Storyville was an iconic neighborhood in New Orleans from 1897-1917. The buildings from this historic area of town, which is not far from the French Quarter, have mostly been destroyed, though the importance of the district is still felt today. It was the only legal red light district in the U.S. and could be seen as connected to the inhibition-free, New Orleans cultural tradition of "laissez les bon temps roulez!" Three key features of this district that (arguably) still thrive in the city today are jazz, nudity, and political corruption.
Below you will find a map of the neighborhood (perhaps a visit is in order?) and two images
taken by a photographer named E.J. Bellocq. He was a commercial photographer who also took several photos of the women working in Storyville. He kept this collection of photos a secret—none of them surfaced until after his death. The most famous jazz performer to come from Storyville is Louis Armstrong. I am going to try to get my hands on two helpful books about the area: a collection of posthumously printed photographs by Bellocq entitled Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, the Red-Light District of New Orleans and a history text from 1974 by Al Rose entitled Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District.Below is a brief article from archaeology.org giving an overview of the history of this neighborhood.
—Shelley
Tales from Storyville
Volume 55 Number 6, November/December 2002
by Eric A. Powell
http://www.archaeology.org/0211/abstracts/storyville.html
America's most notorious red-light district, Storyville was also the nation's only legal one, courtesy of carefully worded Ordinance No. 13,032, which absolutely forbade any and all prostitution in New Orleans outside of a tightly defined district just northwest of the French Quarter. The ordinance was pushed through in 1897 by Alderman Sidney Story, who hoped that consolidating prostitution in one area would salvage property values in neighborhoods where brothels were sprouting unchecked. Though known at the time as simply the "District," local wags quickly dubbed the area Storyville. The name stuck, much to the alderman's enduring mortification.
Storyville prospered for 19 years, attracting everyone from sailors and traveling salesmen to
luminaries like P.T. Barnum and Babe Ruth. Louis Armstrong delivered coal to the district as a boy, and lingered to hear the great jazzmen who performed in elegantly appointed bordellos and scruffy saloons. Madams like Lulu White and "Countess" Willie V. Piazza became local celebrities, paying rent that lined the pockets of New Orleans' most respected businessmen and enriched institutions like Tulane University and the Archdiocese of New Orleans, neither of which shrank from owning property in the district. According to one estimate, in its heyday Storyville brought in profits of one million dollars a month. Connections to powerful clients that frequented their "sporting clubs" ensured Storyville's madams a role in New Orleans politics.All that came to an end in 1917, when a wartime federal order meant to eradicate prostitution near naval bases shut the district down. Most of Storyville's bordellos, saloons and "cribs" (residential buildings wher
e prostitutes rented rooms) were razed to make way for the Iberville federal housing projects in the 1940s. In 1949, jazz historians made a bid to save one of the last of the brothels, Lulu White's once-ritzy Mahogany Hall, immortalized in "Mahogany Hall Stomp," a jazz standard recorded by Armstrong and others. Despite their efforts, the building was demolished. Today, only three forlorn structures from the Storyville era remain. By all appearances the physical legacy of the district has been swept away, but the past has a way of surfacing at unpredictable moments, no matter how hard you try to bury it.Eric A. Powell is an associate editor of ARCHAEOLOGY.
7 comments:
Shelley, this is great! I love the idea of putting Storyville as one of our stops. Its history and even its name is so evocative!
Jazz, nudity and political corruption? I think these should be our three stops! All aboard, first stop, Storyville!
What is fascinating to me (since I've been focusing my research in the 19th century) is that the Storyville starts exactly one street over from Rampart street, which was (from about 1805-1870), where all the placees lived. Placees were quadroon mistresses of white men who were courted in a formal debutante ball process, were given a house and money for their entire lives by their sponsor. Their children were generally educated, with boys going into trade and girls becoming placees themselves. (I'll attach some interesting pics on a separate post.) The dates of the end of the placage system and the start of Storyville is telling. One formalized system of prostitution dies and another emerges to take its place. . .
Karen, I agree that the name is quite evocative. If you take the name "Storyville" literally (as in, the place where stories are told, created, adapted) I think the concept could apply to all of New Orleans. New Orleans has such a mythic place in the stories of the US. I've also come across a few books that could be interesting to connect to this concept: _The Booklover's Guide to New Orleans_; _Literary New Orleans: Essays and Meditations_; and _Literary New Orleans in the Modern World_. They're all interested in considering the New Orleans that haunts the pages of writers' work. I like the idea that New Orleans is a place that prompts artistic inspiration and expression (of authors who lived there, wrote there, visited there, imagined it). Tennessee Williams is just one example. Let me know if you think I should pursue this research in more depth. Perhaps "Storyville" could be one of the stops, and could encompass more than just the original location and history of Storyville.
Yes, let's run with all of these images of Storyville - the "real" place (already mythologized, I suspect), the places of stories and artistic expression, the links of different socially acceptable levels of prostitution.
Good stuff.
Placage wasn't prostitution. Placage was more like polygamy. When placage ended, most the creole placees and their lovely daughters, who were being raised to be placees, resorted to prostitution because they couldnt marry white men, most creole men couldnt provide them with the life they were accustomed to living, and black men were not socially equal to their social economic status. Prostitution was a way a woman could earn $10/hour, where the average working wage was 22 cents.
http://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/placage/
HOWEVER, I did enjoy reading this article. As a future tour guide of New Orleans, its my responsibility to do very deep research and confirm all of the myths with facts. There are 3 remaining structures left of Storyville, and personally, I would love to have a renovated apartment in one...right on the edge of the French Quarter and the Treme. I'm thinking about developing my own Women of New Orleans History Tour, discussing slave women, voodoo women, placage, prostitution, and more.
Post a Comment