In 1930, Signer Sewing Company hired local architects Charles Favrot and Louis A. Livaudais to erect a Neoclassical style storefront at 934 Canal Street to house a flagship Singer Sewing Center. [1, 2]

In 1850, Isaac M. Singer invented the first practical sewing machine for general domestic use. This sewing machine was the “first to embody features allowing continuous and curved stitching, his machine employed an overhanging arm holding the needle bar over a horizontal table, thus making it possible to sew on any part of the work.” [3]  In 1855, Singer’s invention won first prize at the Paris World’s Fair. In 1885, Singer demonstrated the first workable electric sewing machine at the Philadelphia electric exhibition. In 1910, Singer began mass-producing domestic electric sewing machines. [4]

During the early twentieth century, the sewing machine increased the speed at which women could fabricate goods and clothing in the home. By 1951, according to SVP, the company that now owns the Signer brand, it is estimated that Signer Sewing Centers trained over 400,000 housewives to sew in one of the 600 Singer Sewing Centers located nationwide. [5] When visiting the Signer Sewing Center at 934 Canal Street, women could purchase sewing machines and notions, in addition to attending classes to educate themselves on how to use the machinery and additional sewing skills such as embroidering and quilting.

The Singer Sewing Center provided a space for women to gather and socialize. Here women could meet together to learn new skills and discuss personal matters and popular culture, in turn creating a culture all their own. Singer Sewing Centers advertised their store as a place women could go to learn hemstitching, picoting, and covering buttons, and come out “walking on air.” [6] According to a 1947 Life Magazine advertisement, Signer only sold their machines in their sewing centers, “never through department stores or other outlets,” further solidifying the sewing centers as a meeting place for women while ensuring Signer secured the greatest profit possible. [6] The Singer Center created a new culture all its own centered around homemakers and women who wanted to create things.

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Starting in the 1920s and increasing exponentially in the 1930s, and onwards, the urban landscape of New Orleans, like many urban municipalities across the country, began to change as a result of a series of racially restrictive covenants and zoning ordinances, New Deal housing policies, local government blight and slum clearance initiatives, and real estate and banking practices. These changes took root with the passage of several federal and state acts, key among them was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Act of 1933, the National Housing Act of 1934 that established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and the Housing Act of 1937, also known as the Wagner-Steagall Bill, which created the United States Housing Authority. The formation of the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) established by Congress to refinanced mortgages in default to prevent foreclosures, and HOLC’s subsequent color-coded Residential Security Maps, or redlining maps, to measure real estate risk assessment of neighborhoods based on the racial demographics set up a discriminatory practice of urban divestment and exclusion. Outlined in the lending protocols of the FHA’s Underwriting Handbook, the practice of redlining institutionalized racial residential segregation, discriminatory housing practices in mortgage lending, and divestment in urban communities. The establishment of the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) by the Louisiana Housing Act of 1936 coupled with the passage of the federal Housing Act of 1937, charged with coordinating and financing the construction of public housing developments in urban settings, set the stage for the displacement and relocation of low-income Black residents in public housing in the city.

In 1938 New Orleans became the first city in the country to receive federal funding under the Housing Act of 1937, codifying racial residential segregation in public housing and the social positioning of black residents, particularly low-income black women, in the city for decades to come through the public demonization of their subsidy-status and punitive socials policies that justified their mistreatment. For decades, nearly all mortgages underwritten by the FHA supported white families, while private banks frequently discriminated against Black households seeking mortgage assistance in the neighborhoods in which they resided. Slum clearance and urban renewal projects disproportionally uprooted black communities, and the locations chosen for public housing developments both displaced and confined black people to racially and economically segregated neighborhoods. Within its first three years, HANO secured $30 million in federal loan contracts for the construction of public housing, and by the time the U.S. entered World War II in 1942, the first six public housing developments in the city were completely occupied.

Four developments were reserved for Black occupancy

— the Magnolia (1941) Lafitte (1941), Calliope (1942), St. Bernard (1942) and the two developments for white occupancy — the St. Thomas (1941) and Iberville (1941).

