Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans (14 page)

Each sector had its own public square: the Place d’Armes
(later Jackson Square
) in the Vieux Carré
and Lafayette Square
in the American Sector. Each had its opulent residential avenue: Esplanade in the Vieux Carré and St. Charles
Avenue in the American Sector. Between 1830 and 1850, magnificent structures rose to change the skyline of the city. In the American Sector, the St. Charles
Hotel
, two blocks above Canal Street; City Hall (now Gallier Hall
) on St. Charles
Avenue; the University of Louisiana
on Common Street; St. Patrick’s Church
on Camp Street; and the new Custom House
at the foot of Canal Street all dynamically changed the visual features of the area. In the Vieux Carré, the opulence was matched by the St. Louis Hotel
on St. Louis Street; the United States Mint at Esplanade Avenue and the river; the Pontalba Buildings
flanking the Place d’Armes
; and the St. Louis Cathedral
, rebuilt in 1850.

Established in 1834, the Medical College of Louisiana on Common Street became part of the University of Louisiana in 1847, when a law school was added. It closed during the Civil war. The university received occasional state appropriations until 1883, when it was the recipient of a huge bequest from Paul Tulane. In 1884, it became the Tulane University of Louisiana; in 1984, the main campus moved to its present location on St. Charles Avenue.
(Courtesy the University of New Orleans Library)

Canal Street in 1850. From Henry E. Chambers’s
History of Louisiana
(1925).
(Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

Nineteenth Century Architects

The Irish architect James Gallier
Sr. was responsible for many of the magnificent edifices mentioned above, which are still revered today. He designed the
St. Charles Hotel
to outdo any other hotel in the world in terms of size and extravagance. It was completed in 1837 at a cost of $600,000. With its white dome, cupola, and flagstaff aloft at 203 feet, it was a commanding landmark, visible for miles upriver and down. Under its rotunda, slave auctions were held regularly.

Second Municipality Hall (later City Hall, then Gallier Hall), built on Lafayette Square by Gallier in 1845.

The
Second Municipality Hall,
later City Hall and today Gallier Hall, was also designed by Gallier in 1845. This building was the seat of government in 1852. Its Ionic portico and Greek details can be matched only by temple-type buildings and churches in the northeast.

The
Custom House
with its colossal columns, an Alexander Thompson Wood design, is said to have the finest Greek Revival interior in America. Work was begun in 1848, but it was not completed until 1881.

St. Patrick’s Church
at 724 Camp Street was built by the architect James H. Dankin for $115,000. It was built on the site of the small wooden church, which it replaced in 1838. It far surpassed every attempt at Gothic architecture on this side of the Atlantic.

The Dankin brothers, James Gallier Sr., and Henry Howard were primarily responsible for the spread of the Greek Revival style of architecture in America. New Orleans Greek Revival architecture is comparable in quality to that found anywhere in the United States (Christovich and Toledano 1972, 95).

The Beginnings of Theater in New Orleans

Contrary to popular belief, the first theater in New Orleans was started in 1792 by two brothers from Paris, Jean-Louis Henry
and Louis-Alexandre Henry
. Their theater was the only theater in New Orleans for fifteen years (Le Gardeur 1963, 47). Louis, a carpenter, built the theater at approximately 732 St. Peter Street and acted in the cast for several years. Jean supplied the capital for the venture and became the business manager. According to New Orleans archives, notarial acts were signed in June 1791, transferring a piece of property measuring 64 feet by 128 feet from Louis McCarty
to Louis Henry. Henry then sold half the lot, retaining a piece 32 feet by 128 feet on which he built the theater.

Some interesting regulations for conduct in the theater were issued. By order of the state government, “. . . the performance shall never be interrupted by shouting, whistling, or in any other manner that might tend to force an actor to be silent . . . It is further forbidden to force the actors to repeat their lines . . . No one shall stand during the performance, nor put on his hat. . . . ” (Le Gardeur 1963, 4).

