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Mardi Gras in New Orleans
“It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh; and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.” A letter from Samuel Clemens to his sister1.
Lea from the Deep celebrating Mardi Gras He did not say the world has not seen America. He focused on the Americans whose American experience is not complete without Mardi Gras. Many visitors have shared with me on tours that they knew nothing about New Orleans beyond the Mardi Gras stereotypes before the tour.
When I lived in China, I kept a daily blog. It was to keep in touch with my friends and family back home, but some of my entries got public attention. One of my blogs continued getting comments for years until I finally unpublished it. I was tired dealing with the public judgment of the thoughts of 23-year-old Lea.
But that blog was entitled “Is America Culture-less?” And I think I struck some SEO magic with those young thoughts. It was my musing on how incomprehensible it was for me to hear Europeans calling America “culture-less” as a Louisianan. I was in extreme culture shock when I wrote that blog — a mixture of exhilaration and frustration at the new and unknown with a longing earned via a deeper understanding of that which I did know.
I’m learning with more experience that our culture is American culture. So much of the music, food, art, literature, slang…culture of our time springs forth from the mouth of the Mississippi, spread around the world just like so much of the country’s goods. (And don’t forget: everything you love about New Orleans is because of Black people.)
It’s been nearly 20 years since I had to travel around the world to learn how much I love my home. And how much I hate my home. And how much so many others love my home. And how much I have left to learn to understand. My home.
127 days until Mardi Gras 2025. Hopefully I get to meet you while you get to see America from the perspective of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
Sources:
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Canal Street: The Widest Street Debate
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).
Postcard by Adolph Selige Pub. Co., circa 1905 via https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=51605 Widest Street in New Orleans
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 😉
Sources
- “The Historical Significance of Canal Street.” New Orleans FrenchQuarter.com https://www.frenchquarter.com/historical-significance-of-canal-streets/ ↩︎
- Hawkins, Dominique M. Et. Al. “Canal Street Historic District,” City of New Orleans Historic Landmarks Commission. May 2011. https://nola.gov/nola/media/HDLC/Historic%20Districts/Canal-Street.pdf ↩︎
- “Canal Street Study,” City Planning Commission, City of New Orleans. October 16, 2018. https://nola.gov/nola/media/City-Planning/CANAL-STREET-STUDY-FINAL-10-16-18.pdf ↩︎
- “Canal Street Historic District,” Historic Marker Database. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=51605 ↩︎
- “New Orleans Jazz History Walking Tours: Canal Street,” New Orleans Jazz Commission, National Park Service. https://npshistory.com/publications/jazz/brochures/canal-street-walking-tours.pdf ↩︎
- “Canal Street, New Orleans,” Wikipedia.org, Retrieved on October 10, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Street,_New_Orleans ↩︎
- Rumrill, Alan F. “A moment in local history: The ‘Widest Paved Main Street in the World,” The Keene Sentinel, May 9, 2020. https://www.sentinelsource.com/news/local/a-moment-in-local-history-the-widest-paved-main-street-in-the-world-by-alan/article_41403075-ba96-5750-8e4e-ad69d2ea8289.html ↩︎
- “Marshall, Oklahoma: Widest Main Street in USA,” Roadside America. https://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/77221 ↩︎
- Campanella, Richard. “Before the Pontchartrain Expressway: Last days of the New Basin Canal.” Preservation in Print, June 6, 2024. https://prcno.org/before-the-pontchartrain-expressway-last-days-of-the-new-basin-canal/ ↩︎
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Historic Gumbo Recipes
When the weather gets cooler, even for just one day, who else craves gumbo? The traditional stew of seasoning vegetables, meat and rich roux-based soup served over rice satisfies my hunger and my soul during the fall.
When I was growing up, my dad would take my sister and me crabbing in the rivers that end in the lake where the water is brackish. If we caught any smaller ones, my mom would process them and freeze them, always calling them gumbo crabs. She added half crabs in shell to the gumbo to cook. That is still my favorite gumbo recipe by far.
Sometimes New Orleanians mistake authenticity for traditionalism. Authenticity is an evolution by definition, as it is your own. Traditionalism, clinging to the past because it is old, is often not true to now. In my experience, this is often demonstrated through recipes. Many people who live in the area of the country known for making gumbo will tell you that only their recipe is correct. Whatever they grew up eating is the only right way to eat gumbo. Does it have tomatoes? Garlic? Did you use jarred roux? What kind of sausage? Did you dare to mix chicken and seafood? Rice or potato salad? Both?! Add the potato salad or keep it on the side?
