As long as people from all walks of life, i.e., all races, social classes, and neighborhoods, continued to accept the faux royalty of the Carnival krewes, the tradition, i.e., myth, persisted. That is, as long as people continued to be willing to suspend their value systems, thereby preserving the bubble that separated folly and illusion from reality. Otherwise, it was feared within the business community, the year-round culture of Mardi Gras would simply collapse. The Carnival attitude seemingly remained impervious to external realities of race, class, and politics.32
Ironically, the civil rights era largely bypassed Carnival. Blacks had developed their own Carnival hierarchy and traditions, centered on Zulu, the parade over which Louis Armstrong reigned in 1949, and the Mardi Gras Indians. Before the interstate destroyed the neutral ground along Claiborne Avenue in Tremé in the 1960s, the Indians celebrated Mardi Gras day on the Claiborne neutral ground, seldom venturing into the Vieux Carré or onto other turf dominated by the white Uptown krewes. These traditions persist to this day; no one wants to “rain on anyone’s parade.” This “live and let live” mentality may make it difficult to rebound from Katrina.
Even in the aftermath of the Mardi Gras antidiscrimination ordinance, and despite the yet unknown long-term effects of Katrina on Carnival culture, the motto of many remains Laissez les bons temps rouler (Let the good times roll). What has endured is an attitude toward Mardi Gras that treats it as a disconnect, as an event in suspended animation, in an in-between zone. In this space, this vector, there are few rules, allowing people to break away from unwieldy ties and excessive restrictions found elsewhere (or at least that is how they behave). In New Orleans, it seems, marginal, “on the edge” behavior often dominates the middle ground. In fact, many live out their everyday lives in parallel realities—secret relationships, activities, places, and the like—wholly unrelated to their primary reality, or “home range.” This explains why in a recent national exposé, an upscale Mid City whorehouse’s list of clients was never made public: doing so might have ruined “proper” families and the careers of prominent men in civic life.
Meanwhile, many of the children of the Carnival ruling classes have migrated to other cities to pursue more promising careers. Job opportunities have been increasingly scarce in New Orleans for both blacks and whites since the early 1980s. This migration has had a profound effect on the memberships of old-line organizations such as Comus. They had painted themselves into a corner by closing their membership to “outsiders” over the generations, and the past was catching up to the present.
Uptown whites were not the only New Orleanians under siege. Nor were white Carnival celebrants the only group fervently clinging to their rituals as a way to keep the festive spirit alive and to hold their families and neighborhoods together. Black citizens of New Orleans had a head start in all these concerns. Historically, black residents had demonstrated as strong a predilection as whites’ for clubs and societies, pomp and ceremony. Brass bands and “social and pleasure” clubs, both of which originated in the flowering of black folk culture in New Orleans following the Civil War, had been around for at least as long as the Mistick Krewe of Comus. Long before 1900, brass bands dressed in bright uniforms were a common sight. The black community, barred from using white banks, traditionally avoided charity from whites and turned to their own to provide a sense of belonging and social status, in life and in death. During Reconstruction, the mortality rate for poor blacks was very high, particularly for men, and the streets resounded with the mournful dirges of brass bands, hired to follow horse-drawn hearses to the cemeteries, where young men who had died before their time were laid to rest in tiers aboveground. Behind or alongside the band, the parade of mourners, which, as mentioned earlier, came to be known as the second line, would follow, carrying umbrellas, good for sun or rain. Once the body was interred, it was time to celebrate.33
In terms of architecture and urbanism, no city seemed to possess a more promising future than New Orleans in the 1850s. In James Gill’s words:
The magnificent French Opera House, designed by James Gallier, opened on Bourbon Street in 1859, when political differences with the northern states were the only blot on the horizon for a vibrant, polyglot city of 170,000 people, including 25,000 Irish and almost as many Germans. It was a sporting town with plenty of horse racing and boxing matches. Men played cricket and raquette, a game resembling lacrosse, or took their sailboats out into the lakes. The mood of the city was buoyant and secure, and few doubted its superiority to anything the North could offer or had any qualms about slavery … the railroad was now spreading through the state, bringing the prospect of faster transportation between the port and the plantations and even greater accumulation of wealth. The streetcar was introduced in 1860, and New Orleans seemed safely established as a great metropolis of the modern world. Then, however, the blue cockade, emblem of the secessionists, began to appear on lapels all over the city.34
In 1860 a statue of Henry Clay (1777–1852) was proudly erected in the middle of Canal Street where it intersects St. Charles Avenue. The great southern statesman (from Kentucky) became the symbol of the prevailing social and political order as well as a rallying point for Mardi Gras merrymakers (Fig. 4.14). In 1900, it was relocated a few blocks away to Lafayette Square. While monuments to white supremacy were being erected in the streets, the long-established old-line clubs, such as the Boston Club on Canal Street, were solidifying their power base in New Orleans society and political life. The Boston Club, the third-oldest such club in the United States, was founded in 1841, only five years after New York’s Union Club. The Boston Club was not named after the city, however, but after a card game called boston that fascinated its members.35 Eventually, improvements to the streetcar line required the Clay statue to be relocated a few blocks away to the center of Lafayette Square, where it resides today.
