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

by Gary Krist

  HELPLESS as they were to control crime in the Italian enclaves of the city, the New Orleans police were having better luck implementing the reformers’ campaign to crack down on Storyville. The passage of two new laws significantly expanded the arsenal that could be brought to bear against the libertine practices of the Tenderloin. In 1910, the city council passed a bill amending the original Storyville ordinance, strengthening restrictions against lewd dances in brothels and beefing up penalties for all other infractions. State laws passed that same year toughened the prohibition against interracial concubinage and other forms of contact across the color line. Though the state legislature declined to put a strict definition on the term “colored,” reformers like Philip Werlein hoped to use the new laws to put the Basin Street octoroon houses out of business for good.

  Meanwhile, Gay-Shattuck was also being used more effectively as a weapon for reform. Shortly before Mardi Gras in 1911, Tom Anderson’s persistent scourge—Dr. S. A. Smith, superintendent of Louisiana’s Anti-Saloon League—launched a campaign against that most cherished of Storyville traditions, the French ball. On the day before Anderson’s Ball of the Two Well Known Gentlemen, the district attorney, under heavy pressure from reformers, announced that the provisions of Gay-Shattuck would be strictly enforced. In other words, if women were present at the ball, no liquor could be served, and vice versa. According to the announcement, “No subterfuges [would] be tolerated.”

  For once, the mayor of Storyville was effectively stymied. The day after the ball, the Daily Picayune’s headline was triumphant: OLD CARNIVAL ORGY CURBED, WITH NOT A DRINK IN SIGHT. According to the paper’s report, all attendees had been searched for contraband bottles and flasks as they entered Odd Fellows Hall. And while the ball did go on, the atmosphere had been decidedly sober—or “sadly lonesome,” as the paper reported. Anderson’s other bane, Rev. J. Benjamin Lawrence, could barely contain his glee. “Every lover of decency and morality,” he told his congregation that Sunday, could rejoice that these “debauching revels … will [soon] pass out of existence.”

  But the hardest blow to Storyville would come two years later—in March of 1913—with the culmination of the so-called Dance-Hall Wars on Franklin Street. The Parker brothers had been gearing up for a confrontation for months beforehand, importing various thugs and mob enforcers from New York, ostensibly to work as waiters in the Tuxedo dance hall. Most hard-bitten of the lot was one Charles Harrison, known to police departments throughout the Northeast as “Gyp the Blood.” An enforcer of some reputation, Harrison was fleeing a potential murder charge in New York when he showed up in Storyville and started working at the Tuxedo. And it was soon clear that the Parkers had hired him to do more than wait tables.

  In the early-morning hours of Easter Monday 1913, James Enright, a waiter at Billy Phillips’s 102 Ranch, walked into the Tuxedo with two friends. Because of the Sunday Closing Law, there had been no music at the dance hall that night, but now that midnight was past, the Tuxedo’s bar was apparently open for business. Enright—who resented the newly imported crop of servers at the Tuxedo, who were allegedly working for scab wages—got into an argument with the cashier. Harry Parker intervened, ejecting Enright and his friends and thrashing them soundly in the process. As he left the waiter lying in the street, Parker allegedly made some comments about his boss that were highly uncomplimentary to his character.

  When Phillips heard about the fight, he immediately headed over to the Tuxedo. Unarmed and still in his shirtsleeves, he walked into the bar and began verbally abusing the Parkers, berating them for their rough handling of his employee. A heated argument followed, but before matters could get out of hand, Phillips was dragged out of the dance hall by his friend and fellow saloonkeeper Tony Battistina.

  Back at the 102 Ranch, Phillips apparently calmed down over the next few hours. By four A.M. (when there was still plenty of action in Storyville, even on the morning after Easter), Phillips was feeling conciliatory. Still unarmed, he again walked across the street to the Tuxedo, with a number of friends and curious bystanders in his wake. The Parkers were still there, along with some customers and staff. Phillips stepped up to the bar and threw down a dollar bill. “Come on, give us a drink,” he said. “We’ll see about the fight later.”

