Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans

by Garvey, John B.

  Basin Street in Storyville, viewed from Bienville Street to Canal Street. Left to right: Mahogany Hall (Lulu White’s mansion), the Olga sisters’ house, Josie Arlington’s, Martha Clarke’s, Jesse Brown’s, Lizette Smith’s, Marie sisters’, Hilma Burt’s, and Tom Anderson’s Annex. The little house is typical of pre-Storyville architecture. (Courtesy Tulane University Special Collections)

  Other tenderloin areas existed in the city, such as the “swamp” on Julia and Girod Streets and the two-block long Gallatin Street at the river called the “port of missing men.” These areas abounded with cutthroats, dance-house operators, fight promoters, thieves, thugs, and pimps. There were dance halls, brothels, saloons, gambling rooms, cockfighting pits, and rooming houses. Police mortality in these areas was high. “[Gallatin] . . . was the center of narcotics traffic, as well as the home of dealers in stolen goods . . .” (Rose 1978).

  In 1898, Alderman Sidney Story introduced the ordinance calling for a “restricted” red-light district, hoping to wipe out all other areas of vice and control the restricted area. The document was discreetly worded so as to be legally acceptable, and it passed. The area of brothels that bore his name was both a backhanded honor and a bitter pill for him to swallow.

  A license for prostitution, as issued in 1857.

  Celebrities from all over the country visited Tom Anderson’s saloon and bawdy houses, such as Josie Arlington’s, which, in time, became “sporting palaces” with furniture, draperies, and chandeliers equal to those in the mansions of St. Charles Avenue. Mardi Gras was a profitable season for brothels, and the inhabitants of the demimonde had their celebrations just as the “society” people did.

  Beginning in 1882, before there was a Storyville, the Ball of the Two Well-Known Gentlemen became the focal point of Mardi Gras for all the creatures who frequented the area: the bartenders, prostitutes, musicians, politicians, and policemen. Word spread about these festivities, and nice young women begged their husbands and fiancées to get tickets to the affair, so that they could see with their own eyes (well-hidden behind masks) how these brazen creatures carried on. In 1906, Josie Arlington, aware of their curiosity, arranged a police raid in which every lady present would be arrested unless she was carrying a card registering her as a prostitute in good standing. This caused untold embarrassment to a number of high-society ladies, who were carted off to the police station for not being prostitutes.

  Tom Anderson, the Mayor of Storyville

  Tom Anderson, the richest and most powerful “business man” in Storyville, was an Irishman without equal in flair and raw nerve with regard to the annals of Old New Orleans. Born in 1858 of a poor Irish Channel family, he sold newspapers as a child, became an informer for the police, and added to his earnings by delivering cocaine and opium to two local bagnios. In 1892, he opened a bar and restaurant on Basin Street, which were an immediate success. The well-known brothel owner Josie Arlington became his consort, and he rebuilt her house and reopened it for business in 1901, renaming it the Arlington Annex.

  In time, through friendships made across the bar with policeman and politicians, the blue-eyed, red-haired Anderson boasted two titles, which he juggled admirably. He was both Mayor of Storyville, that tenderloin of crime and corruption, and Honorable Tom Anderson, representative in the Louisiana State legislature of a large and important district of New Orleans. From Collier Magazine, February, 1908:

  Tom Anderson overtops the restricted district; he is its lawgiver and its king; one of the names for it is ‘Anderson County’ . . . saloons with their wide-open poker and crap games; the dives where Negroes buy for fifty cents five cents worth of cocaine . . . when a woman of Anderson County commits robbery [not an uncommon occurrence in the brothels], and when the victim complains loudly enough that she has to be arrested, Tom Anderson comes down and gets her out. He doesn’t even have to give cash bail . . . [she] may be released on parole of any responsible prominent citizen.

  The Settlement of Mid-City: 1890-1930

  At the turn of the century, space was running out on the two-mile area of natural levee of New Orleans. Three options were available if the city were to accommodate more people: expand toward the lake, expand farther and farther along the levee, or crowd more people onto the same land.

