Delirious New Orleans

by Stephen Verderber

  Mardi Gras and the Commercial Vernacular Environment

  It is impossible to understand to any reasonable degree the inner life of New Orleans’s culture, geography, commercial vernacular and folk architecture, and patterns of land development without some knowledge of the underlying influence of Mardi Gras. Carnival’s influence has been profound since its earliest days, as an annual festival of paganism, and the built environment was to a large degree shaped by its rituals. The culture was wrapped around Mardi Gras. Its inner profundities extended far beyond social, racial, and political spectrums, and this culture and its influences were expressed in subtle and not-so-subtle ways in the urban and suburban landscape. Historically, Mardi Gras was premised on the perpetuation of racial and class inequalities, screened—masked—through a process in many ways brilliantly conceived and executed; it was a nomenclature based upon civic illusion, delusion, and folly (Fig. 4.6).

  How did New Orleans arrive at the confluence of natural and social vulnerabilities that were laid bare to the world by Katrina? It is a long and winding story, but here is one short version: Nearly two decades before New Orleans was founded in 1718, by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, Mardi Gras had become part of the local geography, for it was on that holiday (Fat Tuesday) in 1699 that Iberville rediscovered the Mississippi River and camped for the night on the embankment of a little bayou that he appropriately named Bayou du Mardi Gras—the first place-name in Louisiana. Early in the city’s history, French settlers celebrated Mardi Gras. When Governor William C. C. Claiborne inaugurated the American regime in New Orleans in 1803, he was impressed by the passionate love of the Creole population for dancing and holding masked balls. In the early nineteenth century, the Crescent City’s reputation as a carefree city was further enhanced. As early as 1837 the first organized masquerade parade in carriages took to the streets, where it was witnessed by a delighted crowd of spectators.18

  “The Missing Links” was the first parade float to be entirely constructed in New Orleans. Previously, the big masks and animal figures had been imported from France, but in 1873, local artisans found ways to make them stronger, and no doubt cheaper, and a new industry was born. The illustration depicts the interior of the “den” where carnival masks and costumes are being prepared for Mardi Gras in 1880 (Fig. 4.7).

  Mardi Gras is synonymous with New Orleans, and it occupies a permanent place in the American national consciousness. Since the mid-nineteenth century, travelers have participated in the city’s forbidden pleasures. The Pavlovian response of a conventioneer upon arriving, even today, is to rush toward the sultry commercial establishments of Bourbon Street. For Middle America, Mardi Gras, New Orleans, and its architectural and spatial experience endure as an escape destination from mainstream American Puritan traditions of solemnity, deferred gratification, and assiduous, undeterred self-actualization. To the casual observer, there is little distinction between the oldest Carnival parades, put on by the city’s social elite, and the newer extravaganzas, such as Orpheus, designed to entrance tourists. Behind the public spectacle of Carnival and the seeming chaos on the streets on Mardi Gras, and set against the architecture of the commercial establishments that line the parade routes, however, are rigid rituals and an articulated social structure (Fig. 4.8). It is a protocol defined by kinship, money, and strong familial affinities with neighborhoods, and one that has evolved over a century and a half.

  4.7: Frantically working to meet the deadline, Missing Links’ den, 1880.

  4.8: Waiting for a parade, Canal Street, 1880.

  New Orleans, through its history, has been profoundly contradictory. Its vernacular and folk built environment is largely expressive of the culture of Mardi Gras, with its peculiar social hierarchies, pockets of byzantine traditions, bawdiness, spectacle, and partiality to drama and the unexpected. The floats themselves are often a concoction of thematic innovation, political commentary, racism, and architectonic dexterity, such as two floats in the parade of the Krewe of Momus in 1878 (Figs. 4.9 and 4.10). Many of the more than thirty thousand active participants (preKatrina) who worked, often clandestinely, on the planning and staging of this annual festival were involved year-round. It was estimated to generate $150 million in economic activity in 2004. The civic-oriented events of Carnival extend over a four-month season, ranging from debutante balls and luncheons for Carnival royalty to a costume contest for drag queens and the chants of the Mardi Gras Indians.