  At this point, Gyp the Blood, who had slipped out the establishment’s back door at Phillips’s reappearance, came in the Tuxedo’s front door with a nickel-plated revolver in his hand. Creeping up behind Phillips, he thrust the barrel of the gun against the saloonkeeper’s ribs. “Come on, you bastard,” he said. “Let’s have it out.” Then he fired three or four shots into Phillips’s torso at point-blank range.

  The ensuing melee of gunfire would prove to be impossible for police or the courts to sort out. Twenty eyewitnesses would later testify to what happened, but there would be no meaningful consensus on who shot whom in the chaotic moments after Gyp’s assassination of Billy Phillips. Certainly Harry and Charles Parker had both fired some shots, but others—never identified, probably friends of the victim—had clearly been firing back. When the gunfire finally ended, Phillips and Harry Parker were dead, while Gyp the Blood, Charles Parker, and a black porter named Willie Henderson were wounded. Ultimately, only one person—Gyp, aka Charles Harrison—would be tried for murder. But thanks to the highly contradictory nature of the eyewitness testimony, the case would end in a hung jury, allowing Harrison to go free.

  For the fate of Storyville, the night of the Tuxedo shooting would prove to be a decisive turning point. Respectable New Orleans had now officially had enough. In the wake of the Easter Night melee, amid enormous public outrage, Superintendent of Police James Reynolds closed down all of Storyville on Monday. Some places would be allowed to reopen on Tuesday, but the dance halls were to remain shut indefinitely. “As long as the operators of these resorts were willing to conduct them properly,” Reynolds told reporters, “the police had no objection, and the resorts were tolerated. But now that they have shown a disposition to operate outside of the law, it is evident that the public has become disgusted. I have determined to close all places where men and women of the underworld congregate in nightly orgies.”

  The order was likely to hit the economy of Storyville hard. But Reynolds was unequivocal. At noon on Monday, March 24, he issued an order to Captain Leroy of the Fourth Precinct: “You will at once take up all permits of dance halls in your precinct, send them to this office, and close up at once all [such establishments] in your precinct.” The glory days of a wide-open and thriving Storyville, it seemed, were about to end.

  IN THE MONTHS FOLLOWING THE KILLINGS AT THE Tuxedo, the shuttering of the Storyville dance halls created a detrimental ripple effect that was felt throughout the District. With fewer customers coming to the Tenderloin to dance—and many others frightened away by the neighborhood’s worsening reputation for crime and violence—businesses of all kinds suffered, and a much more staid and sedate atmosphere descended on Franklin Street. “New Orleans seems to have put the kibosh on the bunny hug, grizzly bear, turkey trot, Texas Tommy, and other fastidious creations,” the Daily Picayune reported in its March 30 edition. “In the place of the dance halls which once did such tremendous business, cabarets have been effectively established, [with] tables and chairs taking up all the available space once used for dancing. Now, instead of noisy Negro bands, the low whining of half-tuned string instruments and the strumming of a piano are heard.”

  This dampening of spirit was exacerbated by an increased police presence in and around the District, as well as a greater tendency among police to actually enforce the restrictions of Gay-Shattuck and other laws. Sunday closing was no longer regarded as a mere suggestion, and cafés that used to employ a female singer were now forbidden to do so. Only one proprietor seemed immune to the stricter enforcements. “It is passing strange,” one disgruntled competitor complained to the Picayune, “that Tom Anderson should be allowed to have women entertainers and we are barred from having them. He is like
the rest of us, except, of course you know, he has a political pull, and they won’t touch Tom. He’s too strong.”

  But even the all-powerful mayor of Storyville couldn’t do much to halt the District’s slide. In the months after the Parker-Phillips shootout, the number of prostitutes working in the Tenderloin slipped to just seven hundred. Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall began employing only eight women regularly, while half of the cribs on Villere and Robertson Streets became vacant. Meanwhile, prices were being cut all along Basin Street. By 1916, the cost of a fifteen-minute romp at Josie Arlington’s palace had fallen to one dollar even.

