Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

by Gary Krist

  It was to be one of the few times in his life that Tom Anderson did not get his way in the local justice system. Appearing before a judge in Civil District Court, Anderson accused his wife of “excesses of cruel treatment and outrages” and of threatening to shoot him with a loaded pistol. Contesting the suit, Catherine denied ever threatening her husband, and in turn cited a few transgressions of his, among them “compelling her at times to perform various duties such as scrubbing, washing, and cooking, refusing to permit a servant to perform said duties.” She further accused him of using “the most profane and vulgar language” toward her, of “humiliating her in the presence of his employees,” and of “treating her in an outrageous manner, for which she could never forgive him.” And as if this weren’t enough, she rounded off her case with a whopping revelation: Catherine Anderson alleged that she was now pregnant with child. As a mother-to-be, then, she was entitled to support in the amount of $100 per month in perpetuity, along with a fair portion of Tom’s existing assets.

  Whether Catherine’s alleged pregnancy was real or merely a ploy to earn the judge’s sympathy (there appears to be no record of any child ever being born), it got the job done. The court ultimately ruled in the wife’s favor, refusing the divorce and holding the husband responsible for his wife’s continued upkeep. Anderson began an appeal, but meanwhile he had to suffer the indignity of having court assessors rummage through his home and businesses, inventorying all of his assets—right down to the two-dollar keg of pickles in the cellar of his restaurant.

  It’s possible that one point of contention in his marriage was Anderson’s growing association with the brothel madam Josie Lobrano—now calling herself Josie Arlington. Rumors of a romantic relationship between the two would persist for decades, but there’s no real evidence that they were ever anything more than close friends and business partners. Most likely Tom recognized in Josie a kindred spirit—another no-nonsense pragmatist with a determination to succeed in one of the few ways available in 1890s New Orleans to persons not born to wealth and privilege.

  For Josie, too, was now a businessperson on the rise. The four or five years since the killing of her brother had been transformative for her. She’d successfully shed the taint of her former rough life and started out anew, just as she had vowed to do back in 1891. She’d taken up with a new paramour, John Thomas “Tom” Brady, an easygoing, mild-mannered clerk in the City Treasurer’s Office, much closer to her own age than Phillip Lobrano had been. Several months after the shooting, she and Brady had gone off on an extended vacation to Hot Springs, Arkansas. There they’d witnessed firsthand the lush life offered by the city’s celebrated Arlington Hotel, a luxurious spa where the well heeled could take a water cure amid the trappings of Gilded Age opulence.

  For a former orphaned child once forced by her aunt to sell apples on street corners (only to be beaten unmercifully if she didn’t bring back $1.50 a day), this was a revelation, a potent vision of a very different and desirable kind of life. Josie came back to New Orleans resolved to re-create a bit of that elegance at her Customhouse Street brothel. She changed the name of her establishment to the “Chateau Lobrano d’Arlington” and proceeded to fill it with “gracious, amiable foreign girls who would be at home only to gentlemen of taste and refinement.” She even began advertising her high-toned new offerings in the newspapers: “Society is graced by the presence of a bona-fide baroness, direct from the Court of St. Petersburg,” ran one announcement in the Mascot. “The baroness is at present residing incog. at the Chateau Lobrano d’Arlington, and is known as La Belle Stewart.” True, the alleged baroness was soon exposed as nothing more than “a hoochy-koochy dancer and circus specialist,” but the tone that Josie was striving for was evident nonetheless.

  Perhaps in part to finance her wholesale image renovation, Josie Arlington sold an interest in the Chateau to her friend Tom Anderson, whose Rampart Street restaurant stood just around the corner. Whether this was Anderson’s first foray into the brothel business is uncertain, but it would not be his last. The saloon and brothel businesses, after all, were natural complements. And it wasn’t long before the bar at 112 Rampart Street became a popular stopping-off place for clients heading to or from the Chateau at 142 Customhouse. To cement the association in the mind of the public, Tom eventually renamed his restaurant the Arlington. Soon both establishments were prospering mightily, enriching both principals and even allowing the genial Tom Brady (a friend of Anderson’s in addition to being Arlington’s kept man) to quit his job at the City Treasurer’s Office and invest in a local pool hall.