  Carnival has endured amid the built environment of New Orleans in its current civic form since 1857, an eternity in a nation of disposable popular culture. In various guises, it extends back even further, at least to the days of French rule in Louisiana, and perhaps back to medieval and ancient pagan festivals.19 According to Carol Flake:

  The damp tropical heat, the permissive colonial regimes, the pomp-loving expatriate royalty, the human flotsam and jetsam washing up from the Mississippi, the enclaves of practical nuns and worldly priests, the pirates and prison escapees, the influx of Caribbean planters and slaves, the gens de couleur libres [free people of color], the floods, the fevers, the voodoo altars, the madams of Storyville, the ragtime professors, Louis Armstrong, the spastic bands, the shot glasses of absinthe, the spices in the market, the iron-lace balconies, the jazz funerals, the Mardi Gras Indians, Tennessee Williams … made new Orleans a place like no other in America. If carnival had not existed, surely New Orleanians would have invented it. Even the broad avenues of the city, divided by tree-lined neutral grounds, seem to have been designed with parades in mind.

  Sold up the river by the French, undefended by the Confederacy, New Orleans nevertheless never really gave in to its Yankee occupiers. Losses, retreats, disasters, plagues, decay, and pestilences did not bring more than passing clouds of gloom and pessimism to a city literally sinking, day by day, further below sea level … the permanent plague of locusts, the tourists, who flock to New Orleans to feed on its oddities, are also its last source of sustenance… . How can a city so ostensibly Catholic celebrate with such pagan gusto? How can a city so poor concoct such extravagant displays, year after year? How can a city with a majority black population so proudly proclaim the reign of bewigged white pseudo-royalty? … New Orleans is still a stratified city, constrained by secrets and social codes and double lives … it is (still) a crushingly poor provincial outpost burdened by corruption and a petrified elite… . Parades, parties, spices, and even music aren’t enough to save the soul of a city, although those things may make a city worth saving.20

  For many, Carnival is sacred, a virtual religion whose rituals cannot be tampered with without injuring the city’s fun-loving spirit and image. For others, however, it is “the altar of the golden calf, the glittering idol of the idle rich, blinding the city to its sins and shortcomings.”21 In 1992, these undercur-rents erupted into open confrontations over the adoption of the city’s Mardi Gras AntiDiscrimination Ordinance. Dorothy Mae Taylor, a black city councilwoman, introduced a long, complicated ordinance that, in effect, prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or religion in Carnival organizations. The initiative garnered much momentum in the black community and stirred much resentment and defensiveness among the city’s white minority. In 1992, New Orleanians for the first time openly faced the realities of race and class prejudice that had remained concealed by the grand civic and architectural façades of Carnival.22

  4.9: A float from the Momus parade, mocking African Americans, 1878.

  4.10: A float from the Momus parade, mocking General Orville E. Babcock, 1878.

  4.11: Rex parade on Mardi Gras Day, 1905.

  Just one month before, David Duke, a former Klansman and something of a cryptic neo-Nazi, was soundly defeated in a nationally covered race for governor of Louisiana by Edwin Edwards. The brief, heady alliance of blacks and whites that defeated Duke, holding him to less than 15 percent of the vote in the city of New Orleans, proved to be an illusory bond. The images evoked in the campaign were reminiscent of those of
the Klu Klux Klan, and the KKK itself was eerily reminiscent of the maskers of the most elite krewes, dating from long before the Rex parade in 1905 (Fig. 4.11). During both the Duke campaign and the intense debate over the Mardi Gras antidiscrimination ordinance, blacks spoke out angrily.

  Privately, whites threatened to “secede” from Carnival rather than comply with the new ordinance. There was something inevitable about this symbolic showdown, whose roots could be traced back to the Louisiana Purchase, the Napoleonic sellout that set Creoles against the Yankee newcomers; to the slavery era, which reinforced the multitiered caste system in New Orleans; to the Reconstruction years, which fueled provincial paranoia and preceded the golden era of Carnival; to the civil rights movement, which challenged the tenets of exclusion; and to the Reagan and Bush years, which left New Orleans, like other cities in America, resource starved. The conflict over Carnival was symptomatic of larger forces reshaping the city as well as pulling it apart. David Duke and the divisive governor’s race had reminded New Orleanians that despite their romantic self-sense of isolation, they were still living in the South. New Orleans’s well-preserved bubble of civic-sanctioned escapism had been broken. And like the rush of Katrina’s storm surge through broken levees, nothing could hold it back.23

  4.12: Rex parade on Mardi Gras Day, 1952.