4.14: Henry Clay monument, Canal Street, 1893.
4.15: Belknap’s Fountain, Canal Street, 1888.
At the time, statues and fountains were being built frequently. Maybe the most bizarre fountain ever built in the city was on Canal Street, Belknap’s Fountain. It featured miniature steamboats, swans, ducks, and cupids, all set in motion by waterpower. A very strange composition and sight to behold, its style was “arabesque-circus,” although this folly functioned also as a memorable civic advertisement (Fig. 4.15).
By the late nineteenth century, the visual and civic spatial dominance of Carnival was firmly fixed in the cultural life of the city. Visitors from afar came to witness this spectacle in the streets, and Canal Street became the epicenter. To view a parade on Canal during the Jim Crow era was to witness a highly choreographed portrayal of social and racial status hierarchies publicly displayed on an unprecedented scale. The wealthy ruling class of white uptowners perched in viewing stands along the parade route, safe from the fray on the street below (Fig. 4.16). These temporary scaffolded edifices, along with architectural, permanent outdoor viewing galleries, were festooned with bright banners and provided with specially designed latrines for ladies. The white lower classes, including the Sicilians, Irish, and other Caucasian immigrants, could view the parade only from street level. Blacks were kept away from Canal Street, in their own neighborhoods, removed from the civic and commercial center.
At this time the streetcar lines were being greatly extended outward from the city center to such far-flung points as West End Park, with its whites-only pavilions (Fig. 4.17), and the adjoining New Orleans Yacht Club and roller coaster, which extended far out on a boardwalk over Lake Pontchartrain (Fig. 4.18).36 For active diversion, the pleasure resorts—West End, Spanish Fort, Milneburg—were not far away from the chaos and grime of the city. New Lake End, later known as West End, opened in 1871 when the city took over the partially built embankment erected about eight hundred feet from the shoreline in Lake Pontchartrain. It was near the terminus of New Basin Canal and the Seventeenth Street Canal. It raised the hundred-foot-wide bank to a height of eight feet
above sea level. In that year, the New Orleans City and Lake Railroad started its steam “dummy” and cars, and soon on a large wooden platform constructed over the water, a hotel, restaurant, and various structures intended to house amusements were built. A garden was laid out along the embankment. By 1880, the palace had become popular with white pleasure seekers (Fig. 4.19).
Some thirty years earlier, in the 1850s, a wondrous spectacle was Spalding and Roger’s Floating Palace. This two-hundred-foot-long vessel, which had been built in Cincinnati in 1851, was a super-showboat (Fig. 4.20). It could accommodate 3,300 spectators and more than a hundred staff members. The crew consisted of trainers, performers, and the horses and other animals of the menagerie. A daily newspaper was even published aboard. Besides the circus performance, there were minstrel and dramatic performances and a museum that the proprietors boasted contained “100,000 Curiosities.” The circus wintered in New Orleans for several years, performing at the Academy of Music, at St. Charles and Perdido. When spring came, the performers and animals were loaded aboard for the trip upriver. The Floating Palace was converted into a hospital in 1862 by the Confederate Army. The interior of the Floating Palace is depicted in a lithograph by A. Forbriger. One of the chief attractions of the circus was its performing horses, shown in the center view and in the side-panel vignettes (Fig. 4.21).
4.16: Mardi Gras Day “Red Pageant” on Canal Street, 1903.
