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Cast Iron Victorian Hinges
When you’re seeking your next deep New Orleans experience, look for the cast iron Victorian hinges. You can still find them on shutters on every block of the French Quarter and in many neighborhoods beyond.1 I learned about these special historic details at the New Canal Museum tour in the Lighthouse.
Note: This is part of my series on atypical things to do in New Orleans, the deep experiences. Click the button to see the rest!
The design allows one to open or close the shutters and lock them in place without tools. You lift the shutter up and then replace it to change its position. These cast iron hinges are so functional in their purpose that there are images of the Lighthouse blown completely over from Hurricane Katrina, but the shutters remain locked in place.
New Canal Lighthouse following 2005 hurricanes via https://www.historic-structures.com/la/new_orleans/new-canal-lighthouse/ Listings for the hinges often include a history explaining that Harvey Lull invented them in 1854. They are referred to as the Lull and Porter Hinges sometimes and commonly the Acme Lull and Porter, or ALP, hinges today.
But the image on the patent for these hinges is similar but clearly not the same. Indeed, a repeated complaint about the 1854 design was that they did not stay closed in wind.
Many designs for hinges appear in the patent records as improvements on the Lull and Porter hinge design. The design that seems most similar to the hinges you can still find in New Orleans to my inexperienced eyes is the 1867 design by Pascal Child.
Lull filed and received extensions for his patent in 1867 and 1876. He claimed poverty. By 1874, he earned only $14,500 — about $427,768.97 in 2024 money or $21,388.40 for each of the 20 years of his patent. Others agreed that his invention should have been worth a lot more, as it was now in common use.
“No opposition to the extension has appeared, but, on the other hand, some eighty prominent hardware dealers and manufacturers (not interested in the patent) residing in the cities of New York, Hoboken, Philadelphia, Reading, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Washington, &c, have petitioned Congress for its extension, on the grounds that the invention is of great value to the public; that the said Lull has not received adequate compensation; that the public will be better protected by the extension, in having good and substantial castings made; and that the cost to the public will not be increased,” William Windom wrote in a report submitted to the 44th Congress on March 20, 1876.2
This wasn’t exactly true. Two years before, in 1874, the report issued by the Committee on Patents did not recommend extending the patent. Henry B. Sayler outlines how much Lull has made from his invention and ends with, “It is but reasonable to conclude that this sum would have been substantially increased had it not been for certain sales of interests in said inventions which were unfortunate in failing to bring to the applicant any returns whatever. No considerable time or money by the applicant in perfecting his invention is shown. Your committee are of the opinion that the equities in this case are not of such a character as to entitle the applicant the relief asked for, and would therefore report adversely thereto.”3
Nevertheless, Congress granted his extension in 1876 for seven additional years.
Patent Case
In 1882, the year before his second extension ended, Harvey Lull sued Charles Clark and several others for patent infringement.45 His claim was that the other hinges were not substantially different than his original invention, which was the mechanism by which the shutters closed and locked and not the specific pieces constructed. The invention was the mechanism, and the court agreed. “Where the mechanism used by defendant’s shutter hinge is a mere formal variation from that of plaintiffs’ invention, having the same mode of operation, it is an infringement of the patent,” the Federal Reporter concluded in 1882.
However, Clark appealed to the Northern District of New York in 1884. The decision resulted in a precedential ruling.6 The defendants objected to the initial ruling because the court found that none of the similar hinges except the Clark hinge were similar enough to infringe on Lull’s patent. They argued that this was an uneven application done without any authority of the court. In other words, the judge couldn’t have been expert in hinges enough to know that the only similar one was the Clark hinge. The court said that it was done to the best of his ability and without substantial confusion or delays. “It would create intolerable delays and confusion, besides putting an unnecessary burden upon the court to hold, that each time the master makes a ruling, the aggrieved party may, by special motion, have it reviewed,” J. Coxe wrote in his decision to deny the motion.
I found at least one case that cites Lull v. Clark (1884). In Pathe Laboratories, Inc. v. Du Pont Film Mfg. Corporation, 3 F.R.D. 11 (S.D.N.Y. 1943), the “motion to quash subpoena duces tecum issued under Rule 45 to produce records before a hearing master authorized to determine the issue of plaintiff’s damages” was denied, and the Lull decision of maintaining the authority of the court to determine what was relevant evidence was cited as a precedent.7
Lull v. Clark is also cited in Modern Pleading and Practice in Equity in the Federal and State Courts of the United States, with Particular Reference to the Federal Practice, including Numerous Forms and Precedents Volume II by Charles Fisk Beach, Jr. from 1900.8
Conclusion
In 1874, Harvey Lull had spent $1,500 on litigation, or about $40,000 in 2024. However, he hadn’t made any substantial improvements on his invention, either via time or money. He invented another totally different hinge in 1874 for blinds.9 He also had patents in 1837 (Improvement in machines for breaking and dressing hemp and flax), 1856 (Improvement in feathering paddle wheels), 1871 (Improvement in auxiliary springs for treadles), 1871 (Improvement in shade racks), and 1873 (Improvement in curtain cord fasteners). I didn’t find any indications that he sued anyone over those inventions.
