Interview #1

I began on my quest for New Orleans information with a visit to The Historic New Orleans Collection. I was looking for information on New Orleans neighborhoods; who built them, why were they built, who lived there – I just didn’t know what I was going to find to help me narrow down such a broad topic into something I could really start to explore in depth.
The Historic New Orleans Collection is actually a complex of historic buildings located in the French Quarter. As I found the entrance, I felt the presence of history. The style of the building is typical of the French Quarter, two stories with the second story creating a balcony over the sidewalk beneath. There was something very appealing about going to look through historic documents and photographs for answers on this city’s past in a place that was so historic itself. To me, this is a perfect example of how New Orleanians hold the past near and dear to their hearts, even as they live very much in the present.
I soon realized that the Williams Research Center, where I intended to go, was actually located on Chartres Street and not part of the collection on Royal Street. It wasn’t far, so I decided to walk. As I asked for directions, I smiled to myself as the lady said, “You’ll know it when you see it, it’s a brick building with arched windows.” What a rarity in New Orleans, especially in the French Quarter! No balcony, no pilasters, and no rectangular shuttered windows, I knew I wouldn’t miss it. My black t-shirt soaked up the sun as I made my way down the block. I arrived at the Williams Research Center and crossed my fingers that all I ever wanted to know about New Orleans would be tucked away in this tidy brick building.
The Williams Research Center is open to the general public and access to the collection begins with an interview. I had come to interview them, but the tables had been turned! I had been worried that taking someone’s time with an interview on the spot would be inconvenient, but as I sat down with someone on the reading room staff, I realized that talking about this collection and the history of New Orleans is not only their job, but their passion. I soon learned that this particular part of The Historic New Orleans Collection holds 35,000 books, pamphlets, and periodicals and 300,000 other documents like photographs, maps, and drawings. This was perfect.
I began the interview by telling them what I was interested in and asking for their insight on how to go about finding answers to my questions. I told them I was interested in the social aspect of the development of New Orleans neighborhoods; how had they come to be and why are these neighborhoods so unique to each other in terms of the architecture, figure-ground organization, and their condition today. I said I was specifically interested in the French Quarter, Garden District, and Bywater neighborhoods. They agreed with me that the relationship between the French Quarter and the Garden District would be interesting because of the Creole sector, American sector dichotomy, and that the Bywater was so different from each of the others that it would be a good contrast in comparison. She told me that the WRC has specific collections on the urban development of New Orleans, the French Quarter, Mississippi River life, and New Orleans architecture that might be a good place for me to start looking into the development of specific areas of the city.
I asked if she had any knowledge on the development of these neighborhoods in question and she paused to formulate a response. She began with what I already knew, that Canal Street was the great divide between the Creoles and the Americans. When the Louisiana territory became part of the United States, the people that lived here believed that unrefined Americans must be kept separate from their far more cultured society and therefore city. Canal Street became a kind of dividing line or "neutral ground" where the Creoles conducted trade, but did not socialize, with the Americans. She laughed as she went on to tell me something I did not know, how the Garden District got its name – this beautiful neighborhood whose name invokes a romantic ideology of stately homes and lush gardens – was actually an insult. When the Americans began to build these grandiose homes with visible gardens, the Creoles couldn’t believe that Americans would build such a brazen display of wealth and that this was proof that the Americans were not worthy to be a part of their society. To have a garden in front the front of your house that could be viewed by the public was unheard of by the Creoles and their courtyards. The Creoles nicknamed the area the “Garden District” as an insult to the American way of life.
Information on the history of the Bywater neighborhood was something that she was not as familiar with. I asked if she knew who had traditionally lived there; I had heard that it was one of New Orleans’ first “suburbs” of sorts. She clarified this by saying that Faubourg Marigny (Faubourg being the French word for suburb) was the first area downriver from the French Quarter of unclaimed land and that soon after the city was founded people began to move to this area, so many say that this was essentially the first suburb of New Orleans. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the city’s population could be classified as French Creole, Black, and Anglo-American in that order of population numbers. A lot of the Americans that were just moving to New Orleans continued to move into the American sector of town and the French Creoles and Free Persons of Color continued to live in the French Quarter and the newly forming suburbs downriver. Bywater became a very diverse neighborhood where many different groups of people lived side by side, bringing with them their own styles of neighborhoods.
I could tell that my interview was ending and even though I was finding these pieces of information interesting, I knew that I needed more depth. The reading room staff member I was interviewing was very knowledgeable about the general history of New Orleans and how I could use the resources at the WRC to further my own knowledge, the personal insight I was hoping to find into this subject was not something that was in her area of expertise. She led me to a table in the reading room and explained the layout of the collection and went back to her station to help the next person.
I sat at the table and looked over my hurried notes and tried to figure out the next step. She had given me a good start and it was all very intriguing, but I knew that this was only the tip of the iceberg. It was getting close to 4:30, closing time, and I knew that my perusal of the library needed more of my time than I could spend there on this visit. I thanked the staff member that had been helping me and walked back into streets lined with the history I had just been talking about.

Parts of a Whole

The New Orleans culture is hard to define in single words. To an outsider the culture is limited to the food, the drinks, and the party. So much of the true identity of New Orleans is masked behind tourism and what tourists expect their experience to be in The Big Easy. Culinary traditions can give you a taste for the city, the sound of jazz can give you a voice to the city, the odor of Bourbon Street can give you an associative smell - but part of what defines New Orleans culture is captured only in the day to day and permeates through everything else. The houses, the neighborhoods, and the easy-going way of life is the heart of New Orleans.
After living here and seeing this city from the eyes of a local (albeit transient) rather than the eyes of a tourist, I realize how unique and unreplicable, how precious this
Place and its culture is. New Orleans is still shaking off the devastating effects of flood damage and struggling with luring the people back; not only just tourists but displaced residents. The people of New Orleans not only lost their house, they lost their home. The rebuilding of this city is not limited to the tourist experience of the French Quarter; if this was the case then Disney would have rebuilt New Orleans in their take on the city. The many neighborhoods that give this large city a small town feel and the people that live here are the parts of New Orleans culture that is most vulnerable to the effects of Katrina and the water that came with it.
With the loss of housing in New Orleans, there was a loss of a piece of the complex culture that will not be restored by reinhabiting its neighborhoods alone. When you see the damaged and abandoned houses, you can still see a glimpse of what they were like before. It is easy to give each house a story about who may have lived there and what their life was like, to wonder about how this house as a structure fit together with its neighbors to create a community unique to itself.
After a previous post on the architectural cues of neighborhoods as I drove from one point in the city to another, I began to think about what it was historically that gave each neighborhood its own rhythm, its own spatial indicators of place. Why were these neighborhoods built as they were and who were they built for? What role has the evolution of New Orleans as a large US city played on determining what these neighborhoods are like today? My initial observations made it impossible for me to ignore the missing pieces of what I didn’t know about these places and how each neighborhood is an essential piece to the city.