New Orleans in Golden Age Postcards

By Matthew Griffis

New Orleans in Golden Age Postcards showcases over three hundred vintage postcard images of the city, printed in glorious color. From popular tourist attractions, restaurants, and grand hotels to local businesses, banks, churches, neighborhoods, civic buildings, and parks, the book not only celebrates these cards’ visual beauty but also considers their historic value. After providing an overview of the history of postcards in New Orleans, Matthew Griffis expertly arranges and describes the postcards by subject or theme. Focusing on the period from 1900 to 1920, the book is the first to offer information about the cards’ many publishers.

More than a century ago, people sent postcards like we make phone calls today. Many also collected postcards, even trading them in groups or clubs. Adorned with colorized views of urban and rural landscapes, postcards offered people a chance to own images of places they lived, visited, or merely dreamed of visiting. Today, these relics remain one of the richest visual records of the last century as they offer a glimpse at the ways a city represented itself. They now appear regularly in art exhibits, blogs, and research collections. Many of the cards in this book have not been widely seen in well over a century, and many of the places and traditions they depict have long since vanished.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Sep 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781496830265

Matthew Griffis

Matthew Griffis has published on the use of postcards in historical research and presented on New Orleans postcards at the Louisiana Historical Association’s annual conference. He saw New Orleans for the first time in 2011 and has since collected over 1,000 vintage postcards of the Crescent City.

Book preview

NEW ORLEANS

in Golden Age Postcards

DPS, posted 1909. Greetings from cards were especially popular with tourists. This example was issued by the short-lived Dixie Post Card Store on the corner of Canal and Baronne Streets.

NEW ORLEANS

in Golden Age Postcards

Matthew Griffis

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

Publication of this book was supported in part by the Jane Hiatt Fund for Books in the Arts and Humanities, in Honor of Dr. Wood Hiatt.

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2020 by Matthew Griffis

All rights reserved

Printed in Korea

First printing 2020

∞

LCCN 2020013206

Hardback ISBN 978-1-4968-3025-8

Epub single ISBN 978-1-4968-3026-5

Epub institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-3027-2

PDF single ISBN 978-1-4968-3028-9

PDF institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-3029-6

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For my parents, Rick and Cathy, to whom I will always be grateful for their love, support, and constant encouragement.

DPC, printed ca. 1906. A view of the French Market, showing the intersection at Dumaine Street (foreground), Decatur (left), and North Peters (right).

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Preface

CHAPTER 1

Greetings from New Orleans

CHAPTER 2

The Gift of the River

CHAPTER 3

The Maturing City

CHAPTER 4

The City Beautiful

CHAPTER 5

Religion and Spiritual Life

CHAPTER 6

Heritage and Traditions

CHAPTER 7

Having a Wonderful Time

* * *

Postscript

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

JS, printed ca. 1910–11. A night view showing Royal Street from Canal. The tall building in the distance is the Hotel Monteleone.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

LS, printed ca. 1910–12. Located on Royal Street near Canal, the Wallace News Stand was one of the city’s busiest retailers of periodicals, tourist guides, and postcards.

PREFACE

The exciting way to learn about the history of this country … is to dig it out of the landscape.

—Alistair Cooke, America

I began this book three years ago. The history of postcards and the history of New Orleans had long interested me, and the challenge to combine these subjects into one project seemed intriguing. But like many intriguing ideas, this one was not so obvious at first; it formed not in a publisher’s boardroom but in my living room, at the end of a long afternoon spent showing old postcards of New Orleans to a friend. My friend, who seldom showed interest in historical topics, found the cards captivating. She had grown up in a small town just outside New Orleans but knew little of the city’s past and, like most people I knew, was unaware that postcards had existed so long ago. But as encouraging as her response seemed, it also surprised me. Up to then, my collection of over two thousand vintage postcards of various subjects and themes had received mixed reactions from friends and colleagues. To people with more everyday hobbies, I suppose mine seemed peculiar. Why collect old postcards? they would usually ask. And why so many? These were good questions. And if I was to write a book about postcards, I would need convincing answers.

Postcard collecting is indeed an unusual hobby—at least today—and its benefits are seldom obvious to outsiders. But over a century ago, rare was the person that did not collect postcards. Postcards were one of the earliest forms of visual mass media, and people mailed millions of them around the world each year.¹ And despite postcards’ wide availability, their novelty never tired: new cards entered the market all the time. Collecting them became so popular, in fact, that newspapers called it a craze. Most collectors kept their cards in albums, some traded them at parties, others even organized clubs.

