by Gary Krist
This new low point in the city’s racial atmosphere became increasingly palpable to blacks in the aftermath of the riot. For when the incident had finally played itself out—after the mutilated body of Robert Charles had been buried in an unmarked plot in the city’s potter’s field, and after the post-riot investigations had led to the inevitable conviction of absolutely no one (except for five police officers who were convicted of cowardice and dismissed from the force)—the city emerged as an even harsher and more hostile place for its black citizens. Political disenfranchisement and social segregation were now reinforced by a hardened resolve among whites to actively “keep the black man down” in the century just beginning. This new attitude was perhaps best expressed by one white city official in 1902: “The nigger’s all right in his place,” the man explained to a reporter for the magazine Outlook, “[but] when he tries to get out of it, hit him on the head, and next time he’ll come in with his hat off.”
For the musicians in New Orleans’ nascent jazz culture, the changing environment would mean more outright suppression of their livelihood—more reform campaigns against the dance halls they played in, more police disruption of their parades and picnics. Most of them had escaped physical harm, but the psychological effects of the riot were to linger on. And at least one musician had lost his life in the violence. “Big Eye” Louis Nelson’s father—a butcher and occasional accordionist—had been killed by a mob in the Vieux Carré on the first night of the major rioting. His body, battered and shot-up, was found in a gutter on Decatur Street and was carried to the hospital in the early morning hours of July 26.
“Nobody knew him,” Nelson later recalled, “[but] when they showed him to me, I knew him. It was my daddy. They had snatched him off his meat wagon down at the French Market and killed him.… Was I angry about it? Well, sure, I was. But what could I do? It just wash away. It all just wash away. Couple of days later, I was back there at 25s playing harder than ever.” That’s when Nelson learned that to play the new music right, you had to “shove in crying wherever you get the chance.”
But it was one thing to suppress the spirit of self-assertion represented by Robert Charles—and, for that matter, by jazz itself; destroying it would be something else entirely. In the years after 1900, in fact, Charles became something of a folk hero among the black citizens of New Orleans. Legends soon grew up around his name—that he had killed thirty-two policemen, for instance; that he’d shot one officer at a funeral, killing the cop but leaving the priest standing beside him unharmed. Some people even said that Charles had never died in that house on Saratoga Street, that somehow he’d escaped and lived to a ripe old age in hiding. And, of course, this last legend was in a sense true. Robert Charles did live on—in a song about his exploits, composed by an unknown hand in the days after his apotheosis. It was played in private all-black gatherings for years thereafter, though rarely in public. According to Jelly Roll Morton, who was just fifteen years old at the time, “This song was squashed very easily by the [police] department, and not only by the department but by anyone else who heard it, because it was a trouble-breeder. So that song never did get very far. I once knew the Robert Charles song. But I found out it was best for me to forget it.”
Others in the city’s black neighborhoods, however, would not forget the song so easily.
THE LIGHTS WERE WHAT AMAZED EVERYONE. THERE were a hundred of them, suspended from the ornate tin ceiling like the bright-burning stars in Tom Anderson’s own private galaxy. “We didn’t have no sunglasses in them days,” one habitué of the place would later claim, “but you needed ’em in Anderson’s … Hurt my eyes [just] to walk past at night.”
It was 1901, opening night of Tom Anderson’s monumental new Annex in Storyville. Sprawled over the corner of Basin and Customhouse Streets, the Annex was a palace for the appetites—the “most modernly equipped and brilliant bar in the South,” and reportedly the first in the nation illuminated entirely by electric lights. Its half-block-long cherry-wood bar, punctuated by polished brass cuspidors and decorated with gilt bas-reliefs in Neo-Empire style, ran the length of the building, backed by five huge arched mirrors that multiplied those hundred lights to create a dazzling glow. Twelve bartenders manned this ocean liner of a fixture, this virtual bowling alley of beer and whiskey, serving customers who stood four deep on the brown-and-white tiled floor.