  The city’s musicians were feeling the pinch as well. Jazz bands reduced the number of players in their rosters, replacing their guitarist, bassist, and violinist with a single pianist to back up soloists. With fewer gigs available, many jazzmen were forced to go back to their day jobs. Even after the dance halls reopened in 1914, when New Orleans caught the tango fever that had swept through much of the country, behavior in the halls was tightly controlled. In the so-called Tango Belt—a stretch of Rampart Street in the French Quarter where many of the District’s dance halls had moved—Superintendent Reynolds announced strict prohibitions on all vulgar forms of the dance, insisting that there be “daylight between the dancers” and no lewd “snake-wriggling” of the shoulders and hips. Violators were promptly arrested, sometimes in droves. The effect on the city’s nightlife was sobering. According to the Item, Reynolds “had closed down the lid so tight in the ‘belt’ that the music was no more than a dirge for the gaiety departed, and a lot of young men in New Orleans were keeping their money out of the beer pots and wassail bowls.”

  Some musicians, responding to the worsening employment picture, began to look for opportunities elsewhere. Several members of the Tuxedo dance-hall band—including Freddie Keppard and George Baquet—reorganized as the nucleus of a new group called the Original Creole Band. In August of 1914, under the leadership of bassist Bill Johnson, they left New Orleans and began touring the vaudeville circuit, ending with an extended stay in Los Angeles. Others followed their lead over the next few years. Jelly Roll Morton, for instance, who had already been spending much of his time on the road, began finding new opportunities—and more receptive audiences—in Chicago, New York, and California.

  White bands also began heeding the call from other cities. In late 1914, the vaudeville dance team of Frisco and McDermott performed in New Orleans. After their show, they stopped by the Club Creole and heard a white jazz band led by trombonist Tom Brown. “Boy, listen to that music; what a band!” Loretta McDermott allegedly told her partner. “C’mon, Joe, let’s go. What rhythm!” They found the band’s loose, syncopated beat ideal for their style of dancing. According to jazz legend, when they returned to Chicago, they convinced the owner of Lamb’s Café in the Loop to bring the band north. And although accounts differ on the details, what’s known for sure is that Tom Brown’s Band left New Orleans in May of 1915 with a six-week contract to play at Lamb’s. They were an instant hit, and soon the exciting new music from New Orleans, which was finally being referred to by the name “jass” or “jazz,” was revolutionizing the sound of popular entertainment in the Second City.

  Another white New Orleans band went north a few months later. In December of 1915, Nick LaRocca (the cornetist whose disapproving father had destroyed his first two instruments with an ax) was playing in one of Jack Laine’s “ballyhoo bands” at the corner of Canal and Royal, advertising a prizefight. A visiting Chicago café owner named Harry James heard them and was deeply impressed by the young man “pointing his cornet skyward and blowing to the point of apoplexy.” James approached Laine afterward and asked if he might be interested in taking his band north to Chicago. Laine claimed that he was too busy, but he advised James to go hear LaRocca perform that night at the Haymarket Café with another band, led by drummer Johnny Stein. The Chicagoan liked what he heard there, too, and soon “Stein’s Dixie Jass Band” had a contract to open the Booster’s Club in Chicago in early 1916. Word was getting out, and the diaspora of the Crescent City’s musical talent was now under way.

  Not that those who remained behind were entirely idle. In some cases, the emigration of talent just meant a reshuffling of personnel in existing bands. When Keppard and Baquet decamped to California, for instance, their places in the popular New Olympia band were soon filled by Joe Oliver and Sidney Bechet. And there was always a new crop of younger jazzmen to fill the artistic vacuum. Trombonist Kid Ory, whose band was now playing full-time in the city after their move from LaPlace, was proving to be especially popular—not only among black audiences but also among many young whites, who liked their more polished style of jazz. Once, at a gig for whites at the Gymnasium, Ory’s band played opposite one of John Robichaux’s more established “straight” ensembles and earned a larger share of the applause. Afterward, Robichaux offered Ory a job, saying, “I like the way you play.”

  “I like the way you play, too,” Ory replied smartly. “But I’m not going to break up my band. It’s too late. You had your day.”

