Posts - Page 14 of 19 -

Some Thoughts on Tour Guiding
AKA the lies of tour guides…

I never expected how competitive tour guiding is in a laid back city like New Orleans, or how willingly so many lie because they think the false story is better. I want to correct the narrative by using the stories of buildings and people that aren’t widely shared to refine our historical framework of both New Orleans and the United States. I have yet to come across a story where the truth is less interesting that the bland lies typically shared by tour guides — complex stories somehow summed up neatly with a bow in 2-5 minutes with very little to challenge your preconceptions.

My tour guiding inspiration is Rick Steves and his public television show¹. This is why I freely share information I learn. He democratizes traveling Europe for the United States, providing free tours and deep looks into historical spots that some may never be able to visit.

New Orleans has just under 400,000 people and about 350,000 of them claim to be some kind of tour guide. That may be a slight exaggeration (a tour guiding term I’ve learned to hide lies), but the industry of “tourism”, or restaurants and hotels according to the Data Center who counted 207,863 total workers in New Orleans in 2018, employed 14,804 and 11,647 people respectively, according to their 2018 study². This 26,451 total (or 12.7% of all workers in New Orleans) doesn’t include a single tour guide! In contrast, the Port of New Orleans supported 21,700 jobs statewide in a 2019 report by the American Journal of Ground Transportation³.

“In 2022, we welcomed 17.53 million visitors who spent $9.1 billion. In 2019, that number was 19.75 million visitors, with $10 billion of spending,” Rich Collins wrote in a 2023 article for Biz New Orleans⁴. In this article, tour guides are included in a 75,000 count for individuals employed by tourism in New Orleans, or about 36% of workers in 2019. This number is nearly three times the Data Center’s estimate and probably a bit of an exaggeration, but I have also seen estimates that claim 80,000-100,000 people are employed in the tourism sector.

The products of the ports may be the biggest industry in Louisiana, but by many measures tourism outpaces other industries in the city of New Orleans. You’d think there would be plenty to share as a result. Even at the upper estimates of tourism jobs, 100,000, and the lower estimate for tourism spending in 2022 ($9,100,000,000), that works out to $91,000 per person, or plenty to share.

I still have not yet gone on a tour where some bit of untruth was shared, including my own. Not because I intended to lie but because my shallow understanding hadn’t yet connected some pieces. I am quite sure this is true for many tour guides who accidentally spread false information, but I’m not sure how many tour guides are following up to learn more and correct their own narrative. My work with NOLA VIP Services spawned in part from Albee’s desire to get the stories right by taking continuing education courses to learn more, where we met.

Our visitors come from around the world, each with their own personal taste. My tours will not be satisfying to some. I want visitors to have a fantastic experience on the tour that will please them the most. If that is a ghost tour of the mythical creatures that haunt New Orleans, then I am not the tour guide for them. I will burst all those bubbles. However! I would love to recommend an amazing tour guide who could satisfy that desire for those visitors, which gives me time to tour the folks who will enjoy my tour and challenge my (inadvertent?) tour guide lies.

Some Lies I’ve Told as a Tour Guide

I like challenges on my tours so I can grow. When someone questions something I say, I have an opportunity to learn something new or teach them something new. I try to question everything that seems unusual and look for sources to explain it, but some things do not seem unusual to me like they do to people from other places or who grew up in a different time.

Once someone questioned why St. Patrick’s Church claims in its tour brochure that the Irish immigrants wanted a place where God spoke English as French was spoken in St. Louis Cathedral.

“Didn’t they speak Latin?”

Wait…didn’t they? Did I just do a tour guide lie?? Turns out the Liturgical Movement started around the time that St. Patrick’s was built with the aim of helping congregations better understand the scriptures by speaking the vernacular languages in churches⁵. The movement culminated with Vatican II in the 1960s. The emphasis on Latin in churches was de rigueur in the first half of the 20th century, but apparently they spoke vernacular languages commonly before that⁶. I learned a lot because of this question, and now I can share that info and its sources with others.

I also once mistakenly claimed that Gallier Hall was city hall for a different city (lie) and that the third Jackson statue was in Virginia (it’s in Nashville). Actually that last one I did over and over until I was recently questioned! I’ve also said that O’Reilly hung the Frenchmen (they were shot).

The Pennsylvania Gazette, Philadelphia, Thursday, December 21, 1769. Page 3.

I welcome pushback because that’s the only way I’ll get better and stop telling the lies. I’ll never know it all. To quote Dr. Crow, a speaker in my History of Voodoo in New Orleans class at Loyola University, “We are all still learning.” But I can try to absorb the knowledge I brush against and disperse it to strangers as I wrap my soul wider and tighter around the sticky mud and shimmering sweat in the crescent cushioned by the Mississippi, simultaneously the most American city and the most interesting city in America, my home — New Orleans.

If you have a tour guide tale you’d like help verifying like Romeo Spikes and Fire Marks, let me know. Maybe we can solve it together.