“Opening night was a thing to marvel at,” the bar’s intrepid manager, Billy Struve, would later recall. “Hundreds of people were there, representatives of the big breweries and the wine companies from all over the country. More than one hundred cases of Champagne were sold, the patrons outbidding each other for their favorite vintages. Before the night was over, everyone was walking in Champagne.”
And there was ample reason for celebration. Storyville, technically open for business since 1898, finally had its linchpin, its headquarters. For patrons approaching the new Tenderloin from the Central Business District or the Vieux Carré, Anderson’s Annex would be the first stop they’d come to—the District’s gatehouse, as it were, perched tantalizingly aglow on the neighborhood’s leading edge. From here, over a bracing glass or two, a sporting man could plan out his entire evening’s entertainment, asking advice of the knowledgeable bartenders or even consulting a Blue Book, the uncensored, ubiquitously available Baedekers to the District’s countless offerings. These guides, helpfully published by Anderson and Struve (a former reporter for the Daily Item who had begun working for Anderson in 1900), were aimed at “the man who wants to be a thoroughbred bounder.” They contained ads, photos, and descriptions of every one of the better brothels and prostitutes in the eighteen-block area of Storyville, with each practitioner conveniently identified by “race”—for example, w for white, c for colored, J for Jewish, and oct. for octoroon. To own a Blue Book was to have the District at one’s fingertips. “Go through this little book,” the preface assured readers, “and when you go on a ‘lark’ you will know the best places to spend time and money.… It puts the stranger on a proper grade or path as to where to go and be secure from hold-ups, brace games, or other illegal practices usually worked on the unwise in Red Light districts.” In short: “Anyone who knows to-day from yesterday will say that the Blue Book is the right book for the right people.”
And the right people were in the right place at Anderson’s Annex. The big electric sign over the door, spelling out the proprietor’s name in bright white letters, told them as much. After all, Tom Anderson—the former Irish Channel snitch, the erstwhile office clerk with the easy manner and the open hand—had already become the dominant figure of the nascent District. Resplendent in a fine suit with an emerald-encrusted pocket-watch and diamond-topped cravat pin, he looked like anything but a common saloonkeeper. “Mr. Anderson had a little white, waxed mustache and looked rather like a banker,” one patron admitted. “He always wore a white flower in his buttonhole, and kept his pants pressed like a boulevardier.” And from his command center amid the glittering lights of Basin Street, he could look out on the new centerpiece of an ever-growing domain—one that besides the Annex now included his original Arlington Restaurant on Rampart Street, another Rampart Street club for black patrons called the Astoria Club, and a soon-to-be-opened restaurant on Gravier Street called the Stag (whose elegance, the Daily Item would say, was such “that Nero himself, in all the attempts he made to make his palaces the finest in the world, never imagined”). In addition to these drinking and eating establishments, he also had his interests in Josie Arlington’s brothel and in a number of other similar places in the District. The forty-three-year-old Anderson, in fact, was already being identified in the newspapers as the unofficial “mayor of Storyville”—a moniker that would stay with him through the rest of his life.
But by now Tom had an official title as well—Representative Anderson. Early in 1900, thanks to his numerous friends in the local Ring, Anderson had successfully gotten himself nominated for a seat in the Louisiana General Assembly, re
presenting New Orleans’ Fourth Ward—the one that encompassed most of the new district. Opposition to his candidacy had been fierce, particularly from the always-conservative Daily Picayune. “Mr. Anderson,” the paper opined when his nomination became public, “is the owner or conductor of a place on North Rampart Street that bears perhaps the worst reputation of any drinking house in the city.”
For this reason, the Picayune viewed his nomination with distinct disapproval: “The lawless classes have no right to participate in the making of laws,” the paper went on, “for if that responsible duty were turned over to them, they would reverse the positions of good and evil and trample right, justice, virtue, and industry underfoot.” If the Fourth Ward had to be represented by a saloonkeeper (as the Ring claimed when nominating Anderson), “it is certain that one could have been found who at least conducted an orderly and decent place, patronized by a respectable class of people.”