  Chartres Street in the French Quarter, including the St. Louis Cathedral on the site of the first church built in the Mississippi valley.

  Lakeward expansion was out of the question, in spite of the New Basin Canal and the amusement parks at West End and Spanish Fort. The backswamp, which lay midway between the lake and the river, was uninhabitable because of flooding.

  Expansion along the river had its limits, too. On the uptown end at the boundary line between Orleans and Jefferson Parishes, there was a protection levee running from the river to the lake; on the downtown side, expansion was limited by the simple fact that parts of Faubourg Marigny were regularly under water after rains.

  What remained, then, was the obvious alternative of packing more people into the same space. New Orleans resisted multi-story residences through fear of inadequate foundation material.

  Three centuries of architecture on Bayou St. John. From top to bottom: Pitot House, eighteenth century; Holy Rosary Rectory, nineteenth century; and a standard shotgun, twentieth century.

  Various architectural examples in New Orleans. From top to bottom: Victorian houses on St. Charles Avenue; Tara House on St. Charles Avenue; and Camelback on Canal Street and another Victorian house.

  The homes most typical of New Orleans architecture at the turn of the century were the shotgun houses, so called because one could fire a shotgun from front to back without hitting an obstruction. The shotgun was a string of rooms lined up one behind the other, usually without a hallway. It afforded no privacy and little ventilation. It was the cheapest house on the market.

  The bungalow, or double tenement, was as popular as the shotgun. In reality, it was a shotgun, or a pair of shotguns, under one roof with party walls. To avoid flooding, builders set them five feet off the ground on piers. Others had basements built in the ground floor beneath the residence, which served as cellars, never built in New Orleans because of the high water table. Such houses were called raised bungalows. None of these houses were invented in New Orleans, but were built to suit the city’s needs. However, once they were embellished with New Orleans favorite touches—louvered French doors, floor-length windows, Carpenter Gothic cornices and brackets, and gables with stained glass windows—they took on a personality of their own. They became “typical New Orleans.”

  At last, a gifted engineer in New Orleans by the name of A. Baldwin Wood invented a heavy duty pump, which could rapidly raise great quantities of water, carry it vertically, and relocate it nearby. With this invention, the city entered an era of land reclamation that would revolutionize its geography, and nothing would ever be quite the same again. Previously uninhabitable areas would now be open to settlement. None of this was to happen quickly, however, or without great difficulty.

  Draining the backswamp was a Herculean task, requiring both time and money. A system of drainage canals had to be built to carry the displaced water to Lake Borgne or Lake Pontchartrain. Levees had to be built to secure the newly-drained land. Pumping caused the backswamps to fall considerably below sea level, making flood controls a matter of life and death. A series of dikes had to be built along the lake to keep out tidal surges. Even then, a line of inner protection levees was needed to connect the levee systems of lake and river. In 1899, Orleans Parish passed legislation to install its first pumping system. Within ten years, much of the backswamp had been pumped out, but on the newly drained land, nothing could be built without driving pilings to considerable depths.

  Drainage: Pumping Stations

  Today, there are twenty-two pumping stations in the city, making it the largest drainage system in the country. The city is under-laid with a network of 1,500 miles of drain pipes and more than 240 miles of canals (which is more
than Venice, Italy, which has 68 miles of canals). The drainage system has a combined capacity of forty-five thousand cubic feet per second.

  Pumping Station No. 6 on the Metaire Relief Outfall Canal (now called the Seventeenth Street Canal) was once the largest pumping station in the world. Now, that title goes to the pumping station on the Harvey Canal, completed in 2011.

  Since 1899, New Orleans has provided its residents with pure drinking water. The river is the largest supply available in the United States with 309 billion gallons daily, approximately the amount consumed in the rest of the United States.