Sources:

Rick Steves’ Europe. https://www.ricksteves.com ↩︎
“Benchmarking New Orleans Tourism Economy Hotel and Full Service Restaurant Jobs” Robert Habans (The Data Center) Allison Plyer (The Data Center). December 7, 2018. https://www.datacenterresearch.org/reports_analysis/benchmarking-new-orleans-tourism-economy-hotel-and-full-service-restaurant-jobs ↩︎
“Port of New Orleans supports 119,510 jobs nationally, 21,700 jobs statewide” by American Journal of Transportation. April 12, 2019. https://www.ajot.com/news/port-of-new-orleans-supports-119510-jobs-nationally-21700-jobs-statewide#:~:text=Within%20Port%20NOLA’s%20three%2DParish,%244.3%20billion%20in%20economic%20output. ↩︎
“Tourism is Economic Development” by Rich Collins (Biz New Orleans). November 1, 2023. https://www.bizneworleans.com/tourism-is-economic-development/ ↩︎
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Liturgical Movement”. Encyclopedia Britannica. March 16, 2016. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Liturgical-Movement. Accessed 5 April 2024. ↩︎
“Forbidden Translations: A Brief History of How the Mass Came to be Rendered in the Venacular” by Jeremy J. Priest (Adoremus). January 13, 2019. https://adoremus.org/2019/01/forbidden-translations-a-brief-history-of-how-the-mass-came-to-be-rendered-in-the-vernacular ↩︎
Lea Pearl
Is Plaçage a Myth?
Disclaimer: This is ongoing thoughts about the plaçage myth(?) as I try to understand the history of New Orleans and not conclusive research.

I recently posted a video about the myth of plaçage. Some recent scholarly research explains that no one has found a contract regarding plaçage arrangements. We can spin rich tales about our history because so many records were kept via the Catholic Church and the notarial system, but we have no evidence of a written plaçage contract. This research concludes that the concept of plaçage, as explained by the tourism industry of today and of yore, is a myth.

Plaque outside of St. Anthony’s Garden for Henriette Delille. I can’t help but see irony in the name Place de Henriette Delille.

When I started researching the life of Henriette Delille, I realized that she is thought to have been a placée before joining religious life in more recent research. The source cited for the details of plaçage, however, is the now debunked(?) older research. The life of the Venerable Henriette turns on her rejection of the plaçage system she was born into, according to her biographies. If the concept of plaçage is a debunked myth, how does the life of the Venerable Henriette change?

What we know as of now

We know that free women of color often married free men of color. We also know that they outlawed “mixed race” marriages for much of the 19th century (legalized in 1868 only to be re-criminalized in 1894 until 1972, five years after Loving v. Virginia). Further, we know that women of European descent had loving and chosen relationships with men who had African ancestors, such as Mrs. Parlongue who lived for almost a decade with Mr. Parlongue, a free person of color, only marrying officially in 1872. In the same way, women with African ancestors sometimes chose to enter relationships with men who had European ancestors, even though they could not marry. We find lots of evidence of fathers leaving inheritances to their “illegitimate” children in the records.

We know that free people of color in New Orleans enjoyed prosperous lives. Under the French, enslaved people were able to buy their freedom with the Code Noir, which they instituted in 1724 in New Orleans. But we have records of free people of color as early as 1722. We know that the first ships with enslaved people as cargo arrived in New Orleans in 1719. From the very beginning of the European takeover, people of African descent were free in New Orleans.

Free people of color are said to have enjoyed even more liberal treatment under the Spanish regime (1762-1803), whatever that means. By the time the Americans took over (1803), the relationship between people of European descent and those of African descent was souring. The Americans did not take as kindly to the three caste system as the laid back New Orleanians did. It seems that they operated as at least three “races” — those enslaved, those with any African or Native ancestry (divided further by terms to indicate which ancestor was African), and those with only European ancestry — with ever decreasing privileges for those deemed “of color”. Society never treated free people of color equally even though free people of color prospered and provided many of the inventions and much of the culture we still cherish in this city.

Another thing we know is that the Haitian Revolution pushed people to New Orleans around 1803. During this time many enslavers who were banished came to the city, along with free women of color who had fewer opportunities to prosper.

My thoughts on plaçage as of today

In a world where enslavers actively prevented some people from learning to read or write, only relying on written documentation of historic events as proof is an act of ignorance. We cannot continue to use only the documentation left by those of European descent to tell the whole story of the history of New Orleans. We cannot continue to reject rich oral histories that detail how a significant portion of the people lived.

There is an African proverb on display at the Free People of Color Museum. It was also how my teacher for two courses I’m taking now (African History of New Orleans and the History of Voodoo) chose to start. “Until the lion tells his story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” We’ve been denied so much truth by only telling a part of the story. We cannot learn from history until we know it all.

I do not have any conclusion. And I am not sure plaçage is a myth. My next reading assignment is Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy and Freedom in the Atlantic World by Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson. I think Dr. Johnson’s research and analysis will illuminate details of the era that I do not yet understand.

