by Gary Krist
AND so the vice mills of Storyville rolled on more or less unchecked. Lulu White, Emma Johnson, and Willie Piazza continued to do business on Basin Street, within plain sight of the passengers arriving at the Frisco depot. In the dives and dance halls of Franklin Street, Freddie Keppard, “Big Eye” Louis Nelson, and the young wunderkind Sidney Bechet continued to play their new music to mixed audiences, provided there was an old ham sandwich on the premises. But for one Storyville icon, life had changed. A few years after her evening with Carrie Nation, Josie Arlington had retired and left the profession as promised. She leased the Basin Street brothel to her former housekeeper, Anna Casey, but retained ownership, thereby ensuring an ample revenue stream to support the family’s luxurious new life on Esplanade Avenue. And though her plans to build a home for wayward girls were apparently on hold (and would in fact never come to fruition), she was now at least free of the taint of Basin Street in all ways but financial. She and her beloved niece Anna could spend all of their time together now, shopping, gardening, making excursions to Anna’s Villa in Covington, and generally living the life of just the kind of respectable upper-class family that Anna still believed she belonged to.
For the woman now known to the world as Mrs. John Thomas Brady, this transformation must have come with overtones of revenge. Her yearnings for respectability had always seemed shaded by a certain contempt for those born into the condition naturally, and this contempt had erupted memorably on at least one occasion late in her career. According to hoary Storyville legend, the queen of the demimonde had by 1906 come to resent the daring young persons of socially prominent families who would show up incognito at Tom Anderson’s annual Mardi Gras fete, the Ball of the Two Well Known Gentlemen. Masked in Carnival regalia, these slumming voyeurs would gape condescendingly at the colorful revels of fallen women and their sporting men, all while remaining safely anonymous behind their masks. “Josie Arlington solved the problem,” one Storyville chronicler explained, “by arranging for the police to raid the affair and to arrest any woman who did not carry a card registering her as a prostitute in good standing. The stratagem caused great embarrassment to the large number of ladies of New Orleans ‘high society’ who were summarily carted off to the police station, unmasked, and sent home.” But now, in 1909, Arlington had an even sweeter revenge: those society ladies who enjoyed masquerading as prostitutes for a night would now have to tolerate a prostitute masquerading as a society lady for the rest of her life.
But Mrs. Brady seemed capable of extracting only so much pleasure from her new life of respectability. According to reports from friends and associates, the retired madam became increasingly morbid and religious over the next few years. Eventually, she spent $8,000 on an elaborate red-marble tomb in Metairie Cemetery. Flanked by two imposing stone flambeaux, the miniature temple featured elegant carvings and bas-reliefs front and back. At the doors to the tomb stood a statue of a beautiful young woman carrying an armful of roses, her other hand placed against the door as if in the act of pushing it open.
Mrs. Brady had meanwhile decided to devote the rest of her life to the cultivation of her adored niece. “I am living only for Anna,” she confided to a friend, and indeed, the two women were reportedly inseparable now. At one point, Mrs. Brady confessed that she would rue the day that Anna finally got married. When the girl asked why, her aunt said simply, “Because men are dogs.”
For a woman who’d spent her entire life catering to the carnal desires of thousands of men, the sentiment was perhaps understandable. But Anna was now in her mid-twenties. How much longer could even the most sheltered innocent be kept in ignorance of the basic facts of her own deceptively privileged life?
BY 1910, it had become clear that reformers generally—and Philip Werlein in particular—were not going to give up their campaign against Storyville. Their proposals to screen off the District and to move the Basin Street brothels had proven both unpopular and politically untenable. But now Werlein, armed with the provisions of the Gay-Shattuck Law, decided to try a new tack. And it would center on the one issue about which moral reformers, business reformers, and machine politicians were all of one mind—race: “The one thing that all Southerners agree upon is the necessity of preserving our racial purity,” Werlein told reporters in early February. “The open association of white men and Negro women on Basin Street, which is now permitted by our authorities, should fill us with shame as it fills the visitor from the North with amazement.”