The rules for gumbo are exhausting. And entirely made up, like so many New Orleans myths.
Once, someone claimed to me that their recipes were the only authentic ones because they were over 100 years old. This was in the year of our lord 2022, so Louisiana was THREE hundred years old. There are plenty of recipes printed and published before 1922. Why does this person think that’s when authentic gumbo was invented? And why does anyone think that 100 year old recipes will satisfy our modern palates?
Because these are some of the oldest gumbo recipes I found. No mention of roux, lots of tomatoes, and beef…or rat or pickled lizard as the protein.
Gumbo Recipe 1838 The Times-Picayune New Orleans, Louisiana Tue, Oct 23, 1838 Page 2 
Gumbo Recipe 1838 The Times-Picayune New Orleans, Louisiana Wed, Dec 12, 1838 Page 2 
Gumbo Recipe 1842 South-Western Farmer Fri, Jun 17, 1842 Page 6 
Gumbo Recipe 1843 Daily National Intelligencer and Washington Express Fri, Oct 13, 1843 ·Page 2 
Gumbo Recipe 1858 The Charleston Mercury Fri, Jul 16, 1858 Page 1
Let me know which you’re willing to try… Old gumbo recipes show that we should be familiar with the past before we cling to it. Or we don’t even know we are clinging to pickled lizard and owl gumbo.
Do you have a favorite gumbo recipe to share? I’d love to hear it!
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The Night of the Pontalba
There is always magic everywhere in New Orleans. I tell my tours how lucky, privileged, honored I feel to get to live in this special place, surrounded by the fractals of ironwork, lush greenery and happy people. I repeated this gushing refrain near the Pontalba building on my first night tour that almost canceled because it gushed like five inches of rain while they were arriving from the airport. Thankfully, the streets were sparkling and the mood was enchanting as we wandered around the French Quarter.
I was explaining the adrinka symbols in the ironwork on the Pontalba building in the milky midnight. A lady leaned over the balcony we were straining to see in the low light as I failed to point out even the monogram, “Hi!”
“Oh hi!!!” I did notice someone was up there, but I didn’t bother them.
“Y’all want to come up?? No one ever looks up here!”
With that, my new friend Heidi whisked us up to her amazing view over Jackson Square. The stairs are covered in 170ish years of paint, layers and layers warping the shapes.
“Y’all don’t seem like serial killers,” she quipped as we ambled up. And…neither did she.
She toured us around the one bedroom sublet and we spilled out onto the balcony.
I was able to touch the iron symbol I struggled to point out.
The Night of the Pontalba
Side note: I assume the tour guides are simply not pointing straight at Heidi’s balcony when admiring the ironwork, not neglecting to point to it entirely.
We giggled about the mayor’s exploits on those balconies, talked about where we’re from, scoffed at the nutty tales they hear tour guides telling, and then traipsed back into the night, greeting my new friend Heidi again when we passed back through.
A little bit of magic that some might say could only happen in New Orleans. I think it can only happen because humans are generally kind and social animals. New Orleans just embraces the risk a little easier than most places, with a few scars to show for it. And has ancient symbolism embedded in the iron balconies to show off.
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Museum Review: World War II Museum
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.
Read more museum reviews.
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423 Dauphine Street
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 12 
The New Orleans States July 21, 1919 page 10 
The New Orleans Item March 29, 1928 page 14 
The New Orleans States December 29, 1936 page 2 
The Times Picayune July 11, 1942 page 11 
The New Orleans States June 12, 1946 page 9 -
Everywhere else is Cleveland: Who said it?
“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.”
While researching something else entirely, I came across a reference from 1934 of Herbert Asbury attributing the quote to O. Henry. Asbury had already written about New York (The Gangs of New York ©1928) and San Francisco (The Barbary Coast ©1933); he was working on his next book about New Orleans, which became The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld published in 1936.
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
“The Municipal Report” by O. Henry1
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.
Sources
- Henry, O. “The Municipal Report,” © 1904 http://fullreads.com/literature/a-municipal-report/ ↩︎
- Marshall, Alexis. “Curious Nashville: Why Did O. Henry Choose The City For His Famous 1904 Short Story?” WPLN News Nashville, December 28, 2018. https://wpln.org/post/curious-nashville-why-did-o-henry-choose-the-city-for-his-famous-1904-short-story/# ↩︎
- Dickson, Samuel. Tales of San Francisco, Chapter XXIV Frank Norris, Stanford University Press ©1947. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781503621039-056/pdf?licenseType=restricted ↩︎
- “There Are Only Three Great Cities in the U.S.: New York, San Francisco, and Washington. All the Rest Are Cleveland,” June 18, 2015. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/18/cleveland/ ↩︎
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Lesbians in 19th Century New Orleans
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.