In 1793, a certain Madame Dursoier
was directing the troupe; she had engaged quadroon actresses and was acting in the cast herself. A possibility exists that they all could have been refugees from the riots in Port-au-Prince, Saint Domingue
, in 1791 (Le Gardeur 1963, 10). In New Orleans in 1794, there was also in the theater a Denis-Richard Dechanet Desessarts
(godfather of Jean Henry’s son), another actor formerly connected with the Saint Domingue theater.

On May 22, 1796, the one-act comic opera,
Silvain,
was performed. It was the first recorded performance of an opera in the city.

The theater was closed late in 1803 because of insufficient revenues. When it opened in 1804 under the American regime, the cast was made up largely of refugees from Saint Domingue. The continuous history of drama and opera in New Orleans dates from that year.

The old French Opera House, built on the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse Streets in 1859, burned down in 1919.

Louis-Blaise Tabary
has long been credited with beginning the theater in New Orleans. This he did not do, according to historian René Le Gardeur Jr.,
who has made an extensive study of records of the period. Tabary’s name first appears in city records in 1806, when he published a prospectus for a new theater to be built on Orleans Street between Royal and Bourbon Streets. The first brick was laid by Governor Claiborne
in October 1806, but Tabary had to abandon the project for lack of funds, and it was later taken over by others. This was the Théâtre d’Orléans
, the first of two by the same name on the same site. Tabary was, however, a pioneer in this effort, and he gave twenty-six years of service to the development of theater in New Orleans, an accomplishment which, in and of itself, is worthy of notice. The second Théâtre d’Orléans opened in 1819 with the performance of
Jean de Paris.

For eighteen years beginning in 1819, John Davis, who operated the Théâtre d’Orléans, staged ballets, concerts, operas, and plays in that theater. Davis gave up his control of the opera in 1837.

Meanwhile, in 1835, in the American Sector, James Caldwell
had built the St. Charles
Theater
on St. Charles
Avenue near Poydras Street.

Charles Boudousquié was the impresario of the French Opera House, which was built in 1859. He brought a troupe that included Julie Calvé to the city during that period. The French Opera House, on the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse Streets, built by James Gallier, burned to the ground in 1919.

Municipal Developments

By the 1830s, one could ride
“in omnibus”
with a dozen other passengers for one bit (half of a quarter). Such a vehicle ran along Tchoupitoulas Street from New Orleans to Lafayette City, a distance of three miles. The driver, perched high in front, blew a bugle as the signal to start. Passengers could sit inside the carriage or on top.

Banquettes
(sidewalks) were made of flatboat gunwale in the 1830s. By the 1850s, some were composed of broad slabs of slate. Streets were of mud or dust, kept in fair condition by chain gangs of convicts.

Sanitary conditions
in New Orleans were deplorable until the Civil War. Female vendors in open markets cleaning fowl or fish dropped the entrails onto the earthen floor, where they were trodden underfoot, as they had been for a hundred years. In areas such as Connaught Yard, a collection of boarding houses on Girod and Julia Streets at the river, refuse of every description and “night filth” were thrown daily into the streets from upstairs windows with a prayer that the rain would wash them away. Such areas were extremely prone to disease.

James Caldwell introduced
street lighting
in the American Sector in the form of gas lanterns suspended on ropes or chains and hung diagonally across intersections from poles. His imported English gas-making machine, which he had used to light his American Theater on Camp Street in 1824, enabled him to begin a gas company that provided street and household lighting to the city.

Railroads and Canals

In 1831, the Pontchartrain Railroad
, the first railroad west of the Alleghenies, began running from the lower end of the French Market along Elysian Fields Avenue, all the way from the river to the lake. Businessmen in Faubourg Marigny
hoped to develop a port on the lake, but this never materialized. The railroad connected the city with Milneburg
, a small community on the south shore of the lake. The train, affectionately called Smoky Mary, chugged and snorted along at the great rate of ten miles per hour, scattering cinders and dust and transporting picnickers to a wharf at the lake’s edge. There, several two-room camps, which could be rented by the day, had been built out over the lake on stilts. This railroad was part of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad.

In 1835, the
New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad
connected the town of Carrollton to New Orleans. It operates today as the St. Charles
Streetcar, the oldest continuously operating car line in America.