4.17: West End pavilions, 1900.
4.18: Roller coaster at West End amusement park, 1901.
4.19: Pier at the West End amusement park, 1885.
4.20: The Floating Palace on Lake Pontchartrain, 1858.
4.21: Interior of the Floating Palace, 1859. Verderber_Pt04R.indd 156 2008.10.13 9:37:50 AM
The Spanish Fort, on the Lake Pontchartrain shore, was originally built to protect the city from invaders from the North. It later became a place of amusement and included such attractions as a concert hall, the massive Over the Rhine pavilion restaurant, and unusual attractions like an alligator pond (Fig. 4.22). New Orleans’s rich tradition of amusement parks extended into the twentieth century. On May 4, 1907, a promoter named Charles C. Mathews advertised the opening of White City. This was to be the best of the new generation of amusement parks in the United States (Fig. 4.23). It was modeled on Coney Island, in New York. On opening night, it featured a performance of Kismet by the Olympia Opera Company. The grounds were illuminated by 1,500 electric lights, and one could ride on the Flying Horses or the Figure 8, play the Japanese Ball Game, or view Katzenjammer Castle. It was built on the site now occupied by a Burger King and the former Fontainebleau Motor Hotel at Tulane and Carrollton, where Pelican Stadium once stood. White City closed in 1914, when Heinemann Baseball Park (later Pelican Stadium) was built on the same site. Perhaps the name White City carried a double meaning; one doubts the reference was solely to the white electric lightbulbs.
Fourteen years later, in 1928, the Pontchartrain Beach amusement park opened. It was built on filled land reclaimed from the lake by the Orleans Levee Board, directly across from the Spanish Fort. It had rides, bathhouses, and a boardwalk. The main attraction was the Big Dipper roller coaster. The park survived the Depression, remaining open until 1938, when it was relocated farther east along the lakeshore. The new site was at the end of Elysian Fields Avenue in Milneburg. Only the lighthouse remains today. Rides at the new location included the Wild Mouse, the Smokey Mary, and an immense Ferris wheel. The most memorable icon was the popular Zephyr roller coaster. The park closed in 1983. In the era of segregation, a separate-but-(un)equal park for blacks, called Lincoln Beach, after the president, was created nearby. It operated from 1939 until 1964, when segregation “officially” ended.
Seventeen years after the second Pontchartrain Beach amusement park closed, yet another amusement park opened. This one, Jazzland, was built in the far eastern swamps of Orleans Parish, and many claimed it was a folly from the outset. The $135 million park opened in 2000, and was financed by a group of local investors and by federal loans backed by the city. The park went bankrupt only two years later. In 2003 it reopened as Six Flags New Orleans. Six Flags, a prominent national chain, purchased the park for the bargain price of $22 million and promptly invested $25 million more in upgrades, including dramatic new roller-coaster rides. Ironically, plans for a themed water park were underway when Katrina struck and submerged the entire park in up to ten feet of water. Six Flags abandoned the site entirely in 2006 amid veiled claims in some quarters that (white) locals never embraced the park because of its location. The place now appears destined to become a ruin.
The most intriguing sights during the period of 1920–2005 were for amusement, but places of worship also were admired as sources of spiritual “escape” of a different sort. After all, fifty-six streets in New Orleans are named for Catholic saints. One of the most revered places of high architecture is a cemetery built in 1875 at the end of a new streetcar extension in the New Marigny neighborhood. It was modeled after the Campo Santo dei Tedeschi (German Cemetery) in Rome. Inside the cemetery’s walls was constructed a miniaturized Gothic cathedral, named the Chapel of St. Roch.
St. Roch was born in Montpellier, France, around 1295. It is said that he was marked at birth with a red cross on his chest. According to “Blake Pontchartrain,” the trademarked moniker of an anonymous local historian who writes a weekly column in Gambit Weekly:
As the story goes, he was orphaned at age 20, gave all his fortune to the poor, gave the governorship to his uncle, and went on a pilgrimage to Rome. On the way, he stopped at a town stricken by the plague. The young man healed the people and moved on. Everywhere he visited in Italy, he cured all those he touched. Then he himself was stricken at Piacenza.
Rather than be a burden, he hid himself in a hut in a forest. And here comes the best part. A dog found him, licked his wounds, and brought him a small loaf of bread each day until he recovered.
