Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans (21 page)

The Creoles, gamblers or not, all believed that dreams had meanings. For example, a dream of pulling a tooth meant death was coming and dreams of trees presaged joy and profit. They also feared the following omens: rain or tears at a wedding meant bad luck; flowers out of season brought bad luck; the transplanting of a weeping willow brought about violent death; spitting in a fire would draw up your lungs; and sleeping with the moon in your face would draw your mouth to one side and make it crooked. They were also well known for the Creole Mirror superstition: if three men look in a mirror at one time, the youngest will die; if three girls look in a mirror at one time, the eldest will marry within a year.

There were hundreds of such omens and superstitious beliefs.

Jazz

New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz. Jazz first gained attention around the turn of the century, although its beginnings reach far back into history. When slaves were first brought to America, they carried with them a memory of the music they had learned in West Africa or acquired in the Caribbean Islands. The slaves chanted as they worked, and their songs spoke of love, anger, longing, joy, and despair. Under the liberal French and Spanish governors of New Orleans, slaves were allowed the freedom to sing and dance together, which was not always a possibility in other parts of the United States. They made their own musical instruments—banjos from gourds or reeds to blow or pluck—and played music to accompany their dancing in Congo Square and at the many picnics, parades, and other celebrations in or around the city. Many musicians were needed in a city of so many festivities.

Free men of color
often had an entirely different culture from slaves. Some were even sent by their white fathers to European schools, where they studied classical music. People considered the outbreak of jazz
(or ragtime, as it was originally called), around 1887, to be nothing more than European music played badly. Innovations in music, such as syncopation, staccatos, and timbres, later considered revolutionary, were considered by these trained musicians to be mistakes. Variations on a theme, as performed in European music, became improvisations, which were called “jazzing it up.” The raw talent jazz musician would take a melody that consisted of just a few notes, such as that of “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” and play it every possible way in variation.
By the standards of European trained musicians, these jazz musicians either could not or would not play music as it was written. Nice young ladies were not encouraged to play jazz. It was considered disorderly music—“closet music”—rebellious and untraditional. The
Times-Picayune,
in 1918, called an attraction to jazz a “low streak in man’s taste” (“Jass and Jassism”).

Jazz was not born in Storyville, but grew up and came of age there (1897-1917). The product sold in the bordellos was not music. Music was an accessory, paid for by the tips given to musicians. With its many dance halls and bars, Storyville gave employment to many jazz musicians. The audience at the bordellos was generally mellow and agreeable to whatever was played, which allowed the musicians ample opportunity to experiment and improvise. There were also “spasm bands” in the 1890s that played homemade instruments on street corners, such as Emile “Stalebread Charley” Lacombe, who got his start with his Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band and became one of the jazz greats.

Storyville proved to be the melting pot in which the perfect ingredients for jazz were blended: the technical training and knowhow of the downtown black Creole musicians and the raw-talent improvisation of the uptown black American musicians. Here, the two were forced to mix. Their disparate heritages were wed and soon gave birth to jazz. Alan Lomax, in
Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz,”
expressed it this way: “Creoles who played in Storyville were compelled to accept blacks as equals, and this was bitter medicine” (1956, 80).

The Olympia Brass Band of New Orleans.
(Courtesy Johnny Donnels)

Paul Dominguez, a black Creole violinist, explained in the same biography: “See, us downtown people, we didn’t think so much of this rough uptown jazz, until we couldn’t make a living otherwise. That’s how they made a fiddler out of a violinist—me, I’m talking about. A fiddler is not a violinist, but a violinist can be a fiddler” (Lomax 1956, 84-86). As to his feelings about black American pure talent: “I don’t know how they do it, but they do it. They can’t tell you what’s on paper. But you just play it. Then they play the Hell out of it” (Lomax 1956, 86).

This forced cooperation was especially important in building understanding between blacks and whites who played together when jazz was just beginning after the Civil War. Jazz played more than a minor role in the building of mutual respect and admiration between the races. “Piano keys opened doors to many white homes for black musicians,” according to Al Rose in
Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District
(1974, 104).

Many New Orleans-born musicians, such as “King” Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton, achieved fame in Chicago, New York, or on the West Coast after having started in Storyville.

Jazz
funerals are still held, though now almost exclusively for deceased jazz
musicians. In these processions, musicians play sad, slow music on the way to the cemetery, but after they have “turned him loose,” as they say, referring to burying their dead, they lead the mourners away to the
beat of a gay and lively tune, such as “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,”
because they are celebrating the jubilation of a soul gone to its reward. They strut and twirl umbrellas, picking up second-liners (bystanders who join in the singing and marching) as they walk.

There are many clubs where Jazz can be heard, such as: 8 Block Kitchen and Bar at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, the Palm Court Jazz Café, and Preservation Hall, to name just a few. Jazz is still alive and well and struttin’ in New Orleans!

Streetcars

Streetcars have become associated with New Orleans, not because this was the only city in which streetcars ran but because while streetcars were being replaced by buses in other towns, they remained the primary mode of public transportation in New Orleans for many decades. New Orleans has a way of lagging behind in such things, as it did with gas-lit streets and other municipal matters. This lack of desire for change stems not only from lethargy, which might be blamed on a debilitating climate, but also from a habit of clinging to the old ways and its gracious, passing lifestyle.