But despite this full-throated opposition from the forces of respectability—and an attempt by the State Democratic Committee to disown the candidate—Anderson went on to win his seat. Sworn in on May 14, Anderson took office claiming to owe allegiance to no one, not even the Ring, and he vowed to support civil-service legislation and other reform efforts. But few people took these protestations seriously. By June, the papers were already taking note of the new representative’s chumminess with “certain saloon influences in Baton Rouge.” When in November he made his petition to open up the palatial new establishment on Basin Street, the application sailed through without a hitch. And although he was still having occasional trouble with the more conscientious elements in the police department (including a pesky arrest in March of 1901 for violating the Sunday Closing Law—a law that he had been elected, some said, expressly to overturn), he was generally prospering in the new open environment of legalized vice.
And why should he not prosper? For an entrepreneur like Anderson, the business model of the vice industry was all but failure-proof. In his bars and brothels he was supplying high-priced, high-margin goods and services to a market where demand was virtually unlimited. And unlike his oil-supply business, where he constantly had to suffer the depredations of bigger fish like the Standard Oil Company, his drinking, gambling, and prostitution establishments had no larger players to compete with. Storyville, in short, was a small businessman’s dream, and Tom Anderson was doing everything in his power to take advantage of it.
So, too, were many others in New Orleans’ sporting world, for there was plenty of business in Storyville to go around. Vice had always been lucrative in New Orleans, but in this new era of official tolerance, the profits to be made were growing. Yes, beat cops still had to be paid off for their genial blindness to minor infractions, but the weekly douceurs (left discreetly in the boxes gracing every brothel’s front porch) were not nearly as onerous as they once were. Now able to operate with impunity on the sunny side of the law, scores of vice entrepreneurs—both male and female—were turning Storyville into a virtual supermarket of sin, catering to appetites and pocketbooks at all points on the socioeconomic scale.
The new District, in fact, was laid out almost as rationally as the D. H. Holmes department store on nearby Canal Street. Each of the six major cross-streets of Storyville specialized in its own portion of the market. Basin Street, the broad avenue that anchored the foot of the District (closest to the Vieux Carré and the river), was the place for the luxury trade. Here was the already-famous row of large mansions hosting the so-called Five-Dollar Houses. These brothels, elaborately decorated and aspiring to an air of opulent exclusivity, were the ones specializing in the white and octoroon beauties most relentlessly touted in the Blue Books; they were the “refined sporting houses” aimed at a white clientele of certain means. One block behind Basin was Franklin Street, a decidedly less high-toned thoroughfare of smaller brothels, along with many of the dance halls, honky-tonks, and saloons that would soon give the District its reputation as a center for music as well as for sex. Extending back from there—in roughly descending order of refinement and expense—were Liberty, Marais, Villere, and finally Robertson Street, home of countless saloons, cafés, and brothels of low and lower repute. On these streets—and on the four intersecting thoroughfares of Customhouse, Bienville, Conti, and St. Louis—were also the notorious lines of “cribs,” tawdry one-room shacks rented by the day by the Tenderloin’s rougher class of prostitutes. Standing half-clothed (or sometimes even naked) in doorways, the mostly white women of Liberty and Marais and the mostly black women of Villere and Robertson would advertise their wares in the most forthright way imaginable, for whatever price the market would bear. These backstreets of Storyville were also the home of a few black brothels—the only sex establishments available to African American patrons outside of those in the unofficial Black Storyville located on the other side of Canal Street.