What excited collectors most about postcards were their illustrations. In the days long before personal cameras, postcards offered the average person a chance to own images of the places they lived, visited, or merely dreamed of visiting. Postcards were a form of armchair tourism: they simulated a sense of place, perhaps more than any other visual medium at the time could. But it was a sense of place as captured and reproduced by printers, publishers, retailers, and boosters: an unseen collective whose interests ranged from the creative to the economic and sometimes even political. Postcards commodified the modern landscape, chopping it into countless little rectangles: pieces to a puzzle so large and boundless that it lured new devotees every day.

More than a century later, these cards still attract interest but for different reasons. They are sometimes the only surviving visual record of a specific place or event. Rarely should we take their images at face value, however. As windows to the past, vintage postcards often reflect the social contexts of their day. Colorized artificially and frequently retouched, postcards were an exercise in portraiture, not photography. Often what they show is not nearly as interesting as how they show it. Their images are full of meanings, intended and unintended, that can change depending on a past or a present-day perspective.

Today, these cards can seem easier to appreciate as visual curiosities than as cultural objects, and debates over their meanings are rarely straightforward. Despite this—or perhaps even because of it—postcards remain one of the richest visual records of the last 120 years, and in many ways we are only beginning to appreciate their value. Once largely ignored by historians, and even discarded by some archivists, vintage postcards are now the subjects of art exhibits, blogs, digital humanities projects and books. Several academic institutions have established research collections devoted to postcards and postcard history. The field even has a name: deltiology.

This was how I first caught the postcard bug: as an academic. I was a graduate student researching library architecture and found that old postcards of library buildings contained valuable historical information. After finishing my studies, I began collecting postcards of many other subjects and themes. New Orleans, however, was an unexpected turn. I found my first New Orleans postcard some 1,400 miles from the city itself, at a junk sale in my hometown of Peterborough, Canada. It was a view of Audubon Place, published circa 1904. I had seen New Orleans for the first time only weeks earlier, and my visit had left me fascinated with the city and its history. Despite its age, the card recalled personal memories of walking in the Garden District and driving up St. Charles Avenue. But in some ways, it was not just the image that affected me; it was the postcard itself. More than a collectible, it was an artifact, something printed and sold more than a century ago in the very city it depicted. It was touchable, tangible evidence of a place I had developed great affection for and wanted to visit again. It was like holding a piece of New Orleans itself. I decided then to collect as many as I could.

Eight years later, that collection totals nearly a thousand cards. I live about an hour and a half from New Orleans and have learned much about the city’s history, to better understand not just the cards I acquire but also the uniqueness of the city itself. It is like no other place I know, and the more I learn about it, the more it seems like an old friend. Studying her in all her changeful moods and phases, noted the Picayune’s Guide to New Orleans in 1904, one might almost say that New Orleans has a soul.² She does, one that is both timeless and ever changing. For if these old postcards have taught me anything about the New Orleans of today, it is that despite decades of social, economic, and architectural change, her sense of place has remained intact. This, as many deltiologists know, is the strange, almost contradictory magic of vintage postcards: our responses to them are often rooted in our present-day impressions of the places they show. Card after card, that understanding becomes a strange union of past and present. And while we realize how much the city has changed since 1900, we also recognize, even among the less familiar places they show, that these cards still convey an unmistakable sense of their subject: the city and spirit of New Orleans.

This book collects and describes just over three hundred of these cards. With a few exceptions, all were originally published between 1900 and 1920, a period known among deltiologists as the medium’s golden age. This was when postcards reached their zenith both commercially and as an art form. It was also a period of economic and civic maturity for New Orleans, and seeing the city captured so extensively in light, shadow, and color is a rare treat.³ Though New Orleans in Golden Age Postcards is not the first book on the subject, it is, as its title suggests, the first to focus exclusively on cards from this early period.⁴ It is also, by number of its selections, the most extensive, and is the first to offer information about these cards’ many publishers. Most views in this book have not been seen in over a century; a few have appeared in other works but have not been reproduced in their original color until now.

While preparing the book, I wanted to create something people would enjoy seeing as much as reading. To this end, I thought almost exclusively of the nonacademic: someone eager to learn more about the history of New Orleans but not from standard history books. New Orleans in Golden Age Postcards is therefore not a comprehensive history of postcards or even of New Orleans in the early twentieth century. It is more like an annotated postcard album. It uses no theoretical frameworks or attempts any kind of thesis. If it argues anything, it is simply that these cards are an immense pleasure to see, learn from, and return to again and again.