  Trouble and care, the two worst enemies of Carnival, and of life in New Orleans in general, finally caught up to present-day realities.24 New Orleans had always been a haven for odd enclaves and subcultures. It remained a place of last resort, a place for restive spirits, for those seeking freedom from ill-fitting identities elsewhere and the bland Wal-Mart milieu of faceless, placeless mainstream America. The city’s elusive, soulful essence, having survived for so long amid all the strangeness and decadence, remained rare and fragile.25 The word carnival itself is derived from the Latin carnelevare, first appearing in Roman Catholic Church writings in the year AD 965. Literally, carnelevare means to lift up, or remove, flesh or meat. In Italian, the term evolved into a hailing of meat and a letting go of meat. In English there is a tie with the word carnivore. The Catholic Dictionary insists that the word was derived from carnem levare, meaning the taking away of flesh or meat, in this case at the start of Lent.26

  There is really no architectural or geographic “center” to Carnival in the strictest civic sense, though its rituals are played out in private clubs, restaurant backrooms, and the krewes’ dens, the places where the floats are constructed. Before the newer sections of the city were built, the Vieux Carré, Garden District, and Uptown provided the main civic stage and architectural backdrop, linked by the main parade route, St. Charles Avenue, its gently winding streetcar line running along its green neutral ground.27 For their part, krewes do all they can to perpetuate myths, including using mystifying themes for their parades, such as the theme of the Rex parade in 1952, “Panorama through the Magic Sugar Egg.” The float depicted was titled “The Bees Build the Magic Camera” (Fig. 4.12).

  By the 1990s, Mardi Gras, with the built environment as its stage, had become, for cynics, the epitome of decadence, snobbery, dispassion, and thinly veiled racism. Moreover, it was increasingly becoming a financial drain on a city with a structurally inadequate tax base that had reduced its 128 public schools to a shabby and forlorn architectural tradition.28 Above all, to critics, the annual event was the cause of the city’s malaise, not merely a symptom, and it symbolized everything that was wrong with New Orleans. In truth, the Mardi Gras syndrome had largely perpetuated, architecturally or otherwise, a fatalistic, escapist view of the city’s prospects and, by tragic default, a general disinclination toward alleviating the plight of the less fortunate inhabitants in the less fortunate neighborhoods.29

  Let’s Have Another World’s Fair

  Taken further, this illusion or delusion was rationalized by accepting tourism as the best economic hope for the city’s future. In reality, the city had become paralyzed by its byzantine political power structure and by the bifurcation of competing constituencies across its various neighborhoods, e.g., Uptown versus New Orleans East, Lakeview versus the Lower Ninth Ward. These competing political interests tended to cancel one another out. Tourism emerged as the preeminent civic income generator that could conceal the structural defects in the economy and political process. And this is precisely what the deliriously optimistic proponents of the 1984 World’s Fair emphasized in their arguments for holding the exposition during an era when such events had already become passé—little more than follies—from an economic-development or technological standpoint, and a huge challenge to stage without any promise of financial success. As noted, the prospect of success proved to be illusory.