  So for Tom Anderson, Josie Arlington, and their associates in vice, things weren’t going too badly in the New Orleans of the mid-1890s. Business was good, despite a nationwide depression, and harassments from police were minimal. But the forces of reform had not been idle, and the outlook for the city’s vice industries was about to change significantly. A new and more energetic reform administration had been elected to office in 1896, and they were ready to ratchet up the battle to clean up the city. Under the leadership of Mayor Walter C. Flower, this new administration set its sights in particular on the spread of vice and crime into respectable neighborhoods all around the city. And their proposed solution to the problem was a uniquely practical one. Recognizing that any attempt to abolish vice entirely was doomed to failure (at least in New Orleans), they hoped instead to regulate and isolate the trade. And they would do it by moving vice out of the central city and the better residential neighborhoods, into a part of town where few respectable people would come into contact with it. Drawing boundaries to isolate vice and crime was the new progressive answer of the day, and it would ultimately change the culture of New Orleans in ways that no one could anticipate.

  FOR a place with such a deeply entrenched culture of prostitution, of course, any scheme to segregate the practice would not be easy to implement. New Orleans’ reputation as a center of sin and perdition had dogged the city virtually since its founding in 1718. Established in that year under a temporary charter to the private Company of the West, La Nouvelle-Orléans was from the beginning a community filled with rough, ungovernable men and women of dubious morality. John Law, the notorious Scottish adventurer who had contracted with France “to establish, thirty leagues up the river, a burg which should be called New Orleans,” needed to populate his new town as quickly as possible, and he wasn’t overly fastidious about how he accomplished the task. According to one early historian, “Disorderly soldiers, black sheep of distinguished families, paupers, prostitutes, political suspects, friendless strangers, unsophisticated peasants straying into Paris—all were kidnapped, herded, and shipped under guard to fill the emptiness of Louisiana.” French jails and hospitals were ransacked for potential colonists, while men with an opportunistic bent were enticed with promises of free transportation, free land, and the prospect of fabulous riches derived from a region of unimaginable abundance. To deal with a chronic shortage of women, prospective wives were also imported from the Old Country, among them eighty-eight inmates from a Parisian house of correction known as La Salpêtrière. As a result, the town was—within a decade of its birth—already famous as a den of iniquity, a place “without religion, without justice, without discipline, without order, and without police.”

  By the latter half of the eighteenth century, New Orleans had polished away some of its rougher frontier edges, and had even attained a patina of French refinement in parts. But the city retained its notoriety for vice and lawlessness. Subsequent political upheavals did little to change this. In 1762, to avoid surrendering New Orleans and western Louisiana to Britain after the Seven Years’ War (known in North America as the French and Indian War), King Louis XV secretly ceded these territories to his Spanish cousin, King Carlos III. But although Spain took political and military control of Louisiana for the rest of the century, the Spaniards sent over few additional colonists; as a result, New Orleans remained distinctly French—and libertine—in character. (Spain d
id, however, rebuild much of the central city after two devastating fires, which is why the architecture of the “French Quarter” is actually Spanish.) In 1800, the whole territory reverted to France, but by then the mother country’s ardor for its unruly American colony had cooled. Three years later, Napoleon sold New Orleans and the whole Louisiana territory to the United States for the sum of $15 million. Residents had no say in this matter, and were not at all pleased, but nothing could be done. And so, in 1803, the old Gallic metropolis became American—at least politically.

  The population explosion set off by the Louisiana Purchase took New Orleans vice to new levels of visibility. Tenderloin districts grew up along the busy waterfront, where rowdy flatboatmen from the American interior, carrying cargoes downriver to the newly unrestricted port, indulged in sprees of gambling, drinking, and “wholehearted wallowing in the fleshpots.” Soon the rise of the Mississippi steamboat culture was bringing a somewhat higher class of scalawag to the Crescent City—in the form of confidence men and professional riverboat gamblers. Gambling, in fact, became something of an obsession for New Orleanians of every class. And although the Louisiana State legislature, occasionally dominated by conservative elements from the state’s Anglo-Protestant north, passed various anti-gambling laws over the years, they were—in New Orleans, at least—widely ignored.