  The Building of the Lakefront

  In spite of the high cost of land, the city moved inexorably lakeward. By the mid-1920s, it became inevitable that something had to be done about the lakefront. The levee itself was inadequate, and the old lakefront was seedy and ugly with its fishermen’s shanties and its two amusement parks connected to the city by streetcar lines. As early as 1873, W. H. Bell, City Surveyor, had suggested a plan for the lakefront combining flood protection with land development. Fifty years later, in 1924, the state legislature asked the Board of Commissioners of the Orleans Lakefront (the Levee Board) to design and carry out such a plan. The Board was to make the lakefront more beautiful with improvements that would pay for themselves. No one denied it was a large order.

  The Levee Board, like the Dock Board, was a powerful body. It had been organized in 1890 and put in charge of 129 miles of levee, 27 miles on the river and 94 miles of inner-city levees. It could levy taxes, expropriate land, run rights-of-way through property owned by other public bodies, and maintain its own police force.

  When the Levee Board at last revealed its plans for the lakefront, the residents of the city were astounded. A stepped concrete seawall,

  Administration Building Tower of Shushan Airport (now New Orleans Municipal Airport), built in 1934 on a man-made island at a cost of $4.5 million. (Courtesy Shushan Collection, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans)

  five and a half miles long, was to be built on the floor of Lake Pontchartrain, approximately three thousand feet from shore, on which the lake waves could roll up and dissipate at the top. After this, the enclosure would be filled in with material pumped in from the lake bottom outside the seawall. Behind the seawall, the filled area would be raised five to ten feet above the lake levee, making it one of the highest parts of the city. When complete, the city would have not only a new levee but also a whole new lakeshore with two thousand acres of prime land to be disposed of by the Levee Board.

  After two hundred years of cutting itself off from the river by constructing warehouses, railroads, and docks, the city was now discovering a new waterfront to be lined with beaches, boulevards, parks, and a municipal yacht harbor. The Shushan Airport, now the New Orleans Municipal Airport, constructed on a man-made peninsula at a cost of $4.5 million, was completed in 1934. It was one of the biggest and best in the country.

  The depression came, and with it came the Works Progress Administration, which looked upon a public work of this magnitude as manna from heaven, for it offered employment to thousands.

  To pay off its bonds, the Levee Board charged rental to the airport and the new Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park, completed in 1939, just before World War II.

  CHAPTER X

  Growth in a Modern City: After 1930

  The late twenties and early thirties brought the city of New Orleans unemployment, soup lines, and deflated bank accounts. Like all other cities in the United States, New Orleans was suffering from the effects of the Great Depression. The people were without hope, and a hero was needed.

  Huey P. Long promised a chicken in every pot to working men in the early 1930s. (Courtesy the Deutsche Collection, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans)

  When Huey Pierce Long was elected governor of Louisiana in 1928 and United States senator in 1932, Louisianians felt that they had found their hero. In Long, they saw the rise of the most colorful leader since Bernardo de Galvez.

  The Kingfish

  Long had built up one of the most powerful political machines in the United States and, in the face of incredible obstacles, enacted his radical program by sheer exuberance of his personality. His doctrine was one of socialism, a revolution of the poor whites. “Every Man a King” and “A Chicken in Every Pot” were the slogans of his Share Our Wealth program. He believed and preached that no man should be allowed to earn more than $1 million per year and that everything he earned over that should go into a general fund from which the needy would be taken care of. There was a faction that hated him, but his power was such that his endorsement for any political office, state or city, was tantamount to election. His power over the state legislature made it possible for him to pass his entire legislative program.

  He was virtually a dictator in Louisiana, and his power was felt most especially in New Orleans. In 1934, he sent the Louisiana National Guard down to Lafayette Street to the Orleans Parish Registration Office across from City Hall, where they broke the lock and took possession of the office. The militia had to be called out by Mayor T. Semmes Walmsley to try to prevent the seizure of the office. Military and police, heavily armed with rifles and machine guns, swarmed around the office and City Hall. Long was victorious, and the office was reopened under his supervision.