  Past world’s fairs, such as Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition in 1933, had celebrated the triumph of technology. More recent fairs had touted geodesic domes and towering “needles” with observation platforms at their pinnacles. But the 1984 New Orleans fair was a postmodern tribute to the city’s past and its culture of decadence, escapism, and fatalism. One entered the gate’s portals—a threshold guarded by scantily clad mermaids amid alligator figures. The main attraction was the Wonderwall, which resembled a frozen Mardi Gras street procession. With its scaffolded mélange of turrets, towers, figurines, and gilded cherubs, the Wonderwall, designed by Charles Moore, the late renowned architect, with Perez Architects, came off as a theatrical, postmodernist parody of Carnival. This wall, with its twenty-foot-high pelicans, appeared to be leaping toward a nearby giant Ferris wheel (Fig. 4.13). The wall was the fair’s most unifying element, the pin that held the toy together. Its main theme was literature and theatre—appearance versus reality—illusion and folly. It ran for three blocks to Bayou Plaza. The content was highly ironic: brightly colored twists on local icons and local urban myths. The double entendre inherent in the Wonderwall represented a midpoint between classical references and pop-culture references that anyone could relate to on some level. For example, the wall was punctuated with royal palms, but here, reality was inverted, for the palms were constructed of concentric layers of green metal tubing crowned with potted palmettos that appeared to be growing out of the crown. Alive, yes; true palms, no. At night it was far more effective than during the day, when the raw scaffolding was spatially overpronounced and dominant.

  The fair was forced to file for bankruptcy, and many vendors, including Perez, the lead architectural firm, went bankrupt (it has since rebounded under new management). However, the cloud had a silver economic lining: the Warehouse District, the neighborhood surrounding the fair site, entered a twenty-year boom period of adaptive use conversion to thousands of apartment and condos. Its future appears even brighter in Katrina’s aftermath.

  In the end, the 1984 World’s Fair functioned to perpetuate the city’s Mardi Gras syndrome because the poorest neighborhoods were completely left out of the civic-improvement equation yet again. Concocting yet another tourist attraction seemed to be the best solution that civic leaders could devise to solve the city’s chronic problems. Unfortunately, the more tourism was promoted as an industry, the less chance there was for fundamental economic structural diversification. In one national survey after another, New Orleans scored near the bottom for attractiveness as measured by CEOS asked to judge the quality of life in the nation’s major cities.30

  By the 1990s, many neighborhoods were changing, and the poor ones were becoming even poorer and more desperate. The chasm between the haves and the have-nots became significantly wider than it had been only ten years earlier. How did this affect architecture? The ornate houses of the haves, in the best (almost always white) neighborhoods, had not been designed for the intense level of protection from intruders that was now needed. Most Uptown mansions, for instance, with their generous verandas, French doors, and tall windows, had not been built for this new age of heightened security. Visual screening from, and surveillance of, the street from within one’s home became a prerequisite in architectural renovations and additions in
the neighborhoods now under siege. It was as if the middle class had gone underground. The aforementioned checkerboard that characterized the city’s traditional pattern of development, a crisscross pattern of black-white enclaves within approximately one-square-mile superblocks, further exacerbated the problem.

  4.13: Wonderwall at the World’s Fair, 1984.

  Not surprisingly, there were black civic leaders who shared many of these concerns, and who had similarly taken to arming themselves in their own declining neighborhoods. Some resided in the Lower Ninth Ward or in the Pigeontown section of Carrollton, where crime worsened dramatically in the 1990s. The guardians of African American culture, concerned about personal safety and neighborhood cohesiveness, were just as nostalgic as whites for the vanishing social order of the past. In an interview conducted at the time, a prominent member of the African American community, Edgar Chase III, known as Dooky Chase, mused:

  People in New Orleans are not looking for a savior. Just someone to bring the city back to where it was—the city in their memory. In the Inter-Business Council, we talk a lot about keeping the essence of the city alive. The architecture of our buildings, the beauty of the people, our way of celebrating is inborn. When I was a child, people would sit on the stoops every evening. You’d take a bath and come out on the porch until mosquitoes made you come inside. You’d turn on the fan and cool things off. Life centered around your neighborhood. We’ve lost that idea of being safe and free in the neighborhood … we’ve lost the days of the sno-ball man, the watermelon man. We want to be a world-class city, but we have to be careful not to change our culture. We’re different. We’re not as plastic as other places. We want to be hospitable … we like to sin, but we don’t want to be known as sinners. Sticking to our roots is how we should grow and evolve—not trying to be like someone else… . Mardi Gras was never a civil rights thing for black people. Maybe the other 364 days. But on Mardi Gras, we really didn’t care. Mardi Gras was the one day when people accept one another and put down all disputes.31