An Oral History of the New Orleans Ninth Ward

By Caroline Gerdes

The story of this influential yet often-overlooked section of New Orleans, in the words of its former and current residents.

Steeped in musical influence, racial dynamics, and culinary significance, the Ninth Ward has distinguished itself as one of New Orleans’ most influential communities, with an impact reaching far outside the confines of a single city. So why is its history so often overlooked?

In this oral history, unique, multi-generational interviews, extensively researched and carefully recorded, preserve the experiences of former and current residents and the rich history of the district. Each source honestly evaluates discrimination, neighbors, poverty, and faith, delivering heartfelt and often harrowing insight into what it means to be from the Ninth Ward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781455622641

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Great American Gumbo Pot

The Settlement of the Ninth Ward

As New Orleans started to expand after the colonial era, mostly in the early nineteenth century and onward, it clung to the natural levee of the Mississippi, Richard Campanella,¹ author and geographer with the Tulane School of Architecture, said as he began an impressive interview during which he discussed the history of the Ninth Ward, and New Orleans, in its entirety.

Campanella is known as the go-to guy for New Orleans ethnography and geography, having published several renowned books about New Orleans population, heritage, boundaries, and history. Before meeting with Campanella, I had spent seven months in the field conducting oral histories of people who called the Ninth Ward home at any time between 1920 and 1960, though several participants were born in the Ninth Ward before 1920 and a few lived there through Hurricane Katrina.² What was fact? And what was fiction? What did these tales have to do with specific moments in history? Campanella was putting my living memory into context, starting with where it all began.

The Marigny, a community downriver from the French Quarter, began to become populated between the 1820s and 1850s. Around this time, plantations began moving to this area as well, spreading into what would become the Ninth Ward, Campanella explained in his Tulane office with New Orleans maps lining the walls.

The first urbanization in what we now call the Holy Cross section of the Lower Ninth Ward appears to be 1830s, 1840s. And, by urbanization, this is a sequence of stages. It’s a plantation, almost always sugar cane at this time, agrarian. The [farmer sees] that the city is growing, realizes that he could probably make more money getting out of agriculture, selling off the land, hiring a surveyor, dividing it into lots, laying down [a street grid], and selling off the real estate. So, one by one, they do that. But that doesn’t mean there is immediately a population there. It takes a while for the houses to be built and so forth. So, we start to see, by 1850s, the beginning of an urban population in this area. It’s closest to the river, because that’s the best drain, he said.

Campanella described how the river side of St. Claude Avenue, in the modern Lower Ninth Ward, quickly began to expand in the 1870s, when the streetcar network extended down St. Claude. Though it was drawn by mules (or horses) at this time, it still made travel quicker and more convenient.

[The Ninth Ward, specifically the Lower Nine] was downriver, and nuisances flow downriver. If you dump something in the river, it’s the people downriver who suffer that. And, so in a very general sense in the geography of [river] cities, being downriver is the worst place to be. And things that we don’t want in the city proper in New Orleans tend to get pushed to the back of town and tend to get pushed below town, he said.

Downriver settlements tended to attract immigrants because the area was home to nuisance jobs like the Lower Ninth Ward slaughterhouse, sugar-processing jobs in adjacent St. Bernard Parish, and factory work. These occupations were easily attainable for non-English speakers starting a new life, Campanella said. What was appealing about the Ninth Ward to immigrants, say at the late 1800s, is what was appealing about the urban periphery. And the urban periphery had certain costs and it had certain benefits. Some of the costs were that’s where, particularly at the antebellum time, that’s where all the high nuisance industries were. . . . [These are industries] that you don’t want to live next to. So that’s a cost. But a benefit is [low] skill job opportunities. . . . Another benefit is that the real estate was lower cost, the housing was lower density, and that meant you had garden space, which could open a secondary opportunity for income as well as feeding your family through truck farming. And ‘truck’ is not the vehicle. ‘Truck’ is a term for small-scale, surplus, gardening agriculture. So, you could feed your family at the local vegetable garden and, if you had a surplus, you could sell it at a local municipal market, which were dominated by these immigrant groups. . . . You couldn’t do that in the inner city, but you could on the periphery.

These gardens were a noted part of Ninth Ward culture throughout my research. During World War II, these plots were called victory gardens. Even baby boomers recalled having chickens or growing gardens, and cattle or horses were seen grazing on the Mississippi River levee. The Ninth Ward’s rich soil and culture of agriculture has been a uniting thread throughout the folklore.