In the Gay-Shattuck Law, which forbade any alcohol purveyor from serving both blacks and whites in the same building, and in another 1908 law against interracial concubinage, Werlein thought he had the ammunition needed to abolish at least the so-called octoroon houses, and he was willing to use it. “I will enlist the aid of every minister in New Orleans,” he vowed. “I am determined to arouse public sentiment against the awful conditions which exist.… It is a shame and a disgrace that Negro dives like those of Emma Johnson, Willie Piazza, and Lulu White, whose infamy is linked abroad with the fair name of New Orleans, should be allowed to exist and to boldly stare respectable people in the face.” His conclusion: “These resorts should be exterminated, and the Negresses who run them driven from the city.”
The war against Storyville thus entered a new and particularly ugly stage. Until now, the District had been a lone holdout in the overall movement in New Orleans toward greater repression of African Americans. Black men had never been allowed to come to Storyville proper as brothel customers (even the black crib prostitutes were available to whites only), but they had always been able to work, dance, and drink there. And certainly sexual congress between white men and black women had not only been allowed but actively encouraged and advertised. All of this, however, was to change over the next few years, as reformers attempted to move the city closer to traditional Southern norms of racial regimentation. Life in Storyville—as both blacks and whites had known it—was about to change.
But perhaps the greatest threat to the District would come not from those who wanted to destroy it but rather from those who wanted to exploit it. For the remarkable success of Storyville had not gone unnoticed in the criminal underworlds in the rest of the country. A number of gangsters from places like New York and Chicago had been arriving in the Crescent City in recent years, eager to win their share of the bounty. One pair of brothers from New York—Abraham and Isidore Sapir (or Shapiro), alleged white slavers looking to expand their interests—seemed especially determined to shake up the status quo of Anderson County. Changing their names to Harry and Charles Parker, respectively, they came to New Orleans in the early years of the twentieth century and opened a saloon on the corner of Liberty and Customhouse Streets. In 1910, they sold that saloon and bought a dance hall on Franklin Street called the 101 Ranch, right behind Tom Anderson’s Annex. By all reports, they were not pleasant, easygoing fellows like the mayor of Storyville. And they were apparently eager to show the local vice lords just how a tenderloin was supposed to be run.
WHEN THE PARKER BROTHERS FIRST DECIDED TO get into the dance-hall business in Storyville, their prospects for success were bright. A dance craze had been sweeping the country, and bold new steps like the bunny hug, the grizzly bear, and the turkey trot were becoming wildly popular—in New Orleans as in the rest of the nation. Local clergymen and bluestockings may have complained, pointing to provisions of the Gay-Shattuck Law that were supposed to keep women, alcohol, and music strictly separated. But police enforcement had so far been lax. Business was good, and by 1910 numerous dance halls and cabarets had opened in Storyville, clustering mainly on and around Franklin Street, just one block behind the Basin Street brothels. The Parkers’ 101 Ranch quickly became one of the liveliest and most popular venues in the District, attracting crowds to hear some of the best black bands in the city.
But the Parkers weren’t satisfied. The competition for customers on Franklin Street was keen, and the brothers from New York were determined to eliminate some of their homegr
own rivals. Their first target was John “Peg” Anstedt, the popular, one-legged proprietor of Anstedt’s Saloon (a place where many white musicians like Nick LaRocca came to hear the black bands). According to local gossip, in 1911, Charles Parker began spending time with Anstedt’s mistress—a prostitute named May Gilbert—hoping to convince her to swear out an affidavit accusing her lover of being engaged in the white-slavery trade. When Anstedt heard about this, he was enraged, and responded as one typically did in Storyville in 1911—by taking a potshot at Parker one evening in a Franklin Street saloon. The bullet missed its mark, as did Parker’s retaliatory shot at Anstedt sometime later at another District dive. But although no one was hurt or arrested in the incident, it did make one thing clear—the power structure that had grown up in the District in its first decade of existence was about to be challenged.
In 1912, the Parkers sold the 101 Ranch to William Phillips, a local restaurateur (and friend of Peg Anstedt’s). Phillips renovated the building and reopened it as the 102 Ranch, a venue that soon became a popular gathering place for the city’s horse players. Tom Anderson—still very much involved in the racing world—was said to occasionally take refuge at the 102, whenever he tired of the many tourists who came to his Annex around the corner and insisted on seeing the great host.
