New Orleans 1900 to 1920

By Mary Lou Widmer

Ironically, taming nature and the elements to build an effective and safe urban infrastructure are issues as relevant in this century as they were one hundred years ago. With the invention of the Wood screw pump in 1906, and the subsequent drainage of swampland, the New Orleans footprint expanded into the popular suburbs of Gentilly, Lakeview, and Mid-City. In praising the virtues of Lakeview real estate, a commercial home builder in 1909 said, "the drainage was excellent, the streetcars provided good service and purchases could be delivered there from the city."

In her new and timely addition of her popular series, Mary Lou Widmer reminds us of turn-of-the-century life in New Orleans. Laundry chores were done on Mondays while the aroma of simmering red beans wafted from the kitchen. Modern conveniences such as electric lighting, indoor plumbing, telephones, and gas for cooking and heating civilized life, while the electric iron proved to be a housewife's dream come true. In an effort to build affordable housing for disadvantaged European immigrants, New Orleans architecture saw the birth of the shotgun house.

Maison Blanche, the flagship of the shopping district, was where fashion-conscious New Orleans women outfitted themselves with the 'Gibson girl look,' or a skirt with a tango slit. The roots of women's suffrage took hold with the help of New Orleanians Caroline Merrick and Jean and Kate Gordon. Breezy waterfront amusement parks dotted Lake Pontchartrain while Storyville offered adult vices and jazz music. All of this and more is recalled as Widmer captures the flavor of New Orleans at the dawn of the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 30, 2007
• ISBN: 9781455609307

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The Neighborhoods

During The 1800s, New Orleans advanced little in matters of flood control, drainage, and availability of pure drinking water. But just before the turn of the century, a ray of hope shone through. In 1896, a gifted engineer named A. Baldwin Wood invented a screw pump that could drain the city's swamps, making possible the settlement of Mid-City and in time changing the geography of the city. This, combined with the recent discovery that yellow fever was contracted from the bite of a mosquito that bred in cisterns, canals, and drainage ditches, would in time bring about mosquito control and put an end to the epidemics.

But none of this would happen overnight. New Orleans, a city below sea level, was shaped like a saucer. At the turn of the century, housing was still crowded along the rim of the saucer. The citizens endured floods that came after every heavy rain. They suffered the stench of open gutters filled with refuse, and they walked each day past open canals where human filth accumulated.

For drinking and cooking, they used cistern water. The facilities were outhouses in their backyards. And they took baths—infrequently—in their kitchens in wooden tubs filled with heated water. Nothing was easy, but they had never known a more comfortable way of life, so they endured as their parents had endured before them.

In the year 1900, only thirty-five years after the end of the Civil War, memories of defeat, humiliation, and poverty were still fresh in everyone's mind. As a port city on the losing side of the most disastrous of all American wars, New Orleans did not recover economically until the mid-1880s, when businesses at last began to show profits. Although New Orleans was always important because of its port facilities, it was not until the 1920s that it became a large metropolis.

A SMALL TOWN FROM 1900 TO 1920

In 1900, New Orleans consisted of the Vieux Carre, Faubourg Marigny, Faubourg St. Mary (later the Central Business District), and Faubourg Treme (the first three suburbs adjacent to the original city). Algiers, across the river, was a part of New Orleans from early in the city's history.

Next, marching upriver in a line along the rim of the saucer, more distant neighborhoods were settled: the Lower Garden District, including the Irish Channel; the Garden District; Lafayette City; Jefferson City; and Carrollton City. By 1910, thanks to the Wood Screw Pump, Mid-City would be drained and settiement would begin there. In the years 1910 to 1920, we see the settlement of Mid-City, Lakeview, and Gentilly. These three neighborhoods had been nothing more than back swamps when the city was founded.

Beyond Mid-City was Lakeview, an unsettled neighborhood in 1900, except for the numerous cemeteries that held the bodies of thousands of Irish who had died of yellow fever while building the New Basin Canal in the 1830s. There were nineteen cemeteries at the end of Canal Street at one time, extending from Metairie Cemetery to the graveyard for the indigent, east of Greenwood Cemetery. By 1920, Canal Boulevard had been cut through but was just a narrow, weed-choked road.

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A TRIP FROM THE CITY TO THE LAKE

If a motorist wanted to reach the lake from the end of Canal Street, he might take Canal Boulevard as far as Florida Avenue where it ended, turn left to West End Boulevard, then right on West End Boulevard as far as Adams Avenue (Robert E. Lee Boulevard), continue on what the author believes was the Turtleback Road to the Black Bridge, then cross over the bridge (over the New Basin Canal) to West End Park. If he wanted to go to Spanish Fort Amusement Park, he turned right on Robert E. Lee and drove two miles to Bayou St. John, where it emptied into the lake.