  Efforts to control prostitution were likewise ineffectual. By the mid-1800s, prosperous Anglo-American planters and merchants had built entire neighborhoods of capacious, colonnaded mansions in the “American” part of the city—the Garden District, upriver from Canal Street. Here they hoped to set themselves apart from the neighborhoods of downtown “Creoles” (a term that at this point meant the offspring—white, black, or mixed-race—of French or other foreign-born parents). To keep their enclaves free of sin, efforts were made to regulate prostitution by city statute. But thanks to lax enforcement over the years, the problem of “vice contamination” in respectable neighborhoods did not go away, and in fact by 1890 seemed worse than ever.

  But now, with the election of the new reform government of 1896, city officials were determined to make vice segregation work. Just after the election, a newly installed alderman named Sidney Story took it on himself to devise a way to protect “the pure and noble womanhood” of New Orleans from this unwanted contamination. “That vice should be allowed to flaunt its scarlet drapery in the face of virtue,” as he would later opine to the Item, “was not only a blotch upon our escutcheon, but a constant menace to the moral health of the community.” So Story developed a plan that would make prostitution illegal everywhere in the city except in a certain eighteen-block area, a neighborhood that was already rife with vice establishments. In this way, sin would be drawn out of prominent and respectable parts of town and relegated to places where, he believed, it would do the least harm to decent sensibilities.

  This was not an entirely new idea. Story had seen similar schemes in several European cities during a tour of the Continent some years earlier. And even some American cities had experimented with officially tolerated vice districts. What made Story’s plan unique, however, was the explicitness of the toleration and the specificity of its geographical limits. And since the proposed ordinance did not actually legalize prostitution within this area (but merely made it illegal everywhere else), it would be able to survive the inevitable court challenges it was bound to inspire.

  Story’s innovative new idea was widely applauded by the city’s business reformers in particular; they hoped that isolating vice in this way would improve New Orleans’ reputation and thus make it easier to attract Northern capital investment. Even the conservative Daily Picayune lauded the proposal, looking forward to a time when the perpetrators of vice and immorality would operate only in “obscure neighborhoods, where decent people will not constantly be offended by their open and shameless flaunting.” The city’s so-called moral reformers—the clergymen, bluestockings, and others who would rather have outlawed prostitution entirely—were naturally less pleased. But even they seemed willing at least to give the new proposal a chance.

  The area designated as the so-called restricted district (though it soon would be known as Storyville, much to the alderman’s annoyance) was located behind the Vieux Carré, downriver of Canal Street. This was a mixed-race working-class neighborhood that contained only one church—the Union Chapel, a Methodist Episcopal establishment with an exclusively African American congregation that lacked any political clout. A second, much smaller area uptown of Canal Street (eventually known as Black Storyville) was also designated, though unofficially, in order to forestall a wholesale exodus of black prostitutes already entrenched there. Known prostitutes in all other parts of town would be ordered to move to the restricted districts by a certain deadline; if they did not comply, notices of eviction—signed by Mayor Flower himself—would be sent and acted upon if necessary.

  On January 29, 1897, Alderman Story’s ordinance was passed by the city council (an amended version would be passed again in July). And so, on the first day of 1898, Storyville would officially be born.

  Long before that date, of course, brothel landlords and other vice entrepreneurs scrambled to establish beachheads within the confines of the new district. And one of the first among them was Tom Anderson. Always well connected to sources of insider information, he moved quickly to acquire a choice property in Storyville-to-be. He bought the Fair Play Saloon, a large restaurant located on the corner of Basin Street and Customhouse, right at the point where most visitors would be entering the district, and made plans to renovate it into a showplace. Josie Arlington, too, acquired a lavish property on Basin Street, just a few doors down from Anderson’s. The vast commercial potential of operating within a legally tolerated vice district was not lost on either of the two entrepreneurs, and they were determined to take full advantage of the opportunity.