  Long abused his right to use the state police during his administration and the subsequent administration, of his hand-picked representative Governor O. K. Allen, which he controlled. Because of this abuse, legislation was passed between 1936 and 1938 restricting the jurisdiction of the State Police in the city of New Orleans until the late 1970s.

  Long was considered a saint and a king to the poor and downtrodden, who heard from his lips the first sound of democracy in action. They had been used to only one kind of government, the aristocratic, one-party kind. If Long wanted to be their dictator, they were willing in return for what he promised them. He rode into office on their backs.

  Long found his start after he finished an eight-month law course at Tulane University, passed the bar, and jumped into politics. On his thirtieth birthday, in 1923, he filed for governor and ran third. In preparation for running again, he made use of all the things that had needed attention in Louisiana for a long time: unpaved roads, the high illiteracy rate, school textbooks, and a Mississippi River Bridge. Promising all of these, he was elected to the office of governor in 1926.

  The Kingfish, as he was called, published his own newspaper, the American Progress. He wrote a book, Every Man a King, in which he outlined his ideas for putting an end to the Depression. Another literary effort, My First Days in the White House, was a futuristic exercise in political egomania.

  During his term as senator, Long made a history-making, if unsuccessful, filibuster against a bill backed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. For fifteen hours and thirty-five minutes, he read the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, parts of Victor Hugo’s The Laughing Man, chapters of the Bible, a monologue on Greek mythology, and a recipe for fried oysters.

  Long made many enemies in Washington. A dozen or more senators would rise and leave the chambers whenever he stood up to speak.

  Long was assassinated in the state capital in Baton Rouge on September 8, 1935, allegedly by Dr. Carl A. Weiss, whose father-in-law Long had gerrymandered out of office. Weiss was then riddled with bullets by Long’s bodyguards. Suspicion has lingered that it was Long’s bodyguards who killed Long.

  In spite of his Mafia-like tactics, Long was a governor to whom the city is indebted for the Shushan Airport (now the New Orleans Municipal Airport), the extensive lakefront development, the Huey P. Long Bridge, the enlargement of Charity Hospital, the LSU Medical Center, and free school books in the public schools of Louisiana.

  Mayor Robert Maestri

  In 1936, the city was on the verge of bankruptcy when Robert Maestri was elected mayor. In less than two years, he put the city on a cash basis. Every morning, he drove around the c
ity with an engineer, checking streets, sidewalks, drainage, and public buildings. Every afternoon, he sat at his desk, working to reorganize the archaic fiscal structure of the city and to improve municipal services. In 1942, he was re-elected almost without campaigning, but in his second term, gambling and extra-legal activities increased, which alienated the clergy. Maestri began to spend all his time running the Old Regulars, which he had fused with the Earl Long state-government organization. This alienated the uptown establishment.

  A story has always been told that Maestri entertained Franklin D. Roosevelt on his visit to the city by taking him to Antoine’s for dinner. There, they dined on Oysters Rockefeller. Proud of the city’s seafood, the articulate mayor asked the aristocratic president, “How ya like dem ersh-ters?”

  Spillways

  In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mississippi River threatened once again to divert its path, frightening New Orleanians. One threat of a diversion existed in a weak spot in the natural levee at a place called Bonnet Carré, where a crevasse had occurred more than once, carrying flood waters from the Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain. If it had not been stopped, it might have gone directly on to the Gulf by way of the lake, instead of continuing its twisting path for 130 miles southward.

  A second potential diversion was above Baton Rouge at a small town called Morganza on the west bank of the river. If the river had jumped its course there, it would have poured into the slot between the present Mississippi River levee and the ancient levee of Bayou Teche, a sluggish, swampy area twenty miles wide called the Atchafalaya River Basin, which flows slowly toward the Gulf. This was, by far, the most dangerous diversion the river could have taken, for if it would have strayed there, it would have stayed there, saving itself half the distance to the Gulf.