My hope is that by celebrating the rarity and beauty of these cards, this book will encourage readers to further explore the city’s rich and fascinating history.

NEW ORLEANS

in Golden Age Postcards

CHAPTER 1

Greetings from New Orleans

Letter mail was an essential part of American life in 1900. It was the most common way to communicate long-distance and often proved just as efficient for local communication. It was also a bargain: for two cents, a letter could travel from one end of the country to the other in a matter of days. Telephones existed but were not as common, and the price of a telegram would have seemed high given what could be sent by mail. Though still a novelty in 1900, postcards were an even better bargain because they required the least time, money, or effort.¹ Hurried travelers, for example, could announce their arrival or departure by postcard or simply let folks back home know they were having a wonderful time away. Businesses posted cards to quote prices and circulate bulletins, while traveling salesmen used them to report daily figures to head offices.²

Postcards were not an American invention, however. They were introduced in October 1869 by Austria’s postal service, which, by the end of that year, had circulated almost three million postal cards.³ Other European countries soon issued similar cards, and by 1872 Congress had authorized their production in the United States.⁴ Then called federal postals, each of these government-issued cards cost one cent and came with preprinted postage. They were so instantly popular that by 1875 the US mail service was printing more than 100 million of them a year. That number would reach almost 273 million by 1880 and nearly half a billion by 1895.⁵

These early federal postal cards were not the only cards available at the time. Postal stationery cards, which had circulated in the United States since the late 1860s, were also available but were not government issued. They were called stationery cards because their manufacturers were usually stationers, the earliest being John P. Charlton of Philadelphia.⁶ Stationery cards were less popular, though, since they did not include prepaid postage and could not be mailed without an envelope. But some stationery cards came with matching envelopes, others with small illustrations.⁷ Some were even printed in color. Federal cards remained quite plain in comparison and were rarely, if ever, issued with illustrations or color.⁸

1.01. DPC, photo taken ca. 1908. A photograph of the Wallace News Stand at Royal and Canal Streets.

1.02. US Post Office Department, posted 1880. Federal postal cards were first sold in the United States in 1873 and were immediately popular. Posted in Birmingham, Connecticut, in May 1880, this card took just three days to reach New Orleans, nearly 1,400 miles away.

Also common were trade cards, which allowed businesses to advertise goods and services by mail. About the size of standard postcards, trade cards were originally printed in monotone but began appearing in color by the 1890s. Their fronts typically featured an illustration (usually a brand name or product), while their backs offered product information. But while trade cards grew popular among collectors, they could not be mailed without envelopes.

1.04. J. B. Camors & Co., printed ca. 1897–98. Trade cards advertised local businesses and services. They could not be mailed without envelopes but sometimes featured color graphics. This card’s publisher, J. B. Camors & Company, was a wholesale grocer that imported produce regularly from the lower Americas.

1.03. Chas. Hernandez, posted 1883. Businesses customized government-issued postals by printing their own graphics on the card’s blank (message) side. This card was customized by Charles Hernandez, a cotton factor who used postal cards to acknowledge the receipt of cotton. Though formerly on Union Street, by the time Hernandez posted this card, he had moved to 199 Gravier. He has rubber-stamped the new address (in red) atop his old one.

The modern picture postcard’s closest ancestor was undoubtedly the souvenir card, which first appeared in the United States in the 1870s. These cards were primarily for tourists and sold as keepsakes at events like festivals and fairs.⁹ Though not mailable without envelopes, souvenir cards were usually well illustrated; some even appeared in collector’s sets, each card with a different view of the same event. Souvenir cards attracted wide attention in 1893, when Chicago’s Columbian Exposition issued two different sets of souvenir cards: one a standard, nonmailable set; the other a set of full-color souvenir mailing cards.¹⁰ Each of the mailable cards featured an image and some message space on its front, and on its back a government-issued, prepaid postage mark with space for a recipient’s address. When the mailable cards outsold the nonmailable set in leaps and bounds, it was clear that full-color, pictorial mailing cards had considerable revenue potential.¹¹ Soon, commercial manufacturers wanted to market their own.

The result was the Private Mailing Card Act of 1898, which permitted the manufacture and sale of what were called private mailing cards. These were commercially produced, 3¼″ x 5½″ mailable cards that did not require envelopes.¹² Like federal cards, private mailing cards contained message space on one side and space for an address and postage on the other. But because private cards could not be printed with prepaid postage, sending one was more expensive because it required a stamp.

1.05. Theo. Ricksecker, printed ca. 1884–85. Given the advertising printed on this colorful souvenir card from the 1884 Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans, it most likely doubled as a trade card