  Anderson in particular saw the coming change as propitious. Until now, he’d had to operate his more questionable enterprises on the gray margins of the law, subject to the whim of any overzealous police captain or city politician eager to make a show of cracking down on vice and petty crime. Now Anderson would be able to operate with the explicit blessing of the authorities. To him, it seemed like an ideal arrangement. Maybe this new crop of reformers wasn’t so bad. With enemies like this, who needed friends?

  And so Anderson began to lay his plans. He could set up shop in a bigger way in the new district. He could call in some political favors from his friends at the Choctaw Club—where the Ring political organization held court—and get himself elected to some position that might prove useful. And maybe he could even find some way of getting rid of his unwanted second spouse. For a man with an entrepreneurial streak and a flexible sense of propriety, the possibilities in this new scheme were virtually endless.

  As for Alderman Story, Mayor Flower, and the other reformers, they too had good reason to expect that their segregated vice district would be a success, lending a semblance of order to a chaotic aspect of the city’s life that had resisted all previous attempts at regulation. What they did not anticipate, however, was quite how wildly successful their well-meaning social experiment would become.

  BUT THERE WAS ANOTHER PHENOMENON BREWING in those areas soon to be set aside by the city fathers as enclaves of sin. At first, no one—certainly not those city fathers themselves—would recognize it as anything significant or worthy of notice. But for the one-quarter of New Orleanians designated in the census as “Negro,” the phenomenon would come to be very important indeed—a way of coping with the changes around them, a way of holding their own, of asserting their identity in a time of adversity.

  The new sound was born sometime in the mid-1890s, in the working-class black clubs and honky-tonks near the poor Uptown neighborhood soon to be known as Black Storyville. You could hear it in the venues on and around South Rampart Street—at Dago Tony’s, the Red Onion, Odd Fellows Hall—or farther afield in the “Negro dives” on the other
side of Canal. For a time, the music was known only to those who flocked to such places, the so-called ratty people—“the good-time, earthy people,” as one musician of the day defined them. But before too long, the new sound was also being heard in parks, on street corners, in dance halls, and in places well beyond the confines of the city’s destitute black neighborhoods. And that, naturally, was when the trouble started.

  No one ever recorded the New Orleans musicians of the 1890s, so it’s difficult to say for sure that it was a young Uptown cornetist named Buddy Bolden who first played the music later known as jazz. Certainly many others—black, mixed-race, and even white—would eventually lay claim to the distinction. But many of his contemporary musicians believed that Bolden was the man who started it all, and to hear them tell the story, he was extraordinary: “That boy could make women jump out the window,” one of his early listeners said. “He had a moan in his cornet that went all through you.” For many people in New Orleans, accustomed to the straighter, more schooled styles of music that preceded it, the Bolden sound was a revelation: “I’d never heard anything like that before,” one convert would later say. “I’d played ‘legitimate’ stuff. But this, it was something that pulled me in. They got me up on the [band]stand and I played with them. After that I didn’t play legitimate so much.”

  Charles Joseph “Buddy” Bolden, like so many of the jazzmen who would follow him, grew up poor and without much in the way of material prospects. The grandson of slaves, he was born on September 6, 1877, in a small house on Howard Street in Uptown New Orleans. As neighborhoods go, it was not a very healthy place to live, perched on the edge of a fetid and foul-smelling canal. By the time Buddy was six years old, he had lost his father, one sister, and his grandmother to various illnesses. Buddy and his sister Cora moved around with their mother, Alice, for the next few years, probably staying with relatives and friends, then finally settling in a small shotgun cottage at 385 First Street. This was a tough but integrated area (not unusual in the New Orleans of the time), populated mostly by German and Irish laborers who seemed to have little trouble getting along with their black neighbors. Mrs. Bolden made a modest living there as a laundress, earning enough to allow her two young children to stay in school without working themselves.