Perhaps he was right to fight so hard to protect his intellectual property at the time. We are still using a variety of it today, 170 years later. I found a comment on an article explaining that the Acme version of the hinges was patented in 1906. I have struggled to find this patent. Please let me know if you know where to find it!
Timeline
1854: H. Lull Shutter Hinge
1867: Improvement in Hinges for Window Shutters
1867: Lull filed first patent extension
1874: Lock Hinges
1874: Design for Blind Hinges
1874: Patent No. 156,277 to Charles B. Clark October 27, 1874
1874: Lull filed second patent extension
1882: Lull v. Clark and others
1906: ACME Lull and Porter hinge patentedSources
- House of Antique Hardware “Acme” Cast Iron Mortise Shutter Hinges – 3 3/4” x 2 1/2” https://www.houseofantiquehardware.com/shutter-hardware-3-3-4-inch-acme-mortise-hinges ↩︎
- Windom, William. Report No. 160 to Senate, 44th Congress, 1st Session, March 20, 1876. ↩︎
- Sayler, Henry B. (Committee on Patents), Report No. 601 to the House of Representatives, 43rd Congress, 1st Session, May 22, 1874. ↩︎
- Lull v. Clark patent and case info, https://oldhouseguy.com/images/shutters/HingePatentInfo.pdf ↩︎
- “Lull v. Clark and others,” Circuit Court, N. D. New York 1882, Federal Reporter, p. 456. https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0013/0013.f1.0456.pdf ↩︎
- Lull v. Clark, Court Listener, 20 F. 454, 22 Blatchf. 207, 1884 U.S. App. LEXIS 2233, https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/8162499/lull-v-clark/ ↩︎
- PATHE LABORATORIES, Inc., v. DU PONT FILM MFG. CORPORATION, Case Text, Pathe Laboratories, Inc. v. Du Pont Film Mfg. Corporation, 3 F.R.D. 11 (S.D.N.Y. 1943), https://casetext.com/case/pathe-laboratories-inc-v-du-pont-film-mfg-corporation ↩︎
- Beach, Jr. Charles Fisk. Modern Pleading and Practice in Equity in the Federal and State Courts of the United States, with Particular Reference to the Federal Practice, including Numerous Forms and Precedents Volume II, W. H. Anderson and Co., Cincinnati, OH. © 1900, p. 681. ↩︎
- H. Lull Patent for Lock-Hinges for Blinds No. 148,315, March 10, 1874, https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/1b/39/c0/982aa30904e5da/US148315.pdf ↩︎
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Sazerac House: Museum Review
The other night, I had an opportunity to visit the Sazerac House Museum with a private event. The Sazerac House is one of the free museums in New Orleans, and it offers a cocktail tasting with your tour.
The exhibit goes through the history of cocktails in New Orleans, from treatments for disease in pharmacies through Prohibition, including a shrine to Antoine Peychaud. Louisiana was the first place to license pharmacists in the country. The laws were the result of both trying to regulate folk medicine and treat the rampant disease.
During Prohibition, around 5,000 defiant businesses continued serving alcohol, according to the museum. New Orleanians also tried to classify alcohol as a food to get around the regulations of the 18th Amendment. “Hidden shops and bars called speakeasies flourished. Rum-runners used the busy port to transport liquor from the Caribbean,” an exhibit in the museum.
Tourists commonly ask about speakeasies that still exist in New Orleans to this day. We don’t really hide the drinking anymore. In fact, New Orleanians take pride in the fact that we can legally drink on the street. However, there are a few speakeasy type bars around to satisfy the need for secrecy. Reach out for more.
I found the information about coffee houses or exchanges very interesting. According to the museum, by 1852, there were 859 coffee houses in New Orleans where businessmen drank and did business. Cafe du Monde claims an 1862 opening year, but we certainly had coffee shops in New Orleans well before that. (Once someone pointed out that the Battle ofNew Orleans during the Civil War occurred in 1862, I have firmly doubted this claim.)
The exhibit is very well done with multiple stories. If you’re interested in a less serious visit to a museum that still provides valuable knowledge (albeit under an obvious branded long form advertisement for the liquor company) and interactive experiences, the Sazerac House Museum is a great way to spend a rainy afternoon. In the meantime, check out my video about the Origin of the Cocktail below.