And so here, within the boundaries delineated by “respectable” New Orleans, disreputable New Orleans flourished. Of course, prostitution and vice did not cease to exist beyond the borders of Storyville; in fact, in 1902 the Daily Item would launch a campaign to eliminate the vice establishments that doggedly continued to operate elsewhere in the city. Nor did the geographic containment do much to mitigate the inherent noxious and abusive elements of that way of life—the rampant drunkenness and violence, the dissipation, the corruption of underage girls (and sometimes boys) forced into a way of life they cannot have chosen freely. The exchange of loveless sex for money, after all, carries with it an ethos that no amount of velvet, Champagne, and gold leaf can make any less degrading. But Storyville was an attempt, at least, to forge a compromise between human ideals and human nature, to rationalize the inevitable and alleviate the harm of activities that realistically could not be abolished. Or so the city’s progressive reformers believed, at least for a time.
Meanwhile, until that time passed, there were many who took full advantage of the opportunity to make a lucrative living off the experiment—not just worldly men like Tom Anderson, but many women as well. Prostitution had traditionally been one of the few alternatives for working-class and lower-middle-class women to a life of drudgery in factories or domestic service. In the permissive environment of Storyville, these women could now make real money without actually breaking the law. And make money they did, particularly the elite corps of Basin Street madams.
Josie Arlington, for instance, was doing very well indeed at her new brothel at 225 Basin Street, just a few doors down from her business partner Anderson’s Annex. Having purchased the large and spacious mansion back when the boundaries of Storyville were first decided, she had allowed her consort Tom Brady to oversee its renovation into a showpiece of late-Victorian opulence. With its domed cupola and canopied balconies, the four-story façade exuded just the kind of ostentatious respectability she had begun aspiring to in the ’90s, after her split with Phillip Lobrano. The interior, decorated with leather furniture, ornate tapestries, and “oriental statuary,” was a perfect expression of Gilded Age excess, featuring one hall (the Mirror Maze Room) paneled entirely in mirrors, a music room, and individual parlors done up in Turkish, Japanese, Viennese, and American styles. Upstairs were sixteen bedrooms, each dominated by a large brass bed where Arlington’s exclusive roster of beautiful women could entertain their customers. It was, according to the Blue Book, “absolutely and unquestionably the most decorative and costly fitted-out sporting palace ever placed before the American public.” And as a generator of revenue, Josie Arlington’s was nonpareil. The take from those sixteen bedrooms, combined with wine and liquor sales in the parlors and the percentage from the house’s gambling business, amounted to a substantial weekly profit for the establishment’s two principals. And all of this now came with little threat of the kind of arbitrary police raids that had previously cut so heavily into vice-industry earnings.
But Anderson and Arlington were hardly the only entrepreneurs making good on Basin Street. The two blocks between Customhouse and the e
dge of the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 on Conti were teeming with similar establishments, all operating under the aegis of a female entrepreneur and all competing for the higher-end segment of the market. “These places were really something to see,” pianist Clarence Williams would later say of the Basin Street houses. “They had the most beautiful parlors, with cut glass and draperies, and rugs, and expensive furniture. They were just like millionaires’ houses.” And the women on offer in these palaces were—at least to impressionable eyes—as elegant and refined as the furnishings. “The girls would come down dressed in the finest of evening gowns, just like they were going to the opera. They were just beautiful. Their hairdos were just-so, and I’m telling you that Ziegfeld didn’t have any more beautiful women than those. Some of them looked Spanish, and some were Creoles, some brownskins, some chocolate brown. But they all had to have that figure.”
That so many of the prostitutes on Basin Street were mixed-race was one of the District’s great paradoxes. The rest of New Orleans may have been subject to the hardening Jim Crow regimen of strict black-white separation, but in Storyville, for the right price, white men could relive the fantasy of the city’s more racially fluid past. No blacks were allowed into the Basin Street brothels as customers, and darker-skinned black prostitutes were largely confined to the backstreets of the District. But sexual contact across the color line was not only tolerated here, it was actively promoted, at least in the District’s first years. Early Storyville, in fact, was arguably the most racially integrated square mile in the entire American South.