By 1957, HANO was the fourth largest public housing authority in the country managing over 10,000 units or public housing, with Desire (1956) being the biggest development. Low-income black women found it difficult to find places to live in this continually changing housing landscape as racial and gender stereotypes, biases, and fears combined in insidious ways rendering public housing, for many, their only ‘choice.’ Public housing became sites of housing security, contradictions, activism, demonization, violence, community, poverty, and isolation.

Hidden within the history of public and subsidized housing in New Orleans are narratives of black women who engaged in a movement without demonstrations.

Circumscribed by opportunity and discrimination, possibilities and restrictions, affordability and surveillance, low-income black woman organized to improve the lives of public housing residents, transform housing policies, advance tenant rights, encourage resident engagement, support policy changes, and participate in community building efforts through partnerships and collaborations.

With the formal incorporation of The New Orleans Public Housing Tenants, Inc. in 1972, and the establishment of the Community Services Department at HANO in 1974, public housing residents significantly increased involvement in shaping management decision-making affecting their communities.

Through resident councils, the New Orleans Citywide Tenant Council, and interactions with housing officials, black women challenged poor maintenance policies, fought against illegal and unfair evictions, sponsored neighborhood clean-ups, created programs for senior citizens, developed recreational and after school enrichment programs for youth, organized against police brutality, established community centers and resident management corporations, formed non-traditional resident councils, created work opportunities for residents, partnered with local groups establishing child care centers and health clinics, hosted cultural events, advocated for safe and healthy housing conditions, and worked daily to address the impact of economic and housing-related poverty, violence, and substance addiction. Black women challenged dominant stereotypes purported by the media, elected officials, and others that criminalized their poverty, family size and composition, and residential neighborhoods. Resident leaders engaged with and reshaped housing institutions as they fought to improve the living conditions of their families and communities. Unable to actualize rights gained during the Civil Rights Movement, low-income black women in New Orleans, like many of their counterparts in urban cities across the country, developed mechanisms to address the harsh circumstances of the everyday violence of racist and sexist housing policies and the irresponsibility of government actions that accompanied living in public housing. Although limited by their housing options, the biographies, political agency, activism, struggles, triumphs, setbacks, experiences, and advocacy efforts of low-income black women—and the communities that supported them—is often invisible or marginalized in historical narratives of black freedom struggle and women’s liberation movements.

Here we acknowledge some of the women who transformed public housing in New Orleans:

Ursula Spencer, Mildred R. Taylor, Dorothy Allen, Lolita King, Hilda LeBlanc, Viney D. Reynolds, Donna Johnigan, Yvonne Marrero, Augusta Kerry, Barbara Villere, Debra Davis, Kathleen Matthews, Desiree Williams, Cynthia Wiggins, Leah Green, Birgil Green, Dianne Lee, Angela Winfrey, Lillie Clark,

Constant Haynes, Christopher Homes, Karen Johnson, Marla Taylor, Demetria Farve, Barbara Jackson, Fannie McKnight, Helen Lane, Crystal Jones, Barbara Carter, Beverly Magee, Yvonne Miles, Laura Johnson, Irene B. Griffin, Cynthia Doughty, Laura French, Delores Morrel, Sharon Jasper, Theresa Nicholas, Kim Piper, Stephanie Mingo, Kawana Jasper, Julie Andrews, Jessie Brock, and Ollie Pendleton.

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The Morales-Arlington’s tomb once held one of New Orleans most notorious madams, Josie Arlington, from the city’s equally notorious red light district, Storyville. Arlington's reputation and the tomb she created for herself have attracted visitors and locals alike, from the time of her burial until today, when some observers say they have caught a glimpse of lights dancing around her mausoleum -- Josie Arlington, trying to get back into her grave.

Sometime around 1910, Josie Arlington purchased a cemetery plot at Metairie Cemetery for $2,000. The idea that a retired proprietor of a house of ill repute would eventually be laid to rest amongst some of the city’s elite outraged many. However, Arlington wasted no time after her purchase of the plot to begin work on her memorial. On May 11, 1911, she signed a contract with sculptor Albert Weiblen to create her final resting place. Arlington wanted it to make a statement about herself, spending a whopping $5,500, and personally selecting every last detail. Once finished, the public immediately began to read meaning into the tomb’s design, seeing it as a symbol of her life in prostitution. The reddish-brown granite was said to represent the red light district of Storyville and the fire torches to represent her chosen profession. Some have seen the bronze female statue as symbolizing a virgin’s doomed attempt to enter Arlington’s brothel. Others have suggested the statue represents Josie as a young girl, sneaking back into her father's house. What Josie saw in the statue of the girl we will never know – we just know that she purchased it from Munich, Germany.