The streetcars
of New Orleans were the successors of its original railroad
lines. The early railroads were extremely crude, nothing more than iron bars nailed to wooden beams laid lengthwise across ties approximately five feet apart. The rails often worked loose and penetrated the floors of the coaches. Boilers exploded, flying cinders set fire to nearby crops, floods washed out bridges, and cars jumped the rails.

The earliest railroad in New Orleans was the Pontchartrain Railroad, chartered in 1830, which ran on Elysian Fields from the river to Lake Pontchartrain. It ran 5.18 miles with horse-drawn cars, replaced in 1832 by a steam locomotive, the Smoky Mary. The line (probably the second to have been built in the United States) ran for 101 years until 1932.

The St. Charles Streetcar Line, whose predecessor was the New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad, is the oldest continuously operating street railway in the world. The line was incorporated as the New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad Company on February 9, 1833, by the Louisiana legislature and continues to operate today. It ran from the business district of the city up St. Charles Avenue (then Nayades Street) through the Garden District on its way to the city of Carrollton. As far back as 1834, a spur route turned off St. Charles and came out Jackson Avenue to the river along the city’s most elegant thoroughfare. This had been a mule-car railroad. The rate of travel could not exceed four miles an hour. The NO&CRR was later a steam driven railroad, and by 1900, it was all electric. Originally, the NO&CRR terminal was roughly at the end of St. Charles Avenue. In 1846, the town of Carrollton began to extend Carrollton Avenue back through the swamps to a navigation canal known as the New Basin. The roadway was complete in 1862, and an omnibus line was initiated.

After the Civil War, in 1866, General P. G. T. Beauregard
and some of his associates leased the
NO&CRR
for twenty-five years. Many new omnibus and street railway companies were formed in the late 1850s and 1860s. These included the Pontchartrain Railroad.

By 1876, the New Orleans City and Lake Rail Road started running steam “dummy” trains along the route of the New Basin Canal from the city to the lake. An amusement park called West End Park
arose in 1880. The railway line, electrified in 1898, was a 6.5 mile ride from New Orleans on West End trains, which consisted of a motor car pulling several open sided trailers, a thrill enjoyed by thousands.

In 1909, the New Orleans Railway and Light Company
acquired a site known as Spanish Fort. The fort had been in existence as a resort long before West End Park
, and the two parks on the lakefront were long to be competitors for the business of lake enthusiasts. Electric cars ran out to the resort in 1911. The railway company rebuilt and reopened the amusement center, which had been abandoned when the railway service was discontinued in 1903.

By 1953, only two streetcar lines, the St. Charles line and the Canal line, remained in operation in New Orleans. Ten years later, New Orleans Public Service
removed the Canal Line and replaced it with buses, accompanied by loud, vehement protestations.

On May 31, 1964, the St. Charles Streetcar became the last streetcar line in New Orleans. The electric streetcars
now operating on the route (which provides visitors with a tour of the New Orleans business district, the mansions of the Garden District
, the University area, Audubon Park, and the Carrollton area) are typical of the streetcars in use in the early part of the century.

The car itself was designed and built by the Perley A. Thomas Car Company
of High Point, North Carolina, in 1923 and 1924. It is known in New Orleans as a streetcar, not a trolley, and it is treasured by the city. Over the years, modifications have included replacement of the mahogany sash and canvas roof with metal. Eventually, the exact change fare boxes and metal automatic doors were installed to facilitate one-man operations. The most nostalgic features are the exposed ceiling light bulbs and the rich wooden seats. The seats can be reversed, depending on the streetcar’s direction, and have brass handholds on their aisle corners. The historical character of the streetcar is painstakingly maintained. In 1973, the streetcar line was placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the Department of the Interior, 140 years after it was organized.

Through 1987, free transportation was provided on public transit to the nuns of the city, because, so the legend goes, the Ursuline
nuns had prayed so unceasingly for victory in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, when victory seemed so impossible.

In 1988, seven vintage streetcars
painted red with gold trim became operational along the riverfront. These “Ladies in Red,” the first to begin running since 1926, run 1.9 miles connecting the many riverfront attractions.

Two streetcar lines were rebuilt and put back into operation in 2004. The Canal/Cemetery line runs the length of Canal Street, and Canal City Park/Museum runs from Canal Street and North Carrollton Avenue to the terminal inside the entrance to City Park.

Carnival

Most customs, as we have seen, were based on the celebration of feast days of the Roman Catholic Church, although they were not all religious celebrations. The most famous of these is
Mardi Gras,
also known as
Carnival,
which is the farthest thing from a religious holiday. The words Mardi Gras are French for Fat Tuesday, a name that hints at the feasting and partying that goes on throughout the day. Carnival is derived from the Latin, meaning farewell to the flesh.

Mardi Gras is celebrated the day before
Ash Wednesday,
when the forty-day season of Lent officially begins, and Catholics are to fast and do penance. The feast of Mardi Gras was brought to America by Iberville and Bienville, when they christened the bayou they discovered on March 3, 1699, Mardi Gras Bayou. They had found it on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday.

In the years between 1806 and 1823, after Louisiana was American, laws forbade masking and balls, so private clubs were founded instead. In 1827, some students returning from their studies in Paris donned costumes and danced in the streets as they had seen maskers do in Paris. They threw flowers to the crowds watching them. (Later on, they threw flour on the crowds.)