  Ory was apparently much more impressed by a certain child cornetist from the Colored Waif’s Home brass band, whom everyone in town had been talking about. Ory first heard “Little Louis” Armstrong at the Labor Day parade in late 1913, and he couldn’t believe that such a young boy could be so accomplished a player. “You’re doing a good job,” Ory told him at the parade. “You’re going to be all right someday, you keep that up.”

  For Armstrong, this praise from one of New Orleans’ top jazzmen was utterly thrilling. The boy had had no easy time of it during his stay at the Waif’s Home, at least in the beginning, before he’d made the adjustment from life on the streets. The home, which housed some two hundred inmates, was run with strict military discipline, and the kid from Black Storyville was identified early on as a boy with “a bad stamp.” But somehow the regimen of Army-style drilling and regular stints on cleaning and gardening crews spoke to the boy’s need for structure and discipline. Soon he was thriving in the new atmosphere, where his innate good-heartedness and natural skill as a clown made him popular among the other boys.

  From the beginning of his sentence, Louis had yearned to join the home’s brass band. Unfortunately, this meant convincing the band’s leader, Peter Davis, that he was worthy of belonging. “Davis didn’t like me too much [at first],” Armstrong later admitted. But the boy was conscientious and eager to please, and eventually the bandleader softened toward him. First, Davis allowed Louis to play the tambourine with the group; from there, the boy graduated to the snare drum. Eventually, he was entrusted with an old bugle—to wake the other boys with a reveille every morning. Finally, Davis gave the boy a cornet and taught him to play “Home, Sweet Home.”

  Under Davis’s careful tutelage, Louis picked up the cornet with amazing facility. By the summer of 1913, he was already leading the band, which frequently was hired for gigs “on the outside”—at parades, private parties, and picnics at Spanish Fort and the other lake resorts. Here Armstrong heard, and was heard by, some of the best musicians in the city. The ubiquity of music in the Crescent City began to work its magic on the boy, who would later recall lying on his bunk on Sunday evenings, smelling the honeysuckles outside and listening to a jazz band playing for “some rich white folks” about half a mile away. “Me and music got married at the home,” he would later say. “I do believe that my whole success goes back to that time I was arrested as a wayward boy.”

  Sometime in the summer of 1914, Armstrong’s father persuaded the juvenile court to release Louis into his custody. The boy didn’t want to leave the Waif’s Home, especially not to go live with his unloved and unloving father. And when it turned out that Willie Armstrong wanted his son around only as long as he worked more than he ate, Louis moved out. The boy took up residence again with his mother, Mayann, and sister, Mama Lucy, on Perdido Street—in “that great big room,” as he later put it, “where the three of us were so happy.�
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  Faced with the necessity of helping support the household, Louis immediately found work hauling coal on a mule-drawn coal cart for fifteen cents a load. But what he really wanted to do was play his horn. After performing for so long with “simple, pimply-faced boys” at the home, he was eager to learn something from the real pros. His first day back at Mayann’s, he ran into an old friend, Cocaine Buddy, who tipped him off to a job at Henry Ponce’s honky-tonk in the neighborhood. “All you have to do,” Buddy explained, “is to put on your long pants and play the blues for the whores that hustle all night.… They will call you sweet names and buy you drinks and give you tips.” Louis was hired immediately, and soon he was bringing in as much money with his cornet as he was with his coal shovel.

  Early on, he found a musical mentor in the person of Joe Oliver. To Louis’s mind, Oliver was the best horn player in New Orleans—“better than Bolden, better than Bunk Johnson.” Louis began shadowing his idol all over, second-lining behind him in parades and sometimes holding his cornet between numbers. When delivering stone coal to a crib prostitute in the District, Louis would become entranced by the sound of Oliver’s horn coming from Pete Lala’s next door. “I’d just stand there in that lady’s crib listening to King Oliver,” he later wrote. “All of a sudden it would dawn on that lady that I was still in her crib, very silent, while she hustled those tricks, and she’d say, ‘What’s the matter with you, boy?… This is no place to daydream … I’ve got work to do!’ ” But Louis didn’t mind the scolding. “As long as [Oliver] was blowing,” he said, “that was who I wanted to hear at any chance I got.”