On February 14, 1914, Arlington took her last breath and was laid to rest in her tomb. She did not enjoy its amenities for long, however. Only a month after Josie's death, her family began fighting over her money and property, which amounted to over $50,000. Arlington's family was forced to sell not only her mansion on Esplanade Avenue, but her tomb as well. The tomb was sold to Jose A. Morales, a New Orleans attorney. Under cover of night, Metairie Cemetery officials removed Josie Arlington's remains to a remote, undisclosed location in the cemetery. The name at the top of the tomb was changed to J. A. Morales and was soon occupied by Morales’s wife and four children.

The fight over Arlington’s estate and the removal of her remains created heated local discussion and headlines in local newspapers. Crowds were drawn to the tomb, and once a flashing red traffic light was installed on the New Basin Shell Road that ran alongside the cemetery, the crowds grew even bigger, as the red light reflected off the reddish granite of Arlington's tomb, creating the illusion that the tomb was on fire. As Metairie Cemetery historian Henri Gandolfo wrote, “The red glare flashing on and off added a mysterious sense of drama never intended.” The red light was later removed and a cross was carved on the back of the tomb, calming the crowds. Today, Metairie Cemetery authorities still refuse to divulge the site of Josie Arlington's remains, but her abandoned tomb continues to attract her admirers.

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-Errol Laborde

In 1425, at the young age of thirteen, voices spoke to a French teenager named Joan telling her to provide aid to Charles VII of France in his plight against the English during the Hundred Years’ War. Mounted on her steed, this teenage girl led the French forces to drive the English troops out of Orleans.

The ‘Maid of Orleans' continued her fight against the English until her capture in 1430 when a group of Burgundians turned her over to the British. On May 30, 1431, the British charged Joan with heresy and burned her at the stake. On July 7, 1456, the church and government absolved Joan of her crimes, and centuries later in 1909, Pope Leo XIII beatified Joan. Shortly after, in 1920, he canonized the warrior for her outstanding virtues. The presence of St. Joan, the Maid of Orleans, drifted through many centuries, over the ocean to a special place in the sister city of her hometown, New Orleans.

Originally cast by French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet in the late 1800s, the statue of Joan that can be found in the French Quarter entered the world as one of nine similar statues. With no destination in mind, Joan patiently waited in a French warehouse until her day of liberation. Adventure finally found her in 1958 when a New York Company purchased the warehouse where Joan sat, longing for a change of scenery. While her warehouse mates traveled to places like Melbourne, Quebec, and Philadelphia, Joan traveled to one of the liveliest cities in the world, New Orleans. Though relocated to a lively city, Joan languished in storage once again, this time in a New Orleans warehouse for approximately fourteen years while the city struggled to pay her $36,500 price tag. Even though French President Charles de Gaulle paid her ransom in 1964, she remained in the dreary warehouse until 1972. Joan emerged under the Southern sun at the Rivergate Convention Center.

Dwarfed by the two giant buildings that surrounded her, Joan never gave up and stood proudly in her New Orleans Business District home. Temporarily disappearing in 1984, Joan reappeared in time for the World's Fair. Finally, in the fresh air, Joan enjoyed her freedom until her recapture by a lengthy legal battle in the 1990s when the Harrah’s Company sought to knock her off her pedestal in the Business District. Supported by her new troops - government officials, historians, and the community - Joan charged into battle once more. In October 1999, a triumphant Joan advanced to her current location in the Place de France in the French Market.

Rearing back on her steed, Joan represents the strength, power, and perseverance of New Orleans, a city that no foe may defeat.

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Juanita Pierre and her partner Leslie Martinez opened Les Pierres, the first Black lesbian owned bar in New Orleans, in the 1980s. Located on the corner of Pauger and Rampart Streets in the Marigny, their Saturday night crowd spilled out of the bar’s French doors and onto the street. Known for their drag queen and king shows, it was a place where “anyone was welcome.”

