Museum Review: The Southern Food and Beverage Museum
The Southern Food and Beverage Museum on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard is across the street from historic buildings and the New Orleans Jazz Market. It seems to be an anchor for a museum district in Central City. I visited on a quiet afternoon. The guide who helped me at the front desk was very informative.
Uranium Glass in the Absinthe Museum, an exhibit in the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans
The exhibit starts with a section on Al Copeland and Popeye’s Chicken, who they credit with spreading the taste of Louisiana around the world. It then spills into the American Museum of the Cocktail and then the Absinthe Museum. The Absinthe Museum was a collection in a separate museum that closed in 2010. I spent most of my time soaking in the extensive collection of paraphernalia and in depth history. The hint about a former absinthe speakeasy in the French Quarter makes me want to run down another rabbit hole.
Then there is an exhibit on coffee and its history in New Orleans. The exhibit included green coffee beans and a video demonstrating cafe brulot along with a history of chicory as a coffee additive. I loved learning New Orleans receives beans from 31 countries, accounting for 530,000 tons or 30% of all of the coffee that enters the United States.
My favorite part of the museum was an exhibit dedicated to the women of the culinary history of New Orleans including contemporary legends like Susan Spicer and Leah Chase, as well as historical greats like Madame Begue and Rose Nicaud.
Woven in between the major exhibits are the stories of the food of Southern states, with many brand names mentioned. The last exhibit is, of course, Louisiana with king cake, snoballs, poboys, and St. Joseph’s altars featured along with famous restaurant signs. But no gumbo, pralines, callas, or jambalaya.
Overall, the museum is a wonderful look at the influential culinary history of the South with a particular focus on cocktails, New Orleans and Popeye’s Chicken. It was an interesting approach to associate the culinary history largely with brands, but I think that brands do define culinary history in a lot of ways.
Is Canal Street, at 171 feet wide, the widest street in the world? Many sources on the history of Canal Street will include the fact that this is the widest street in the world, sometimes in America, sometimes in New Orleans. The reason for the girth (and the name) is the planned but never built here canal.123
Highsmith, Carol M, photographer. Canal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana. [Between 1980 and 2006] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2011630059/>.
While I grew up across the lake, my mom grew up on this side. Canal Street in the 1960s was the shopping district. I learned from stories from my mom’s childhood about going shopping with her aunts on Canal Street, getting dressed up and taking the bus to spend the day going to the fancy shops and eating yummy food. It was a special treat to get to go to Canal Street to go shopping.
Canal Street was laid out around the turn of the 19th century and reached its most prominent time in the 1840s, according to Richard Campanella, when the Americans were flooding into the city and settling upriver from the French Quarter. Canal Street became the border between the two neighborhoods, Faubourg Ste. Marie and the Vieux Carre. Some say that the term neutral ground (still used today instead of median) originated here. This area was a neutral territory between the Americans and the Creoles, who some historians say had hostile relations.
I heard the fact about the widest street in the world and repeated it without question4. Canal Street is still often a sparkling magical place of my mom’s childhood in my memories. But the person I repeated it to, thankfully, questioned it. It came up again on a tour recently, where I had to break the news.
Widest Street in the World
A Google search for “widest street in the world” does not return Canal Street as the answer. The result, in Argentina, is 110 meters and 16 lanes wide, which is more than double the width of Canal Street. They built this roadway well into the 20th century though. It couldn’t have been the widest road in 1891 when the Library of Congress published images with captions claiming Canal Street as the broadest street in the world.
View on Canal St., New Orleans broadest street in the world, U.S.A. Washington, D.C.: J.F. Jarvis, Publisher, Jun 2, 1891. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress,<www.loc.gov/item/2015645053/>.
Broadest Street in America
You can find many sources showing Canal Street as the broadest street in America5. Wikipedia has narrowed this down further, “Canal Street is often said to be the widest roadway in America to have been called a street, instead of the avenue or boulevard titles more typically appended to wide urban thoroughfares.”6 This seems like it’s possibly only oft-repeated by tour guides as it doesn’t include a source for this claim, but using semantics like these does make it far more likely to be true.