Campanella has dedicated his time to accessing census data and tracking New Orleans human geography. When assessing the 1910 census, as well as older censuses, he said there is a problem of everything being aggregated at the ward level, which is simply an administrative district.

You see the problem here, if you’re studying the Lower Ninth Ward and using the 1880 census, and they lump together everyone in the Ninth Ward, then you are including people all the way up to within a stone’s throw of the French Quarter, he said. What I’ve done with the 1910 census is I’ve broken it down into enumeration districts. Which took a whole lot of time but it was worth it because we start to get spatial detail there. An enumeration district is the one in which the census enumerator was tasked to go around counting people. So now you start to get finer and finer granularity. In the three or four enumeration districts in the Lower Ninth Ward at that time there were about 5,500 people living there. Which is about one-quarter of its pre-Katrina population. It was about 78 percent white. Which was roughly the percentage of whites in [New Orleans] in 1910. Of that group, about 20 percent heads of households were foreign born. So they might have been in their 30s or 40s. . . . This would bring us back to the 1870s or 1880s. That 20 percent, the largest component of that was French born. The second was German plus Austrian. The third was Italian, and it’s probably safe to say most of those were Sicilian born. [Since] the vast majority of our Italian American population in the city is Sicilian. And then a much smaller percent were Irish. This was never a particularly Irish area.

I’m telling you, this guy is a walking encyclopedia of New Orleans neighborhood history—a New Orleans treasure.

This census data reflects the population I interviewed. I have sources of Sicilian, German, French, Irish, Isleño, African American, Jewish, Arbëreshë Sicilian, Cajun, Spanish, Basque, Croatian, and Swiss heritage. The majority, as census data reflects, are German, French, and Sicilian. My goal was to find three to five people who lived in the Ninth Ward between 1925 and 1940. I was unsure of how much living memory would be plausible to capture from this period, but I exceeded my expectations and interviewed six people who were ninety years old or more. Fred Westphal, 101 at the time of his interview, was my oldest narrator. Twenty-nine of my forty-seven interviewees were in their seventies or older. The remaining eighteen were in their forties and fifties. Several of these baby boomers gave personal experiences and discussed their parents’ lives in the Ninth Ward.

The population roughly doubles in what we call the Lower Ninth Ward between 1910 and 1940. It goes from about 5,500 to about 11,000. The racial and ethnic breakdown is roughly the same. In the 1940s it’s two-thirds white; it is still majority white. And, by now, we don’t really have foreign-born households that much anymore. Because we’re starting to get past the main era of immigration. But we can still look at ancestry and by that time, as you would expect, the ethnic identity of many of the households is pretty much what we saw in 1910. You have Franco-Americans, you have Germanic Americans, you have Italian Americans as the main white groups. And then African Americans. Again, they would constitute about one-third, but the racial geographies were not even, Campanella said.

While African American families lived throughout the Ninth Ward, historically the area between St. Claude Avenue and the river—in the Lower Nine—was comprised of primarily white, immigrant populations. The population that settled between St. Claude and the swamps was primarily African American, though white families were sparsely scattered throughout the community. This back part of the Lower Nine was the section infamously affected by the Industrial Canal breach during Hurricane Katrina.

But why did these immigrant and African New Orleans populations originally leave their homes to move to the Ninth Ward and Lower Ninth Ward?

Richard Campanella. (Photo by Robert Giglio)

A History of Migrations

The Germans who immigrated to the city in the 1850s and 1860s were not from the nation we define as Germany today. These people, as Campanella explained, were linguistically united as German, but they came from present-day Germany, Austria, and related regions. At this time in history, large numbers of Germans immigrated to the Northeastern cities. A smaller wave of this migration settled in New Orleans, especially the Ninth Ward.

They were called the ’48ers. This group of so-called German liberals is fairly progressive, fairly educated: Germans who are getting away from of the civic problems going on in Germany in 1848. And so they arrived on the heels of that. They benefitted from the fact that they were largely educated and skilled. They were very civically engaged, Campanella said, adding that they started several societies from gymnastics to singing groups to church societies. They settled at kind of the periphery of the city because . . . while they tended to be skilled, they had something working against them and that was a language barrier. They really started at I wouldn’t quite say the bottom, but near the bottom as the working class and they had a similar geography to the Irish, in that they settled in the periphery.

These Germans were representatives of the three major religions, Campanella explained. There were German Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. And German churches in the city reflect this.