In some sense, this scene at Les Pierres was nothing new. Queers have paraded Rampart Street, found lovers in dark French Quarter bars, starred in gender-bending variety shows, and visibly defined the nightlife of the city since at least the 1920s. Queer women have long labored in the larger economy of sex and entertainment tourism here. Some bars they frequented were a part of the hustle economy and some were a relief from it: The Starlet Lounge, the Goldenrod Inn, Miss Kitty’s. Les Pierres was the kind of place locals went after their late shifts in the Quarter had ended. What was new about Les Pierres and this particular moment in lesbian bar culture was that, beginning in the 1950s with Dixie Fasnacht of Dixie’s Bar of Music, women now owned and operated these businesses for themselves. They joined the ranks of Brady’s, Charlene’s, Pinstripes and Lace, Rubyfruit Jungle—at least a dozen bars in total—that were women-run bars catering to lesbian patrons from the 1950s to the early 2000s in New Orleans.

“We did it for us,” Pierre firmly declares in her recent interview with “Last Call,” a podcast dedicated to the stories of people who experienced the thriving (and now non-existent) lesbian bar culture of that era. The stakes were high. Outside the doors of Les Pierres was a culture dedicated to profiting from these women while violently limiting their experiences, desires, and mobility, especially those who challenged gender and racial norms. But that culture was not simply outside the doors, safely at a distance.

A long history of police brutality and harassment in particular threatened what this community continually created together. The 1950s saw large-scale raids of bars frequented by gays and lesbians. In 1953, one lesbian bar in New Orleans was raided 78 times by the police. Women were frequently charged with lewd conduct, being improperly attired in men’s clothing, and having no visible means of employment. After arrest, their names and addresses were printed in the papers, and if they had jobs, they usually lost them.

By the 1960s popular white lesbian bars like Brady’s anticipated police surveillance and so limited dancing and touching in the bar, insisting on feminine attire for their clientele. Bar patrons and bar owners paid off police and the mafia in hopes of avoiding being targets of vice squads. Upon arrest, white women faced shame and stigma, while Black women faced time in state prisons. In the long glare of Jim Crow, gay and lesbian bars have been as segregated as the rest of social, political, and economic institutions of the city. Though often targets of state violence, white lesbian bars enforced the status quo as much as they challenged it.

When Les Pierres opened, they defied the past prohibitions on intimacy between women and the enforcement of gender norms. They created an erotic space of defiance for women of color. The energy of collective organizing was nurtured in spaces like Les Pierres. These bars were spaces of political incubation where radical visions and lifelong friendships were born.

And so in the dance, the music, the sexual energy of Les Pierres was a long legacy of electric resistance.

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Marie Baron was among thousands of forçats, or French criminals sent to Louisiana in the early 1700s as forced laborers. Most were convicted for life terms, but if they survived the first few years (the majority did not), they could acquire a de facto freedom. In 1719, Marie was shipped with several other women from France “under orders of the king.” New Orleans’ mythology has remembered these early women as prostitutes, but Marie’s life simply illustrates the harsh conditions of French working-class women, both at home and in the colonies.

A young woman of 18 when exiled, her crime was that she had become pregnant out of wedlock. After burying a little girl at Biloxi shortly after her arrival, she married and settled at Natchez, Mississippi. There she lost her first husband and another child in the Natchez Indian uprising in 1729 and was taken captive. After she escaped to New Orleans, Marie met and soon married a soldier named Dumont de Montigny. Years earlier in France, Dumont had been assigned to watch over 500 forçats waiting to embark for Louisiana. Many were low-ranking soldiers who had attempted desertion. The rest, according to Dumont’s colorful mémoire, were “young people whom their relatives wanted to be rid of, whom they were sending, it was said, to seek their fortune. Without a doubt I was one of this number.”

Marie and Dumont settled into a cottage at the corner of Dauphine and Bienville in the French Quarter. There they had two children, the first of hers to survive into adolescence. The family struggled with poverty (and more imprisonment for Dumont) and raised most of their food in a little kitchen garden next to their house. For them, there was no fortune to be found in the colony, but they did survive.