Eventually he made his way home to France, but his relatives did not recognize him, and he refused to reveal his identity. In his disguise as a pilgrim, he was taken for a spy and thrown into prison by order of the governor. There he died five years later in 1327.
The red cross on his breast and documents in his possession proved his identity, and 100 years after his death he was canonized.37
4.22: Alligator pond at the Spanish Fort, 1898.
4.23: White City, Carrollton and Tulane avenues, 1909.
4.24: St. Roch Chapel and Cemetery, Ninth Ward (New Marigny), 1910.
4.25: St. Roch, New Marigny, 2006.
The inherent folly of the structure, which is beautiful in its own right, rests in its diminutive scale. It was built after an epidemic of yellow fever in 1868 as a thanks offering by Father Peter L. Thevis (Fig. 4.24). The priest promised he would build a chapel to the saint. Legend has it that not a single parishioner died, and Father Thevis kept his promise. Soon thereafter, the shrine gained fame as a place where cripples shed their crutches (leaving them behind on permanent display) as evidence of newfound physical abilities thanks to sacred intervention. The cemetery and shrine stand today, having weathered Katrina remarkably well, although many of the artifacts were looted (Fig. 4.25). It apparently was designed with periodic floods in mind. The crypts and graves were safe, resting slightly above the reach of Katrina’s high floodwater mark. The chapel appears to have been designed to withstand repeated flooding as well. And Claremont, California, is home of the St. Roch Dog Rescue, an organization dedicated to saving abandoned and homeless dogs.38
St. Roch’s was to miniaturized cathedrals what another church of the same period, the Second NME Church of the South, was to miniaturized medieval castle fortifications. This church, completed in 1907, was designed by M. B. De-Pass, and stands near the corner of Music and Burgundy in the Faubourg Marigny (Fig. 4.26). The façade contains what appear to be gun turrets, shielded behind a rusticated wall with few openings.
Other unusual structures built during this period include t
he Doullut Houses, popularly known as the Steamboat Houses. Built in 1905, these residences are situated prominently along the Mississippi River levee in the Bywater neighborhood, a few miles downriver from the Vieux Carré (Figs. 4.27 and 4.28). These houses, which resemble each other like fraternal twins, were built by a determined individualist, steamboat captain M. Paul Doullut, for himself and his son. Heavily influenced by a Japanese precursor, the Kinkaku, or Golden Pavilion, at the St. Louis–Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1903–1904, they were constructed the following year. Oriental motifs occur throughout the three-tier configuration of each house, as well as on the dipping roof overhangs and deep eaves. Motifs derived from the vernacular architecture of steamboats were incorporated, including narrow interior halls, decks, squared corners, and a pilothouse at the top. Especially at night, the illuminated pilothouses atop steamships passing by can be easily seen from each house’s pilot perch, and vice versa, as if to convey the illusion of a landlocked ship. The immense wooden Mardi Gras–like beads that give a distinctive accent to the galleries are graduated in size and loosely strung between the columns on steel wires.39 The vernacular high architectural synthesis of illusion and deliriousness exhibited in the Chapel of St. Roch, the Second NME Church, and the Steamboat Houses indicates deeper undertones in the city’s culture of escapism.
4.26: Second NME Church of the South, Faubourg Marigny, 2005 (preKatrina).
Speaking of escapism, the invention of motion pictures was embraced with enthusiasm in New Orleans, just as it was everywhere else in America, but until the late 1960s, nearly every movie palace was segregated.40 The wealthy white elite went to their theaters on Canal Street, while the poor blacks had their own in the “back neighborhoods.” In 1896, the first motion pictures shown in the city were projected from an elevated wooden booth in the center of the West End amusement area. They were shown outdoors on a large canvas screen that was unrolled in front of a viewing stand. A five-hundred-volt current was rigged from the nearby streetcar line; the current was reduced with a water rheostat, and was attached to a Vitascope machine. Canal Street movie palaces included the Triange, the Dream World, the No Name, and the Alamo. Later came the Globe and the Trianon. By 1940 there were nearly fifty movie theatres in New Orleans.41 By 1970, more than two-thirds had been destroyed. Drive-in theatres included the Airline Drive-in in Metairie; it was destroyed in the late 1960s.
Delirious New Orleans Page 13