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New Orleans Ghosts: The Beauty of Ancestor Worship
Many explanations of New Orleans Voodoo will start with ancestor worship. Ghosts and death and all the accoutrements surrounding ancestors are integral to the monotheistic religion that New Orleans is known for. The rituals around ancestor worship and interacting with ghosts work well with the rituals of Catholicism, like All Saints Day and All Souls Day, feasts celebrating all saints known and unknown and all the faithful departed. The overlapping rituals provide even deeper connections to the afterlife and a strong root in New Orleans.
The Daily Picayune, November 2, 1848, page 2 All Saints Day in New Orleans — Decorating the Tombs in One of the City Cemeteries, a wood engraving drawn by John Durkin and published in Harper’s Weekly, November 1885.
via Wikimedia.The Night of the Pontalba, one of the ladies, a retired Catholic school teacher, told me about an experience she had with a psychic. We were waiting for one of the tour guests to finish a reading in Jackson Square. She asked if we were familiar with it. One of the guests said she does her own readings.
“Now, I am a devout Catholic. I believe. But one time, I had a reading done,” the teacher explained. “It was that lady from New York. My kids really believed in it, so we went to see her at a show. That lady told us things she couldn’t have known.”
Heidi chimed in reiterating the deep knowledge the psychic from New York inexplicably had.
“I asked my priest about it after, and he told me that we believe it’s the possession of the devil,” the teacher continued.
“Straight to confession!” I joked.
“I DID!” The teacher professed. “I went straight to confession before the end of that day, and I don’t mess with it anymore.”
This tracks with my experience with Catholicism also. I learned that Voodoo was devil worship or evil. Interacting with the spirits (that no one doubts exist) is certainly an invitation for demons and possession. However, I learned from people who practice the religion that there isn’t even a devil figure in the Voodoo tradition. The Catholic notion that it is devil worship is based on misconceptions. Ghosts, spirits, and ancestors are prominent in Voodoo, but the devil doesn’t exist.
The Ghosts of New Orleans
“You think you’ve never seen a ghost?” My teacher’s husband asked this one night in the Voodoo class that I took last summer. I’m a natural and trained skeptic, so I admitted that I never saw a ghost before. Although I do believe any weird sounds or moving objects in my home are definitely the ghost of my cat Salome, who died in 2021.
RIP Salome 2009-2021, but please don’t stop haunting me. She serves as my personal New Orleans ghost. “You know those people you see in the Quarters walking by themselves and talking to themselves? Those are ghosts. They don’t all know they are dead,” he explained.
I thought he meant this figuratively. New Orleans can wring you out like Las Vegas, but it’s a different kind of vice. Finding yourself or losing yourself are equally likely in the Crescent City.
Shortly after that, I learned he meant it literally through experience. I saw such a man in the French Quarter one morning when I was also alone. I often go for a walk through the Old City alone in the early mornings for inspiration and because one of my favorite things in the whole world is the French Quarter in the morning.
Dressed in decorated rags and mumbling loudly to himself, I instinctively made sure there was no emergency and let him be. Then, I remembered the wisdom from class and turned to see the ghost again.
He was gone.
There wasn’t a block for him to have turned down. There wasn’t time to duck into a building. He was loudly talking to himself and then like the fog burned off by the morning sun — was he ever there?
Savvy marketers built the tourism industry in New Orleans on ghost stories, some with roots of truth, most entirely made up for marketing. Tour guides and servers and bartenders will tell you personal stories about ghosts that have visited them and then laugh behind your back at the gullible tourists. I’ve even seen other tourists get in on the act and provide life long memories for their comrades in New Orleans.
I don’t believe in gatekeeping information. I also can’t participate in spreading falsehoods that will certainly be warped and repeated without explaining that they aren’t true. However, I am still learning and understanding. Sometimes, I get things wrong.
There are earnest people living in New Orleans who believe the stories, but many are full of shit and know it. No matter how many times people admit to making up the ghost stories or people like me prove them wrong or the guests feel that twinge of disbelief, they still want to hear the ghost stories. And I’m sure some rush to confession after.
I still hold skepticism that my ghost disappeared in an entirely corporeal and logical way and not in a New Orleans or paranormal way. But I have no way to prove what I did or didn’t see. I wonder if I have ever been someone’s New Orleans ghosts on my early morning strolls.
Fewer and fewer people in New Orleans participate in All Saints Day on November 1, but newspaper archives share that this was a festive day with crowded cemeteries in the New Orleans of the past. “All the ceremonies passed off in the usual quiet manner, and we trust that many years will elapse before the interest now taken in its observance shall have died away,” 1848 article from The Daily Picayune. Sometimes the premonitions in the archives are calls to action.
Please tell me your brushes with the paranormal in the comments. Or, preferably, your rituals around ancestor worship. Most of my family’s tombs in New Orleans are regularly maintained, but there has never been a picnic in the cemetery during my lifetime…yet?
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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/ ↩︎