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The historic Holy Trinity Church in the Upper Ninth Ward’s Bywater neighborhood. The church is an example of the area’s immigrant past as it was founded by German Catholics. Note its Bavarian-style architecture. (Photo by Robert Giglio)

To this day, we have St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, which is a relic of that geography. We have the old Holy Trinity Church, which is now no longer a church. But if you look at that church it is a Bavarian-style church; it is a dead ringer for a Catholic church you would see in southern Germany. [As the population] clusters started to move downriver, they brought their German-ness with them and hence the German preponderance among whites in the Lower Ninth Ward in the early twentieth century, he said while discussing Upper Ninth Ward churches. Holy Trinity has since found a new life post-Katrina as the Marigny Opera House.

The area where this cluster of Germans intersected with the Ninth Ward was nicknamed Little Saxony. New Orleanians, just like residents of other American cities, gave nicknames to certain spaces and neighborhoods for various reasons and one of the reasons was often their ethnic predomination. And some of them were meant in a neutral sense and some were meant in a less than flattering sense. Little Palermo was the Sicilian predominant population of the Lower French Quarter. We had a Chinatown, the Irish Channel, and the German cluster of the third district of Marigny got nicknamed Little Saxony, Campanella said of the community he documents in his book Geographies of New Orleans.

The Ninth Ward also intersected with another ethnic neighborhood referred to as the Creole Faubourgs, which was home to the African American and white Creole population in New Orleans. Therefore, it is home to some of the African American founders of the Ninth Ward. These Creole Faubourgs of the early nineteenth century encompassed what we now call the Faubourg Marigny and smaller subdivisions in the Upper Ninth Ward’s Bywater neighborhood and all the way down to the modern Lower Ninth Ward.

The areas in 1850 where you were more likely to be around Creoles, either white or black, you were more likely to hear French Creole, you were more likely to see Creole architecture, were generally the Lower French Quarter and the so-called Creole Faubourgs, Campanella said.

Though Cajuns and Creoles are both French-derived groups who call Louisiana home, their ancestors come from different migrations whose cultures evolved in separate pockets of the state³. The Cajuns are French by way of Acadia—modern Nova Scotia and Maine. They made their way south after being expelled from Acadia during the French and Indian War. Their new settlement in Louisiana was aptly called Acadiana.

Growing up, I thought the word Creole defined people of mixed heritage, usually a combination of Spanish, African, and American Indian. However, many in New Orleans use the term Creole synonymously with the word French. Amanda LaFleur⁴, an instructor of Cajun studies at Louisiana State University, explained in a 2012 interview that Creole is actually derived from the Portuguese word crioulo, meaning born on the continent. She said this term described the children of New Orleans’ first colonists. Children of this generation were born from relationships of French and Spanish settlers and unions with both free and enslaved African residents. However, the definition of Creole is not this simple.

Campanella discussed the evolution of the term over the past five hundred years. The Creole identity is very fluid. . . . There is no one right answer. The multitude of answers is the answer, he said. By most accounts, the original meaning or use of the word in the 1500s . . . was New World-born offspring of Old World-born parents. But as time went on, it came to mean that which is native and born and bred of the New World. [In eighteenth century] New Orleans, Creole identity basically included everyone. There was no outside party that forced them to gather around a certain identity. This changes in the nineteenth century. Anglo-Americans start to come down. Immigrants come in from other countries including France and [Saint-Domingue].

Groups who emerged in New Orleans during the colonial era started to feel threatened by all these incoming people. And when you feel threatened, Campanella said, you gather around a unifying center. This unified group of Creoles was pan-racial. There were Franco-African Creoles with deep roots in the city, white Creoles, and even Jewish Creoles. Campanella called it a place-based ethnicity. After the Civil War, the term was co-opted by elites who tried to remove black blood from the definition of Creole. Then whites tried to detach themselves from the term. And some African groups tried to detach themselves, hence the (sometimes frustrating) fluidity Campanella described.

When you hear the word Creole in present-day New Orleans conversation, more often than not it means a Franco-African American who usually has very deep roots in the city. More often than not, but not exclusively, [they] are Catholic. More often than not, but not exclusively, [they] have a Francophone last name, sometimes a Hispanic-sounding last name. But through intermarriage it gets complicated. More often than not they live in the lower half of the city, the Seventh Ward, Gentilly. . . . Many of their ancestors were the free people of color who lived in the lower half of the city, Campanella said.

This notion of Creole has captivated artist Jerry Dupas. Dupas was born in the Ninth Ward and currently