But the Parkers had not left the dance-hall business. That same year, in fact, they opened the Tuxedo, almost directly across the street from the 102 Ranch—a move that was in direct violation of a clause in their sales agreement with Phillips. The new Tuxedo, moreover, was a large and modern entertainment complex, with a dime-a-dance section in the rear and a large bar up front that opened out directly onto Franklin Street. Soon the Parkers were directly competing with Phillips for the best of the city’s musical talent.
Even so, Phillips, to the Parkers’ annoyance, continued to attract a large share of the dance-hall business. The rivals argued frequently, sometimes coming to blows in the street. The resulting brawls soon created lurid newspaper headlines that ended up hurting Storyville’s reputation at a particularly inopportune time, just when reformers were looking for ammunition in their campaign to close the District.
For New Orleans’ jazzmen, however, the increasing competition among dance-hall and cabaret operators was a boon. Thanks to the ongoing dance craze—to which the revolutionary new sound proved especially conducive—jazz was becoming increasingly popular, not just with the denizens of poor black neighborhoods but among the city’s white “sporting set” as well. Work was plentiful, and musicians were finally making enough money to give up their day jobs and play full-time. Clarinetist Alphonse Picou described a typical jazzman’s schedule during these years. “I worked at my trade all week. All day Saturday I would play in a wagon to advertise the dance that night. [Then I’d] play all night. Next morning we have to be at the depot at seven to catch the train for the lake. Play for the picnic at the lake all day. Come back and play a dance all Sunday night. Monday we advertise for the Monday night ball and play that Monday night. Sometimes my clarinet seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.…”
By this time, most of the now-storied venues of early New Orleans jazz were up and running. In 1910, Italian businessman Peter Ciaccio opened the Manhattan Café on Iberville. Universally known as “Pete Lala’s,” the club was, according to one Storyville denizen, “a noisy, brawling barn of a place, [offering] music and dancing downstairs, heavy gambling in the back rooms, and assignations upstairs.” And it wasn’t long before it became central to the city’s jazz scene. “Pete Lala’s was the headquarters,” pianist Clarence Williams would later recall, “the place where all the bands would come when they got off work, and where the girls would come to meet their main man.… They would come to drink and play and have breakfast and then go to bed.” Trombonist Kid Ory, who finally moved full-time to New Orleans in 1910, managed to get his group a regular gig at Pete Lala’s, and soon many of the other big names were playing there as well.
Another Lala—John T. Lala—ran the Big 25 on Franklin just west of Iberville, which also became a noted hangout for musicians and gamblers. (It was where, according to Louis Armstrong, “all the big-time pimps and hustlers would congregate and play ‘cotch.’ ”) The Frenchman’s, a bit farther afield at the corner of Villere and Bienville, was a particular favorite of the District’s piano professors. According to Jelly Roll Morton (who by this time was spending most of his time away from New Orleans), the Frenchman’s was “the most famous nightspot after everything [else] was closed. It was only a back room, but it was where all the greatest pianists frequented after they got off from work in the sporting houses. About four A.M.… they would go to the Frenchman’s and there would be everything in the line of hilarity there.”
Storyville’s reputation as the birthplace of jazz has often been exaggerated—Black Storyville across Canal Street actually has a better claim—but the District can definitely take credit for nurturing the new music’s childhood and adolescence. Keppard, Baquet, Ory, Bunk Johnson, and other members of the post-Bolden generation were now making music history nightly in the dance halls and clubs of Storyville, though few people at the time—including the musicians themselves—realized this, given the character of the venues they played in. “My first job was in Billy Phillips’ place,” trumpeter Mutt Carey would later recall. “We played anything we pleased in that joint; you see, there was no class in those places. All they wanted was continuous music. Man, they had some rough places in Storyville in those days. A guy would see everything in those joints, and it was all dirty. It was really a hell of a place to work.”