Googling “widest street in America” returns many results too, including a street in New Hampshire that is 172 ft wide7 and one in Oklahoma that is “six ft short of being as wide as a football field”8. This could mean 294 ft (a football field is 100 yards or 300 ft long), 354 ft (360 ft long with end zones), or 154 ft (160 ft wide).
A Google search for “widest street in New Orleans” does return Canal Street in the AI results! AI is compiling answers from all over the web, so if it’s on the internet we can believe it, right?
Screen shot of AI Google results on October 13, 2024.
The planned canal that was never here was actually built where the Pontchartrain Expressway/Boulevard is today, which is obviously wider to the naked eye than Canal Street, with a huge park as a neutral ground. According to Richard Campanella, the New Basin Canal was 60 ft wide with a foot print of 300 ft9. The photos demonstrate that construction took up all of the allotted space for the new road, more than double the space of Canal Street. But the road over the canal is called boulevard not street…
Semantics
One side of the former canal is called West End Boulevard and the other is Pontchartrain Boulevard/Expressway. Perhaps the separate names cause the distinction? Or maybe it’s because it’s a boulevard and not a “street”. I don’t know of any roadways named street that are wider than Canal in New Orleans, but I also am definitely not familiar with all the streets in New Orleans. Do you know of any wider streets?
Was Canal the widest roadway in the world at sometime? Possibly. Is Canal the widest street in New Orleans now? Maybe. That road in Argentina is an Avenida, not Calle, so it might not even outrank Canal. I think with enough qualifications we can probably make anything a superlative. Tour guides are especially good at this trick, so be careful about what you repeat 😉
After more than 10 years, I revisited the World War II Museum again recently. My first visit was likely around when it opened in 2000 as the D-Day Museum. My grandmother is a charter member, and I know she insisted we visit. But I didn’t save that ticket. I visited again in 2004, while I was in college. It was still the D-Day Museum then. The museum is in New Orleans because of the Higgins Boats, which were manufactured and tested in New Orleans and were essential to the D-Day landing at Normandy. Stephen Ambrose is also often given a lot of credit for the location of the museum.
Tickets from 2004, 2013 and 2024
I visited again in 2013 (after the Freedom Pavilion was opened) with my husband’s grandfather. He was a World War II veteran with an amazing story of his time in Europe. From a tiny town in Mississippi, Grandad did not hesitate to tell us that he was drafted and did not want to leave for the war. But he loved to tell us stories of the things he wanted to remember. Like the time he coincidentally met up with his brother on the battlefield in Europe.
Enterprise-Journal Fri, Mar 08, 2019 Page P76
For this visit, I used the Culture Pass from the library. In the decade since my last visit, the museum has expanded considerably. I raced through the first part, the old part, so that I could see what’s new. The most notable expansion is the Liberation Pavilion where the Holocaust and the Monuments Men are remembered.
Holocaust
A major criticism of the World War II Museum before was that there was little to no mention of the Holocaust. This does feel like trying to discuss the Civil War without slavery. The latest expansion, opened in November 2023, aims to solve this omission.
Replica of the attic where Anne Frank, her family, and others hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam
There is now a replica of the attic where Anne Frank and her family lived in hiding in the museum, personal testimonies from Holocaust survivors, replicas of the bunks in concentration camps, and an interfaith chapel in the museum, among many other moving artifacts to remind us that the world we live in was fundamentally shaped by World War II.
Monuments Men and Women
The area dedicated to the Monuments Men has replicas of priceless works of art to tell the story of the special people who worked to return to their rightful owners the art and objects that were stolen by the Nazis. This work is now done by a foundation as many works have never been located. Update 2024: Another piece found and returned.
Display in the Monuments Men exhibit
Conclusion
I spent two and a half hours in the museum, and I basically ran through the first part that I’ve been to several times without reading anything. There is almost no way to do the National World War II Museum quickly. However, it covers all aspects of World War II now, so you could easily go to only the exhibits that interest you most. All are very in depth and well done. Many are interactive. The explanations are nuanced. War is messy, and this museum tries to make sense of the strategic efforts of the military leaders while constantly reminding us how much life was lost and how much was the result of luck. The personal stories alongside the hand drawn military maps and mass printed propaganda posters are all important details to remember.
I’m grateful that I have the opportunity to visit whenever I want because I could never take it all in at once. If you’re interested in anything related to World War II, this museum is an essential stop.