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WHAT WAS GOING ON IN TOWN?

Although the first decade of the century would see few automobiles and electric streetcars in the shopping and business sections of town, photos taken between 1910 and 1920 show an ever-increasing number of cars and very few horses and wagons.

Early skyscrapers of five to eight stories rose along Canal Street and in the American Sector, such as the Mercier Building and the Cotton Exchange in the late 1800s.

Americans rose early and worked long hours each day, bent on making money. They tended to be hustlers, as opposed to many of the French Creoles, who sat on their galleries sipping black coffee, making it clear that they had old money and did not need to labor. But as the city entered the twentieth century, even that was about to change.

UPTOWN NEW ORLEANS

One event that triggered the explosion of urban and industrial progress in New Orleans was the 1884 World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, built on the site that would later be Audubon Park and the campuses of Loyola and Tulane universities. It was the only site big enough to house the many exhibits. It lay between the old city and the recently annexed Carrollton City.

The World's Fair, built on 51 acres under cover in the five main buildings, boasted the most dazzling display of electric lights ever seen anywhere, as well as art galleries, industrial exhibits, and restaurants. Although it was not a commercial success, it gave impetus to urban development. When the fair ended, the state turned the fairgrounds on the river side of St. Charles Avenue over to Audubon Park, and landscaping began. In time it became a 340-acre park, abounding in ancient oaks and lagoons. The fairgrounds on the opposite side of St. Charles Avenue became the sites of Loyola and Tulane universities.

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The tract of land between Audubon Park and Carrollton City began residential development in the early 1900s and would in time become one of the city's most affluent neighborhoods.

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THE VIEUX CARRE

At the turn of the century, the old French Creoles began to desert the Vieux Carre, which had become a seedy inner-city slum. Madame Pontalba would have wept at the sight of laundry hanging from the beautiful wroughtiron balconies and animals foraging in the courtyards of her apartment buildings. Thousands of poor, uneducated, unskilled immigrants, mostly Sicilians, came to New Orleans in the 1890s. They had settled in the Vieux Carre for its cheap rents, its atmosphere much like the one they had left, and its location within walking distance of the French Market or the riverfront, where many of them worked as vendors or stevedores.

AREAS OF SIN AND VICE

Many areas of sin arose in the port city. Gallatin Street on the riverfront, adjacent to the French Market, was called the Port of Missing Men. Policemen dared not enter the two-block neighborhood, where cockfighting, prostitution, and gambling thrived, for fear of never being seen again. Another such nest of corruption was The Swamp on Girod Street near the river in the American Sector. These areas harbored cutthroats, fight promoters, dance-house operators, brothels, and saloons. Storyville on Basin Street, the most infamous of the red-light districts, thrived in this twenty-year period (see chapter 9).

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The ancienne population of the Vieux Carre, descendants of settlers from the time of Bienville, began to seek property in the University area, as far from the slums and the tenderloin districts as they could get. The old slowmoving Creole way of life was giving way to the driven American work ethic.

In 1915, a hurricane did extensive damage to the city, knocking over church steeples and historic structures such as the St. Louis Hotel and City Exchange, which was torn down in 1916.

In 1919, the Old French Opera House on the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse burned to the ground, destroying another landmark of old Creole society.

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CANAL STREET—THE SHOPPING DISTRICT

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the shopping district of New Orleans was located primarily on Chartres and Royal streets near Canal Street. But the gradual movement beginning in the 1840s of stores and business places to Canal Street, mostly in the area of Dauphine and Bourbon, benefited the economy of the whole city.

A pioneer merchandising establishment on Canal Street was D. H. Holmes, built in 1842 and moved in 1849 to the 800 block. By the 1870s, this was one of the busiest retailing blocks along the street. Some of the buildings in the block were Elie's Piano and Music Store (809), jeweler Joseph Dayton (811-13), milliner Margaret McAubrey (827-29), and M. L. Byrne's Dry Goods Store (831-33). In this block, adjacent to D. H. Holmes, were the Touro Buildings, originally constructed as residences.

D. H. Holmes, in the late nineteenth century, was a ladies' store, handling fabrics, notions, and accessories. Few things were bought off the rack. In the center of the store was its famous silk room under a vaulted Gothic ceiling. By the twentieth century, however, new departments of furniture and household goods were added, making it a complete department store.

MAISON BLANCHE—FLAGSHIP OF THE SHOPPING DISTRICT

On the corner of Canal and Dauphine, in the 900 block of Canal, Christ Episcopal Church had provided services since 1847.