Few places that have existed for hundreds of years do not have the souls of past humans tied to their history. While researching May Baily’s Place, I learned about these people who lived, loved, hurt, and sometimes died at 423 Dauphine Street. Interestingly, 423 Dauphine was the location of or home to several suicides or attempted suicides. All could be the restless spirits lingering at the address, and all deserve our attention to remember them, even briefly.
If you are interested in my help figuring out who your ghost is, the history of your home, or mysteries in your family, reach out! I’d love to find the answers together.
The New Orleans Item October 16, 1917 page 12The New Orleans States July 21, 1919 page 10The New Orleans Item March 29, 1928 page 14
The New Orleans States December 29, 1936 page 2The Times Picayune July 11, 1942 page 11
“There are only three cities in America — New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” — Who said it?
I never thought to question the attribution of this famous quote. I’m not sure why because I have certainly sought out the original sources for other quotes. With this one, though, I did not question that Tennessee Williams was snarky enough to say this. But did he?
The attribution seems to come from a profile written about Tennessee in a 1984 book by Mel Leavitt called Great Characters of New Orleans. This was one year after Tennessee died. The profile begins:
“There are only three great cities in the United States,” Tennessee Williams once said. “New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. All the rest are Cleveland.”
The New Orleans Item. Friday, February 9, 1934, p. 7.
This completely derailed my research. 1934 is certainly before Tennessee Williams could have said this as he didn’t make it to New Orleans until 1938-39. Tennessee was born in 1911. Who said it?
O. Henry started his 1904 short story, “A Municipal Report,” with the quote, attributing it to Frank Norris:
Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are “story cities”—New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco. —Frank Norris
A post I created and shared before I learned the truth.
But the story is about Nashville. O. Henry wanted to prove that there were other great American cities beyond these oft-repeated three2. It seems that Herbert kind of missed O.’s point with his giddy predictions.
“I expect to find more glamour and less sordidness in New Orleans than I did in San Francisco,” Asbury said, a particularly hilarious premonition in hindsight.
The Times Picayune, Sunday, March 10, 1935, p. 16.
Frank Norris was a newspaper man, who wrote primarily about San Francisco. Samuel Dickson included the quote in a chapter about Frank in his 1947 book called Tales of San Francisco, but I cannot find this book to see what it says beyond the Google preview. The chapter is available for purchase for $423, so maybe my next big tip will fund this curiosity. My sister’s public library in the Bay Area has eight copies available, so maybe she will be inclined to help her sister out. 🙂 Update November 2024: During a visit to my sister and her new baby, I insisted on a trip to the library to get the new baby a library card, of course. I took the opportunity to look up the chapter on Frank Norris. I’m certainly glad I did not spend that $42 because the quote is a total throwaway line. It’s a section about his early life, talking about his parents, and it implies that Frank was not the first to say this either.
Of course, the parents did the worst possible thing parents of an overimaginative child could do. When the boy was fourteen years old they were established in Oakland, and from Oakland soon moved with him to San Francisco. They stayed for a short time at the old Palace Hotel, and then Norris purchased the Henry Scott residence on Sacramento Street near Octavia. Life became a living story for the boy. In fact, it was only a very few years later that he was to be one of the first to say, “There are just three cities in the United States that are ‘story cities’ — New York, New Orleans, and best of all, San Francisco.”
In 2015, the website Quote Investigator published an article about the quote, finding similar references all the way back to 18954. New Orleans does not become involved in the mix until 1936 in this timeline though, and O. Henry published his story in 1904. However, the timeline makes it evident that there are plenty of other references to the three cities much earlier than our beloved playwright could have said it. And that there are many other cities that are considered irreplaceable in this massive country.
I have no doubts that Tennessee did say this once, long after the original source was forgotten. Mark Twain, another source sometimes cited for the three cities quote, wrote in his autobiography:
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”
I wonder what Tennessee would think about the quote and how his name has become lastingly attached to it.
I recently completed the LGBT History of New Orleans course at Loyola University, taught by Frank Perez. This class was an amazing telling of the recent history of some of the most influential people in this city’s history from the first hand perspective of Frank who was either there for the stories he told or heard them first hand from the people who were.
He made an observation in one of the classes about memory and how fallible it is. How we know eye witness accounts are not reliable and memory is even less so. How hard it is to discern the Truth from the myth in a world where humans are reporting the “facts”…As a journalist by training, I ponder the idea of Truth a lot.
When Herbert Asbury was writing The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld, he made a similar observation on his research. “…Asbury preferred to use the files of old papers because he had learned from experience that people do not remember accurately, and will usually substitute imagination for facts in the weak spots.” Tour guides are certainly known to claim that we shouldn’t let facts get in the way of a good story…
January 15, 1936, New Orleans States, New Orleans, Louisiana, Page 22
Frank also mentioned a book called The Mysteries of New Orleans in one of the lectures1. It’s a compilation of newspaper articles written in German by Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein in the 1850s while he was living in New Orleans. One is provocatively titled “Lesbian Love” in which he describes a colony of lesbians living near the lake and along the New Basin Canal. At the time, the use of the word lesbian would have referred to someone from the island of Lesbos. However, his articles were translated to English in 2002, well after the use of lesbian as a homosexual woman was part of our parlance.
I learned in my studies of Voodoo near the lake and New Basin Canal is also commonly reported as the location where the Voodoo queens resided. I’ve learned since that “lewd and abandoned women” were relegated to The Swamp, an area near the New Basin Canal in the Lorette Laws of 1857. Is this all a coincidence or were these the same colonies of women fulfilling all of these roles for the imaginations of male writers?
Of course, I immediately got in line to borrow The Mysteries of New Orleans from the library. It’s about 700 pages long, so I’m working through it. In his review just after Hurricane Katrina, Christopher Capozzola writes2:
“A tender romance between Claudine and Orleana makes up one of the novel’s many subplots. The love scenes are tame by modern standards–“How sweet and supple your waist is!” is about as sultry as the pillow talk gets–but the author’s sympathetic portrayal of their love is striking. “Lesbian ladies,” he noted, “are not as bad as most, and they are as decent and well mannered as the rest of the world of women, after their fashion.” Equally astonishing is his insistence that their love was common in New Orleans in the 1850’s. “We find them,” he writes, “in clubs of twelve to fifteen on the Hercules Quay, along the Pensacola Landing, and all along the entire left side of the New Basin.” In the rest of the novel, Von Reizenstein depicted real people and locations to give his work credibility; it’s not out of the question to think that these same-sex communities existed too.”
So maybe New Orleans is the birthplace of lesbian romance along with so many other things. Maybe this is yet another layer of the matriarchy of New Orleans. Maybe it was just a made up rumor like so many tour guides have perpetuated.
Did you know that sometimes the Court of Two Sisters is reported as a cover for lesbians in tour guide stories? Here’s the true story of the two sisters.
I hope you’re having a wonderful Southern Decadence!
Sources
Perez, Frank, “Queer Arts and Letters.” LGBT+ History of New Orleans, Loyola University of New Orleans, June 12, 2024. ↩︎
Capozzola, Christopher. “New Orleans: birthplace of lesbian romance?” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 13, no. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2006, p. 40. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A140547843/LitRC?u=tulane&sid=googleScholar&xid=1ac5d4f3. Accessed 13 June 2024. ↩︎
Klotz, Sarah. “Black, White, and Yellow Fever: Contagious Race in The Mysteries of New Orleans.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 2, 2012, pp. 231–60. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26467184. Accessed 13 June 2024.
