Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans (27 page)

S
panish Fort
became the site of an amusement park in 1883. It wa
s abandoned for a time in 1903, when railroad service to the site
was suspended, and its buildings burned down in 1906. The property was
acquired in 1909 by the New Orleans Railway and Light Company, who rebuilt and reopened an amusement center that included a Ferris
wheel and other rides, picnic pavilion, restaurant, and bathing facilities.
Ownership of the property later reverted to the city. Plans were drawn in 1928 to develop the lakefront from West End to the airport, concluding the final chapter to Spanish Fort as an amusement center.

In 1928, the amusement park was relocated at the lake end of Bayou St. John on land already “filled” and its name changed to Pontchartrain Beach. Eventually, the Levee Board decided to establish a permanent site for an amusement park several miles farther east and to grant a twenty-year lease. The Batt family (headed by Harry Batt Sr., president) acquired control in 1934, and in 1939, the new Pontchartrain Beach opened at the end of Elysian Fields Avenue. The Zephyr was the park’s symbol. World War II created a boom for the park, bringing servicemen in droves to enjoy recreation. The park closed in 1983.

Another delightful outing at the turn of the century was a drive on Old Shell Road, which ran along the Metairie side of the New Basin Canal. The drive went past the New Orleans Country Club on Pontchartrain Boulevard and the new Metairie Cemetery on a trail lined with palms and oleanders and a view of pleasure boats on the water.

The Second Renaissance of the Vieux Carré: The Vieux Carré Commission

Baroness Pontalba is credited with the first rebirth of the Vieux Carré in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time when the trend was to move out of the old part of town and build a mansion on St. Charles Avenue. Her beautiful apartments flanking the Place d’Armes served as a catalyst, stirring up renewed interest in the French Quarter and pride in its history.

In the decades following the Civil War, there was a sharp decline in the commercial importance of the city, and New Orleans remained impoverished. There was no money for expensive renovations, and once again, the French Quarter began to deteriorate. Families who could afford to move migrated to the newer parts of town. Jackson Square, at the turn of the twentieth century, was once again seedy. The Pontalba Buildings were derelicts with vagrants for tenants, and the whole neighborhood was fast becoming a slum.

In the year 1908, an entire block of the finest buildings in the Quarter was destroyed to build the Civil Courts Building. The Old St. Louis Exchange Hotel
with its majestic dome, once the pride of the Vieux Carré
and the site of the State Capitol in 1874, fell into decay; badly damaged in the 1915 hurricane, it was eventually demolished.

New Orleanians who cared about preserving their historic treasures
began to take note in the 1920s and 1930s that, unless
some-thing was done to protect what remained of the Quarter, it would

The Cotton Exchange Building on the corner of Gravier Street and Carondelet Street, built 1882-83. Demolished in 1920. Statues on the third floor were moved to City Park for a brief period of time. The two caryatids on the ground floor now stand on City Park Avenue.

St. Charles Hotel, viewed from Canal Street circa 1925. This is the third structure on this site, demolished in 1974. Currently, it is the Place St. Charles.

soon disappear and be lost forever. The Vieux Carré
Commission was therefore established in 1921, and, by state constitutional amendment in 1936, was given the power to regulate architecture through control of building permits. Its purpose was to renovate, restore, and remodel the old buildings and put them to new uses so that they might pay their own way. Thus began the second renaissance of the Vieux Carré.

Fortunately and unfortunately, President Roosevelt
’s Works Progress Administration almost simultaneously moved in with money and talent to recondition parts of the Quarter, giving special attention to
the French Market
, Jackson Square
, the Cathedral
, the Cabildo
, the Presbytère
, and the Pontalba Buildings
. While no one would dispute the fact that a slum area was rehabilitated and that the land values began to rise, it was equally true that progress as envisioned by legislators in Washington had a different definition in New Orleans. WPA “progress” involved the demolition of some of the city’s earliest structures.

Opulent lobby of the third St. Charles Hotel, circa 1925.