Meanwhile, the music was changing as new star soloists rose to take up the mantle left behind by Buddy Bolden. For some years after Bolden’s institutionalization, Creole trumpeter Freddie Keppard was widely regarded as his principal heir. “After Buddy died,” Sidney Bechet would later write (forgetting that Bolden didn’t actually die until much later), “Freddie Keppard was King. Freddie kind of took Buddy’s way some; he played practically the same way as Buddy, but he played, he really played.”
In the intensely competitive environment of New Orleans music, however, there was always someone new coming up, eager to snatch the coveted title for himself. Cornetist Joe Oliver—an Uptown African American who, like Bolden, lacked some of the downtown polish of his Creole peers—rose to prominence in these years. Though several years older than Keppard, he came to music somewhat later; he began his career around 1910 with the Eagle Brass Band, the new name for Bolden’s old outfit. Soon he was also playing the better clubs of the District—102 Ranch, Pete Lala’s—and wowing audiences with his driving “freak” style, using various mutes to make his horn sound like everything from a rooster to a baby. (“How he could make it talk!” one fellow player marveled.) One famous night at Aberdeen’s in the District, Oliver decided to stake his claim. To hear one version of the story:
Something got into Joe one night as he sat quietly in the corner and listened to the musicians who were praising [Freddie] Keppard and [Manuel] Perez. He was infuriated by their tiresome adulation; didn’t they know that Joe Oliver could play a cornet, too? So he came forth from his silence, strode to the piano, and said, “Jones, beat it out in B flat.” Jones began to beat, and Joe began to blow. The notes tore out clear as a bell, crisp and clean. He played as he never had before, filling the little dance hall with low, throbbing blues. Jones backed him with a slow, steady beat. With this rhythm behind him, Joe walked straight through the hall, out onto the sidewalk. There was no mistaking what he meant when he pointed his cornet, first towards Pete Lala’s, where Keppard played, then directly across the street, to where Perez was working. A few hot blasts brought crowds out of both joints; they saw Joe Oliver on the sidewalk, playing as if he would blow down every house on the street. Soon every rathole and crib down the line was deserted by its patrons, who came running up to Joe, bewitched by his cornet. When the last joint had poured out its crew, he turned around and led the crowd into Aberdeen’s,
where he walked to the stand, breathless, excited, and opened his mouth wide to let out the big, important words that were boiling in his head. But all he could say was, “There! That’ll show ’em!” After that night, they never called him anything but “King” Oliver.
Actually, there’s no evidence that anyone called him King until he went to Chicago some years later, but Oliver’s importance to New Orleans music in the teens would be difficult to exaggerate. He was especially influential among the younger generation of players just coming into their own. In this time of musical ferment, bands shuffled personnel frequently, so neophytes would eventually get the chance to play with many of the older players they admired. Sidney Bechet, for instance, was now playing with a number of different ensembles all over town, despite the fact that he was still in his mid-teens. Hoping to discipline their wild child, his conservative Creole parents would sometimes lock up his clarinet in a cabinet. But Sidney would just go to his gig anyway, asking his bandleader to get him any old pawnshop clarinet. Often, when he was supposed to be playing with his brother’s somewhat staid Silver Bells Band, Sidney would gig instead with his own band, formed with his friend Buddy Petit, called the Young Olympians. “I’d always catch hell from my brother when he’d find I was playing in [the Olympians],” Bechet would later recall. “Many a time he’d come to catch me at it and drag me off … I didn’t care to have trouble with my brother, but it was like I couldn’t help myself. There was so much more of what I was looking for in other bands, so much more of what I was needing.”
Even Bechet’s most admired mentors had trouble keeping the young clarinetist under control. “We could never keep our hands on that Sidney,” remembered Louis Nelson, who played with his former protégé in several venues around town. “Regular little devil, always running off down the alley after them little women.” So eager was Bechet to be perceived as a ladies’ man that he once pretended to have VD (by pouring Musterol ointment over his crotch and then wrapping it up in a bandage). Sometime later he tried to take credit for impregnating a neighborhood girl. “I’m sure I can support a wife,” he told the girl’s father one night. “I earn 75 cents [or] a dollar a night in the District.” The two of them drank wine and talked it over all night, until the father (who knew exactly who it was who’d made his daughter pregnant) carried the sleeping boy back to his family’s house and put him to bed.
