, these signs exploded with color and special effects.

  2.2: Camel cigarettes advertisement, Royal Street near Canal Street, 1907. Note the autos parked in front of the Hotel Monteleone.

  In walkable areas within New Orleans’s historic core, and particularly in areas along the river, advertising within the streetscape was scaled to the individual and to the rate at which someone could effectively process information while on foot or on a bicycle. Not only the signs but also the smells emanating from these places contributed to the essence of the city. In New Orleans, small mom-and-pop commercial places flourished. The caption of a 1903 photo of the smallest newsstand in New Orleans, a news and magazine vendor located across the street from the Hotel Monteleone on Royal Street, is telling in this regard (Fig. 2.3). This stand closed in 1995, having fallen victim to a combination of the novel allure and immediacy of the Internet as much as to rising real estate values in the Vieux Carré.

  2.3: “Smallest Newsstand in New Orleans,” 103 Royal Street, 1903.

  New Orleans is an excellent example of a pre-auto-age American city that was transformed into an auto-age metropolis without ever completely turning its back on its past, i.e., its historic core. As New Orleans’s early auto-age fringes grew in population, new roads were built, and the city extended and widened existing roads wherever feasible, in the process sometimes destroying the beautiful live oak trees lining the miles of neutral grounds (this is discussed further in Part 3). Along the streetcar routes, a number of neighborhood family-run restaurants soon appeared, and other establishments were adapted from former residential structures. Two notable freestanding examples of the former type were Compagno’s (now Vincent’s), operated by the Compagno family for four generations, and the Bungalow in Gretna, across the river. Compagno’s was composed as a series of three progressively smaller, almost telescoping architectural elements—scalar serialization—with all three frame “houses” contiguous to one another (Fig. 2.4). The front element housed the main dining room and a bar, the midsection housed the kitchen, and the third component served as back storage. This white frame structure, with its striking side profile and roofline, has been a landmark in the Carrollton section along St. Charles Avenue since the 1920s.

  Another architecturally noteworthy neighborhood eaterybar was the Bungalow, built in the 1930s in Gretna. It was also located on a streetcar line. This structure, designed in the art deco style popular at the time, was a variation on the camelback shotgun style, and was appropriated (as was Compagno’s) from nearby private dwellings built in the 1870–1920 period (Fig. 2.5). The curved glass windows gave the place, from within, a fishbowl look. An attached two-level camelback residence to the rear was somewhat reminiscent of a steamboat pilothouse. This structure remains intact and extremely close in appearance to this photograph from 1938. Both the former Compagno’s and the Bungalow were built on high ground near the Mississippi.

  In a pedestrian-and streetcar-scaled city, the introductio
n of neon signs in the 1930s caused a minor sensation. This new type of sign could be seen from farther away than its predecessors. Neon allowed for new possibilities in color, form, scale, and imagery. The Half Moon, on Camp near Magazine Street (Uptown), depicted a smiling neon-lit moon-face (Fig. 2.6). Similarly, The Pearl oyster bar on St. Charles, near Canal Street, was a particularly strong example of the kinetic potential of neon, its flickering arrow at the bottom beckoning patrons to come inside to dine or drink (Fig. 2.7). The restaurant’s namesake was very cleverly placed within an oyster pearl.

  2.4: Vincent’s Italian Restaurant, St. Charles Avenue, 2005 (preKatrina).

  2.5: Bourres’s Bungalow, Gretna, 1938.

  2.6: Half Moon Bar & Restaurant, Camp Street near Magazine, 2005 (preKatrina).

  New Orleans’s indigenous culinary traditions are known the world over, and the representation of these traditions has always been an integral visual element in the signs displayed outside its eating establishments. In particular, the representation of nautical life has endured as a central, often whimsical theme since the city’s founding. Myriad signs depict crawfish, oysters, shrimp, and, to a lesser extent, alligators and catfish. Shrimp in particular continue to be depicted in the signs on many family-run corner restaurant establishments and in those on roadside-strip eating establishments in the suburbs. Alligators tend to be depicted when a whimsical theme is sought. For example, the neon sign at the Cajun Cabin beckons patrons with a depiction of an alligator frolicking in a tub of beer. It remains hard to tell if the alligator is simply enjoying the “Live Cajun Music” within or is just unaware or even unconcerned—New Orleans is often referred to as the City That Care Forgot—of his ultimate fate (Fig. 2.8). Such evocative signs, while designed primarily for pedestrians, are also effective for those in autos whizzing by at 30 to 40 miles per hour or faster. They were conceived in the spirit of the pedestrian age but were used later in the age of the suburban roadside strip. Many pre-auto-age neon signs in the oldest neighborhoods in the city were therefore later adapted to suburban settings. This dualism was most often expressed in Metairie, where the signs for Café Du Monde, the Morning Call Café, and Gambino’s Bakery were nearly identical to their earlier counterparts in the old neighborhood. The wedding-cake sign of Gambino’s Bakery on Veteran’s Memorial Boulevard, in particular, is highly iconic, like the oyster at the center of The Pearl neon sign in the central business district; only here the cake is the sign in its totality: cake as sign, sign as cake in this clever composition. It is beautifully designed as well. The attention to detail is stunning, including the realism of the candles (especially when lit at night), the white frosting, and the realistic cake lettering in the center. The candles are illuminated at night in bright neon colors (Fig. 2.9). The intriguing aspect of this and similar neon signs remains their effectiveness in pedestrian as well as roadside-strip contexts. One could just as easily take in their detailed artistry during an encounter along a sidewalk.