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Harriet Martineau, Saxe Weimar, and numerous other antebellum writers described New Orleans free women of color as promiscuous, seductive characters who sought partnerships with wealthy white men so they could live a life of leisure. Indeed, Dorothée Lassize had a partnership with a wealthy, white, Protestant man, which conforms to this fantastical description. However, she was no licentious harlot, but rather an enterprising businesswoman in New Orleans’ booming nineteenth century economy. Dorothée married Samuel Moore, the son of Alexander Moore, an Irish immigrant who migrated to the United States in the mid-eighteenth century. Samuel administered sales of timber from Natchez and became a small time slave trader, but his main source of income was buying and selling New Orleans real estate. He took full advantage of the city’s rapid growth in the early nineteenth century, buying and selling properties at a torrid pace. Samuel and his partner Dorothée, combined, bought and sold over fifty properties in New Orleans and raised a family of seven children. The couple never legally married but remained together for life and had seven children. The baptismal records show that Samuel and Dorothée went to great lengths to establish white identities for their children. The baptismal records for daughters Sara Virginia and Maria Camille are recorded in the St. Louis cathedral register reserved for slaves and free people of color, while the other five children were recorded under the section for people of unmixed European descent. In the case of Samuel Jr. and Urania, Samuel Moore signs as the father but the name of their mother, free woman of color Dorothée, is omitted. It was common at this time for fathers of bi-racial children to leave their name off the record, but Samuel’s involvement shows that he wanted to permanently link himself to his children. On the contrary, Dorothée’s name was left off of Samuel Jr.’s and Urania’s records in order to establish their whiteness.   Samuel Moore and Dorothée’s main business was buying and selling of property in New Orleans French Quarter. They flipped houses on Chartres, Conti and Burgundy Streets, among many others. Dorothée’s most famous sale was her successful petition to sell two properties on Dauphine Street, using the profits to buy herself a stately townhouse on St. Louis Street. Of the free people of color who owned property, women make up 70% of the total people in the records. The 1820 census includes 607 free women of color listed as the head of their households. While some of these women acquired property through marriages, others represented themselves in buying and selling real estate. In situations in which free women of color have acquired wealth through their white husbands, historians have inaccurately depicted them as promiscuous golddiggers. In fact, this thinking reflects patriarchal thinking that discounts the limited power of free women of color who were often only given a few options, none of which didn’t include some kind of compromise of autonomy. Kimberly Hanger writes, “Free black women fought daily oppression and sought to assert their identity, in part by striving to attain what was important to them: freedom for themselves, friends, and relatives: stable, long-lasting unions that produced children and cemented kin networks; prosperity for themselves and future generations; and respect as hardworking, religious members of the community. In most cases, they faced an uphill battle.” In many significant ways, Dorothée’s life rejects stereotypes of free women of color. Samuel Moore’s lifelong commitment to Dorothée Lassize defied the plaçage stereotype, in which white men only entered into relationships with women of color as their mistresses, often buying them property in secret, and disassociating from them and their children in public records.  Dorothée’s daughters Eulalie Allain and Charlotte Eugenie married free men of color, unions that stand in contrast to Martineau’s claim that free women of color raised their daughters to seduce rich white men. Before her death, Dorothée wrote a thirty nine page will, a testament to her financial success in life. Her carefully inventoried estate includes a number of valuable properties and the following enslaved persons: Felicité, a 27 year old enslaved woman for sale for $1100 Henriette, an enslaved woman for sale for $1100 An unnamed enslaved girl of 13 years for $660 George, Henriette’s brother, 16 years old, $870 Charles, 7 years old, sold to Samuel Moore for $300 Benny, an enslaved woman of 60 years of age, also sold to Samuel Moore for $370 Mary, an enslaved “African” of 48 years of age for $300 Total: $3600 ($93,000 today) As the population of free people of color increased in the second and third decades of the 19th century, they purchased not just real estate but enslaved persons as well. There were a plentitude of reasons why free people of color might get involved in the slave trade, but the majority are business-related. During the early 19th century, New Orleans was the largest slave market in the South, and any person in the Vieux Carré couldn’t turn a corner without seeing or hearing about an enslaved person for sale. If you could gather the considerable wealth needed to purchase someone, most considered buying an enslaved individual a good investment.