The WPA’s main concern was to put food in the mouths of the hungry (workers on those projects were earning fifteen dollars to twenty dollars per week), but it began “making improvements” by eradicating some of the French Market’s
oldest buildings. The Old Red Store
(1830) was demolished and Gallitin Street on the riverfront, that “dark alley of mystery and murder,” was wiped out altogether “to relieve the city of an area of human decay.” According to Robin Von Breton Derbes, in
New Orleans Magazine
in 1976, this act was “the equivalent of demolishing Camp Street to get rid of Skid Row” (75-78).

None of this was done, however, without a fight. Daily, the powers that be in the WPA and the Vieux Carré
Commission locked horns: the WPA argued that slum clearance was its first concern while the Vieux Carré Commission
insisted that the French Quarter
retain its Caribbean character. But the WPA plowed forward.

St. Louis Cathedral at Jackson Square.
(Courtesy Kathy Chappetta Spiess)

Improvements were made, however, and some would argue that they were for the better. Gallitin Street was replaced with the present air-steel sheds of the Farmer’s Market. Since a major restoration in 1975, the historic French Market
’s buildings, distinguished by graceful arcades and stately columns, offer a glimpse of a scene of activity that has existed in the same place since the early 1800s. The Halle des Boucheries
(built in 1813), the Halle des Legumes
(1822), and the reconstructed Red Store are all part of the rebuilt French Market complex that authenticates early French Quarter
architecture. One end of the market is tucked into the bed of the river; the other is at Jackson Square
.

Flagstone promenades, sparkling fountains, and old fashioned benches add touches of a bygone era. At the Jackson Square
end is Café du Monde
, with its inimitable coffee and beignets (without which no visit to New Orleans is complete).

Just outside Café du Monde
, the steps of the beautifully landscaped “Moonwalk
” are decorated with fountains, lampposts, and benches and are well secured by guards so that the view of the river by night is safely visible and, in the opposite direction, the Cathedral
, breathtakingly illuminated.

Street Patterns

The circuitous route that the river takes in meandering around the city of New Orleans affected the entire way of life of the city’s citizens. Only the Vieux Carré, laid out in a grid pattern, had straight streets. Beyond the Vieux Carré, property lines extending back from the river date back to the earliest land grants ever to exist in the city. Property lines ran perpendicular to the levee in long narrow strips, for good reason: all landowners needed access to transportation, and transportation was the river. Also, the only good land was on the natural levee; its value diminished as it approached the backswamps.

But the river wrapped the city in concave and convex curves. On the land inside the convex curves, the streets were squeezed together. Cross-streets ran parallel to the river, running in straight lines toward the curve of the river, then shifting slightly in conformity with the curve as they crossed property lines, which later became boulevards: Melpomene, Jackson,
Louisiana, Napoleon, Jefferson, Broadway, and South Carrollton.

St. Charles Avenue (originally called Nayades) was the great boulevard running parallel to the river. It was actually the rear boundary line of the original land grants. It was inevitable that such a wide boulevard, situated on a habitable part of the natural levee halfway between the noisy riverfront and the backswamp, would become the main residential avenue of the American city.

Black and White Population Patterns

It was the street patterns that determined the patterns of black and white population settlements. In early New Orleans, in spite of social segregation, there was no geographical segregation of blacks and whites. Slaves lived in the homes of their owners. Free blacks working for whites lived within walking distance of their employers, usually in small houses in back of the big houses owned by the whites. When the boulevards were divided into blocks, neighborhoods developed with an affluent white perimeter, enclosing a small nuclear cluster of blacks, which has survived into the present. The architecture of these cluster houses was not conspicuously different from that of poor whites. It was, in fact, a far less detrimental type of segregation than that which is found in most northern cities.

Chinese in New Orleans

After the Civil War, when slaves were no longer available for work in the cotton and sugar cane fields, the Chinese began arriving in Louisiana. Many remained in New Orleans, and in the late nineteenth century there developed a Chinatown of sorts near the present-day Public Library extending in the direction of Loew’s Theater, opium dens and all.

Since weather was hot and humid in New Orleans, and since it was the style for businessmen to wear starched linen shirts and suits, Chinese laundries were popular with the male population and sprung up in every neighborhood. The Chinese also dried Louisiana shrimp, prepared in their own villages in the swamps below New Orleans. Many Chinese restaurants emerged. It is an ethnic group that has retained its own speech, culture, and attitudes more than any other to come to our city.