I’d also love any reading suggestions from you.

Sources:

https://afropunk.com/2016/10/know-your-black-history-deconstructing-the-quadroon-ball/

https://afropunk.com/2015/06/op-ed-race-forward-time-to-drop-antiquated-racial-designations/
Lea Pearl
A Tale of Irish in New Orleans
Museum Review: New Canal Lighthouse Museum

March is Louisiana’s Irish American Heritage Month, and my personal immigrant connection to New Orleans is through my Irish Heritage. Today, we credit Irish immigrants with making New Orleans into one of the world’s cosmopolitan cities, helping to shape the accent, and building the New Basin Canal. I always knew that some of my mom’s ancestors came from Ireland to New Orleans. I recently realized that their immigration coincided with the years of the “Potato Famine” or the “Great Hunger”.

My grandmother’s grandmother was a first generation Irish New Orleanian born in 1861. Her parents were both born in Ireland, as was her eventual husband. Her family settled in the Irish Channel. She ran a boarding house on Chippewa Street, like many other Irish women who immigrated to New Orleans and other American cities.

“Many Irish women, married and widowed, ran boarding houses as a means of support. Married Irish women could do so as well as sew on contract or help out in other kinds of family enterprise. The mother of Archbishop Williams of Boston had immigrated to the United States as a single woman and after marriage managed a boarding house while her husband worked as a blacksmith. When he died she ran both the boarding house and a grocery story in order to underwrite her son’s education. Some of the Irish boarding houses run by women also expanded into hotels and restaurants.”
Hasia R. Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century

Early recognition that the epidemic affected strangers who were coming to town for Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras day in 1815 was February 7.
Richmond Enquirer. March 1, 1815.

New Basin Canal

The mass immigration of Irish people in the mid-19th century coincided with the building of the New Basin Canal in New Orleans. “Substantial Irish communities exploded in size across the last half of the nineteenth century in San Francisco, Omaha, Memphis, New Orleans, Cleveland, Detroit, and Denver. The Irish showed up in large numbers wherever workers were needed,” Diner writes.

In the 1830s and 1840s, they hadn’t yet figured out how Yellow Fever spread. But they knew it killed many people who did not grow up in New Orleans. The nickname “The Stranger’s Disease” appeared during this era. They chose to hire Irish people to dig the canal because the cost of losing enslaved people who may die during the construction was greater than the cost of paying Irishmen to dig. They did not also lose an asset when an Irish person died. The Irish had no defenses against the tropical disease. A coinciding cholera epidemic caused the death of 8,000 or more Irish immigrants digging the canal. Ghost stories will tell you that they buried them where the fell — under the sidewalks lining Ponchartrain Boulevard today.

The Lighthouse Museum

The New Canal Museum is located in the lighthouse at the mouth of the New Basin Canal. This is the only portion of the canal that remains today. Before the mid-20th century when it was filled, the canal cut from the lake to the area near where the Superdome is today. There was a turning basin at the end. The canal made it easy to move goods into the city using the lake as a shortcut. The turning basin made it possible for large barges to turn around instead of having to back out of the canal.

Display about how many women Lighthouse Keepers served at this location.

The museum is where I learned about the Victorian hinges still used all over New Orleans. There are images of the lighthouse completely destroyed during hurricanes, but the hinges remain locked in place.

This location is also unique in how many women served. A significant portion of the tour focused on these special women.

I signed up to visit the New Canal Museum through the New Orleans Public Library’s Culture Pass. There is a volunteer tour guide who is extremely knowledgeable about the lighthouse, the canal, and New Orleans. He provides a free tour. He also knew about the Irish influence on New Orleans, including pointing me to to the Celtic Cross Memorial on Pontchartrain Boulevard, which I will share in a coming post.

Irish New Orleans: Other options for learning more about the Irish influence on New Orleans

New Canal Lighthouse Museum

Celtic Cross Memorial on Pontchartrain Boulevard

Irish Cultural Museum

St. Patrick’s Church

Gallier House and Gallier Hall

Irish Channel

Irish New Orleans Trivia

James Gallier was born James Gallagher in Ireland.

Alexander O’Reilly, an Irish mercenary at the service of the Spanish crown, was the Spanish governor who murdered the Frenchmen and gave the famous street its name.

The New Orleans Revolt of 1768 in The Derby Mercury Derby Derbyshire, England April 6, 1770 Page 1

Margaret the Bread Lady was an Irish immigrant whose time in New Orleans was so impactful that a statue of her at the intersection of Prytania and Camp streets was one of the first public statues of a woman in the country.

Margaret the Bread Lady between 1890-1901

Margaret the Bread Lady in 2024

Delphine LaLaurie was born Delphine MaCarty. Her great grandfather was a captain in the Irish regiment of Albemarle who escaped the tyranny of the English kings to France and became a knight of St. Louis. Delphine’s grandfather came to Louisiana from France in 1732.

Source:

Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. The Johns Hopkins University Press © 1983 Baltimore, Maryland.
Lea Pearl