Furthermore, many free people of color’s families had lived in a three caste system for many generations, either in Louisiana or St. Domingue. The only new change for them would be the new American regulations that prohibited any kind of fluidity through aforementioned coartación or manumission. Despite the possibility of owning enslaved people in the free black community, the seven expensive people in bondage listed in Dorothée’s will denote her as an unusually lucrative female entrepreneur.

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A wealthy man, Louis Hazeur De Lorme (ca. 1760-1828) was a highly respected man in his community. He shared a large indigo plantation with his brothers-in-law, Francois and Louis Xavier three and half miles away from the city, where their families lived together. In the memoirs of Pierre Clément Laussat, a high-ranking French official who acted as a colonial prefect to Louisiana in 1802, the Hazeur plantation is described with envy: Laussat praises the Hazeurs as “real French knights.” He also reported with disgust that while none of the men were married, and they were surrounded by children “whose color betrayed their origin”. He blamed these mixed race children on a “colonial weakness,” referring to the prevalence of interracial relationships on the French colonial islands of the Caribbean.

The free people of color, who lived in a liminal space often without the full liberties of freedom, but with considerably more independence than enslaved persons, sometimes became slave owners themselves. The Hazeur family, which began with an interracial relationship between a white man and a formerly enslaved woman, demonstrates the tension between social boundaries, slavery, and love in antebellum New Orleans. The Hazeurs exemplified the conflicting role that free people of color were forced to play in a racially divided society.

Felicité Hazeur (ca. 1772-1835) spent the first twenty years of her life in bondage, enslaved on the Hazeur plantation, where she was likely born. After Francois Dreux, her legal owner, died, his widow, Marie Dreux Hazeur de Lorme, inherited their enslaved persons and took over management of the plantation. Shortly after Marie took over control of the plantation, Marie’s brother-in-law, Louis, and Felicité conceived a child while Felicité was still a slave in Marie’s possession. It’s impossible to know the intentions, motives, or personal details of their relationship. The truth could lie anywhere between a story of two people falling in love despite societal mores and a man raping a woman he thought of as legal property. The answers to these questions are lost to history. Nevertheless, we must remember that the power imbalance between Louis and Felicité was undeniable, and Felicité would have felt compelled in some way to acquiesce to her master’s will for fear of negative, or even fatal, consequences.

Felicité remained in Marie’s possession until a daughter, Helena Hazeur (1792-1853), was born. After that, Marie sold Felicité and Helena to Louis. On the deed of the slave sale, Marie noted that she gifted Felicité and Helena “out of the love for her brother.” Louis freed both women immediately after. Helena was immediately baptized and Louis proudly signed his name as the father, perhaps suggesting affection for his children, or even pride in his paternal role. The sacramental records show that Felicité was originally listed as Felicité Dreux, under her deceased master’s name, which was crossed out and corrected to Felicité Hazeur. It’s possible that the name change reflected Felicité’s status as property in Louis’ household or as his wife, if they had secretly married in the church. As the years went on, they had four more children. All were baptized and recognized as Louis’s natural children, as seen in the records as well as Felicité’s will.

Despite Louis’ relationship with Felicité and their mixed race children, Louis was, above all, a businessman. Surviving evidence suggests that the only enslaved persons that he ever set free during his long involvement in the slave trade were Felicité and their daughter. An estimated 90 enslaved people worked the Hazeur indigo plantation, which was of such notable size that it was mentioned in his neighbor’s will. He bought and sold slaves frequently, as both a source of income and a way to keep his plantation fully staffed.

After being emancipated, Felicité herself became a slave owner. She’s on record in 1834 as selling slaves to both her daughter Antoinette and her son in law, Basil Crocker. We can guess that Felicité may have treated the enslaved people she owned differently, or kept them in her family in order to keep them safe from unknown purchasers, but the fact remains: she did not emancipate them. Helena Hazeur, her first child, was also a slave owner. A white woman gifted her an enslaved woman when she turned 24 in 1816, a common practice for young ladies of prominent status who were assumed to need the help in keeping up their home and appearances. The Hazeurs of color likely rationalized the economic side of slavery, just like Louis. Dehumanization and distancing helped him to continue trading slaves and working them in unforgiving fields, an ideology he in part passed onto his family of color.

