The expensive end of Basin Street, in New Orleans’s Storyville, Louisiana:
The townhouse brothels of Storyville
Postcard view of Canal Street, a bit before the middle of the 20th century.(1940)
View is looking riverwards from around Crozat Street. To left is big archway of the Southern Railway Terminal building at Basin Street. Marquees for Saenger and Loew's Theaters seen. Streetcars running in middle of neutral ground
Basin Street at intersection with Canal Street looking downriver; Kraus Department Store Building seen across street.1935
The Tom Anderson Annex in "The District."
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Alecia P. Long --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the depths of the Great Depression, the federal government, led by a president with a vision of social justice and some interest in the fate of the nation's poorest and most vulnerable, oversaw the passage of the U.S. Housing Act of 1937. For once, local New Orleans leaders had their act together, and the city was the first in the nation to qualify for funds. The city's first six housing projects were racially segregated—two for whites, four for blacks—as was the case throughout much of the South.1 One of the projects for whites was named Iberville, in homage to one of Louisiana's founders, Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville. Located two blocks from both the French Quarter and Canal Street, Iberville is one of only four housing projects that have been reopened to a pitifully small percentage of former residents since Hurricane Katrina. The complex sits on a valuable, enticing, and contested piece of real estate, ardently desired by investors and developers who want to "clean up" the area adjacent to the French Quarter and make it more business and tourist friendly. Despite Katrina's tragic breadth, a closer look at this neighborhood's history reveals that contemporary events resonate with a depressingly familiar past. This is not the first time city leaders have acted to move poor blacks out of this area in the name of "progress." Unfortunately, New Orleans has seen it all before. The neighborhood that became the infamous vice district Storyville, and later a public housing project—built for whites but ultimately populated entirely by African Americans—started out as the low-lying swampy backside of New Orleans proper, the lowdown doppelgänger of the higher, drier French Quarter. 1
When Katrina struck, the Iberville Housing Project had 673 occupied apartments. Some of its residents walked to the nearby French Quarter and worked hard but often invisibly, as maids in hotels or as kitchen staff in the Quarter's many celebrated restaurants. Lacking cars, credit cards, or the several hundred dollars in ready cash necessary to stage any kind of evacuation from the city, many of them stayed behind because they had no other choice. As the water began to rise, many Iberville residents waded through the muck and then lived through the hellish aftermath in either the Superdome or the Convention Center. When they were finally rescued five days later, they were widely dispersed across the country in the chaotic evacuation that followed. The residents of public housing, just like the city's other renters and homeowners, also lost their homes and neighborhoods when the flimsy, federally underfinanced levee system collapsed. Many Americans seem not to realize that fact or to care, perhaps because the housing was federally owned and subsidized
View is looking lakewards, probably from vantage point above the upper French Quarter. The street running horizontally at the bottom of the photo is Basin Street, with the Southern Railway train sheds running down the neutral ground. Streets running vertically from left to right are Customhouse (now Iberville), Bienville, Conti, and St. Louis. The first full block on the left along Basin between Customhouse and Bienville has the most famous upscale houses of the district, including Tom Anderson's, the Arlington, and Mahogany Hall. St. Louis Cemetery #1 is seen at bottom right. St. Louis Cemetery #2 is near the top, in the row of three blocks, with tree-lined Claiborne Avenue behind it. At the top right, a bit of the Caronedelet Canal (Old Basin Canal) is visible beside the railroad yards. The whole of "the District" is seen, which ran from Basin to St. Louis #2, Customhouse to St. Louis.
www.historycooperative.org/.../94.3/long.html New Orleans. Aerial photograph from balloon, 1914, showing "The District" aka "Storyville".
www.perfessorbill.com
Wont you come and go with me
Down that mississippi
Well take a boat to the land of dreams
Come along with me on, down to new orleans
Now the bands there to greet us
Old friends will meet us
Where all them folks goin to the st. louis cemetary meet
Heaven on earth.... they call it basin street
Im tellin ya, basin street...... is the street
Where all them characters from the first street they meet
New orleans..... land of dreams
Youll never miss them rice and beans
Way down south in new orleans
Theyll be huggin.... and a kissin
Thats what I been missin
And all that music....lord, if you just listen
New orleans....i got them basin street blues
(instrumental break)
Now aint you glad you went with me
On down that mississippi
We took a boat to the land of dreams
Heaven on earth...they call it basin street
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/
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Dancehalls, Dives and Bordellos: Where New Orleans Jazz was Born
www.riverwalkjazz.org/jazznotes/Dancehalls/
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1. The parlor of Lulu White's Mahogany Hall