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Museum Review: Flooded House Museum
That annual ritual of acknowledging the disaster and flood of Hurricane Katrina. Here we are. I spent the first 18 years after Katrina avoiding any media related to it. Now, guests regularly ask me about it on tours. It’s always a different question, but Katrina is the still one of most significant events in New Orleans history, especially recent memory. My recommendation for paying homage is the Flooded House Museum in Gentilly.
I live in Gentilly, one of the neighborhoods that the levee failure completely destroyed. We bought our home in 2013, eight years after Katrina flooded the neighborhood. It felt like a lifetime ago already then, but half the houses on our block were either still blighted or were just empty lots. We still have never repaired our garage, so it still has the the rust mark showing us exactly how high the water was. Our house only flooded once in its nearly 100 years of history.
In Gentilly, levees.org converted one of the destroyed homes into the Flooded House Museum and Levee Exhibit. It sits at the site of the one of the levee failures, the one that flooded my home. You look through the windows of the house to see the scene a family would have returned to after the disaster. There is also an exhibit that explains exactly what happened, why it happened, and what’s been done to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
This museum is quite literally in the middle of a middle class New Orleans neighborhood, and it’s an extremely heavy topic. So it’s a different kind of experience than I typically recommend in New Orleans. A deep New Orleans experience. If you’re interested in learning more about both the human impact and the science behind the levees, I highly recommend the free Flooded House Museum in Gentilly.
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Museum Review: Historic New Orleans Collection – Captive State
If you only have time for one museum in New Orleans, my recommendation will always be the Historic New Orleans Collection. In the center of the French Quarter, in a historic location with a public courtyard, well-curated, free, and most importantly air conditioned, it is a necessary New Orleans experience. If you want to understand Louisiana on a deeper level, do not miss the current exhibit Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration running until January 19, 2025.
They offer a guided tour of the exhibit a few times a week. I did the tour on a Friday. My guide, Kurt, was thoughtful, calm, and engaging. Our group of five included two New Orleanians, one person from Montreal, another from Toronto via London, and a fifth who was late and didn’t introduce himself. Kurt pointed out some of the finer points the exhibit is trying to make.
The exhibit opens with this startling graph. The central thesis is clear: mass incarceration and slavery are linked, intrinsically. Using laws, the state constitution, and data about the prison and jail populations, the historians have painted a very clear and irrefutable picture of how we got to be the most incarcerated place on earth through regulations around leasing enslaved people for profit which evolved into leasing incarcerated people for profit. The incarcerated people in Louisiana and New Orleans are disproportionately Black; there is a higher percentage of Black people in prison or jail than make up the population. This fact isn’t just true in Louisiana as the Federal Bureau of Prisons reports that 38.8 percent of the prison population is Black while the Census Bureau reports that only 13.7 percent of the population is Black.
Enslaved people and incarcerated people have built and maintained every aspect of New Orleans since the 1700s, including levee repair, city waste and drainage, street cleaning and maintenance, pothole repair, building the Carondelet canal, and cemetery maintenance.
New Orleans is the most American city for many reasons, in my opinion, and one of them is the prominent role of the American institution of race-based slavery. Another is that Louisiana is the most incarcerated place in the most incarcerated nation. We are in a Captive State. We are the Captive State. The America we know was shaped by hundreds of years of oppression, and New Orleans sits at the epicenter of that oppression to this day. The most American city is not necessarily a good title to hold.
We look in horror on the truths of slavery in the United States from centuries ago, yet tend to look away from the horror happening in front of us now. This is largely because incarceration has been increasingly hidden from public view even as they build and maintain the infrastructure we rely on. Everyone who drove into New Orleans from the airport passed the notorious Orleans Parish Prison on the interstate. Yet, very few realize what they see.
The historians at the Historic New Orleans Collection are working to shine a bright, glaring light on the American problem of mass incarceration in Louisiana in particular, and how easily we draw a direct line from slavery to mass incarceration. The tour guide expressly stated his objective was to get more people talking about this problem in a respectful way. I hope to expand the scope of their bright light by encouraging as many people as possible to see the exhibit for yourself.
Truth in advertising alert: I had to return for a second visit about a week later to see the second floor. Here you’ll find images of people in hospice care while incarcerated. It was too much to take in at once. Every room of the exhibit includes a content warning before you begin. I hope you will take the time to see this exhibit and share what you learn with those you love.