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Standing at the intersection of Basin and Conti Streets and facing just west of St. Louis Cemetery #1, is the former location of the Storyville district in the Tremé neighborhood.

From 1897 to 1917 New Orleans established a centralized prostitution district known as Storyville, named after the city alderman Sidney Story who sponsored the creation of the district. Storyville was bound by Iberville, Basin, St. Louis, and North Robertson Streets.

In this period, upscale brothels in mansions such as Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall lined Basin Street and employed parlor pianists such as Jelly Roll Morton. On the backstreets Fewclothes’ Cabaret, Pete Lala’s, the 101 Ranch, and the Tuxedo Dance Hall provided many of jazz’s most notable performers with stable income and an environment in which they could hone their various musical styles.

In 1917, the district closed in upon order from the U.S. Navy, and the neighborhood was razed in 1939 to make way for the Iberville public housing development for low-income white residents.

The closing of Storyville provided romanticized lore regarding the birth and spread of jazz. This legend emphasizes the closing of Storyville as a catalyst for musicians leaving New Orleans and spreading the style. In fact, jazz musicians performed throughout the city from before World War I well into the 1920s and 1930s.

1216 Bienville Street, now a local corner store, is the site of Frank Early’s My Place Saloon, one of only three remaining structures from the Storyville period. Tony Jackson, considered to be one of the great piano professors of the period, worked at Frank Early's before moving to Chicago in 1912.

"I also looked forward to every night in the Red Light District, when I was delivering Stone Coal to the girls working in those Cribs. I could hear these wonderful jazz musicians playing music the way it should be played." -  Louis Armstrong [6]

"It's not true that nothing happened after Storyville closed. [In New Orleans] before and after Storyville closed there were so many great jazz musicians, so many cats all the way down the line. Buddy Petit, Kid Rena, Sidney Desvignes, Sam Morgan, Punch Miller....there was plenty of work with vaudeville and minstrel shows, roadhouses, circuses, riverboats, and lake-boat excursions, as well as circuits and tours that traveled the South."

-Musical Artist/Educator Danny Barker

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Many visitors to New Orleans are familiar with the song “The House of the Rising Sun,” made popular by the English band The Animals in 1967. The song itself has roots far back in English folk balladry, long before any association with New Orleans. While many places in New Orleans have made claims to be the ‘Rising Sun’, archaeological investigations at 535 Conti Street, a place identified in documentary records as the location of the “Rising Sun Hotel” in the 1820s, have added just a bit more information to the debate over the origins of the New Orleans variation of the song.   In 2005, an archaeological investigation took place at 535-537 Conti Street as a joint project between the Historic New Orleans Collection, Earth Search, Inc., and the University of Chicago, led by Dr. Shannon Dawdy. According to census records and other archival data, multiple renditions of boarding houses and hotels existed on this site through the latter part of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. While the association of the lot with the ‘Rising Sun’ garnered the most attention, archaeologists identified material remains of a rich history spanning many eras of occupation at the site.   Prehistoric Native American Settlement Dawdy and her team found Native American pottery sherds in layers predating the French settlement of the city, thus providing direct evidence for indigenous occupation of the natural levee in the French Quarter area. While there is no record of a Native American encampment in this area, Iberville’s journal notes that members of a Quinipissa village would walk from the mouth of Bayou St. John to the Mississippi River, as a connection to Lake Pontchartrain, presumably passing by this site.    1730 – The Mandeville Family The first recorded French occupation of the site dates back to the early 1730s.  The Mandeville family owned the property, and it is believed they used the site as a garden based on the abundance of organic material found during excavation, including crushed shell and coral used as fertilizer. Census records from 1726 indicate the Mandevilles enslaved two African people and one Native American person while they owned the Conti Street property. Archaeology from this period has been used to inform researchers about sustenance patterns in the early French colony.   1760 - 1820 The Chabot Women & The First Rising Sun Hotel Between 1760 and 1790, the house switched ownership multiple times and the property was subdivided into lots, which were later rejoined.  In 1791, a man named Louis McCarty purchased the property and all extant structures, but a fire destroyed it in 1794.  Following this fire, a wooden structure was rebuilt and the property was sold to an Irish immigrant woman named Madame Margaret Clark Chabot shortly after her French husband died. The title transfer document from August 22, 1796, states that Ms. Chabot was illiterate when she purchased the property already owning the materials needed to run a boarding house, including multiple walnut tables, 5 dozen chairs, and 25 new mattresses.  Ms. Chabot owned the property for approximately 28 years, and under her management, the boarding house shows up in a number of historical accounts.   In 1821, L.S. Hotchkiss and Co. purchased an advertisement in the Louisiana Gazette for a “Rising Sun Hotel” on Conti Street. The ad claims that the new Rising Sun Hotel would maintain the best entertainment, “which this house has enjoyed for twenty years past,” referring to Chabot’s period of ownership. With the modern association of the ‘Rising Sun’ with prostitution, some of the language of the ad sounds suggestive, as it states things like “Gentlemen may here relay upon finding attentive servants.” However, Rising Sun was actually a common name for taverns in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The Rising Sun Hotel burned to the ground in a catastrophic fire in 1822. It was replaced with a new, more upscale brick hotel, referred to variously as the Richardson Hotel, the Conti Hotel, and the Veranda Hotel. Later, the building was reused for various commercial ventures, before falling into disrepair after another fire in the late nineteenth century.   The different fires that affected the lot made it possible to stratigraphically separate different periods of occupation at the property in some detail. Artifacts from the 1822 Rising Sun Hotel fire were of particular interest, as they included fancy glass tableware, wine bottles, items of jewelry and personal adornment, and numerous tin-enameled rouge pots or galley pots. Such items initially suggested that there might be a connection between the hotel and sex work, as high incidences of rouge pots have elsewhere been associated with brothel assemblages. However, other corroborating historical evidence is lacking, and Dawdy and Weyhing have noted that cosmetics like rouge was as associated with single men and ‘dandyism’ as with women in the 1820s.  

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“One of the handsomest structures in the city will be the new building of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association,” [1] said an article from the New Orleans States when the Athenaeum opened in 1896. With various Jewish families from the New Orleans area wanting to join together to form an association, the Athenaeum was born after a November 22, 1891 meeting at the Grunewald Hotel where the organization, Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA), was proposed. [2] This became a site for social gathering for New Orleans socialites, various musical acts from around the world, and, of course, the betterment of Jewish men until the building burnt down first on January 17, 1905, and then for a second time in 1937. [3]

The YMHA was originally instituted to advance the mental, moral, social, and physical improvement of young Jewish men. The first was established in New York on March 22, 1874 at the home of Dr. Simeon Leo with the board of directors including Isaac S. Isaacs, Adolph L. Sanger, Oscar S. Straus, Lewis May, and others. After, similar organizations sprouted throughout the United States in such cities as Philadelphia, St. Louis, San Francisco, Louisville, Washington D.C., and New Orleans. [4]

With the Jewish population growing and expanding in New Orleans, many young Jewish families began wanting to form an organization, named a Young Men’s Hebrew Association. After several attempts, a meeting at the Grunewald Hotel proposed the organization to 300 gentlemen gathered there and thus started the New Orleans branch of the YMHA, the Athenaeum. [2]

The Athenaeum was built at 1205 St. Charles Avenue, on the corner of St. Charles and Clio St. The first floor included a parlor, a library, a chess and checkers room which adjoined to the library, a large billiard room with three billiards and three pool tables, a committee room, a smoking/lounging room, and a lodging room with a capacity for 150 people. The second floor opened up with a spacious foyer which adjoined to a ballroom. The plans for the building were by Mr. D. Einseidel, and the building company was T. Carey and Co. [5]

For many years the meeting of the courts of Rex and Pickwick Club at midnight on Mardi Gras day, the official end of Carnival, took place in the Athenaeum’s ballroom. [2] However, the krewe of Pickwick Club did not allow Jews in its membership, showing that even though the Athenaeum was socially prominent, there were still signs of segregation.

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Le Petit Salon was once the most exclusive and prestigious private women’s organization in New Orleans. Founded in 1924 and described as a “circle of distinguished ladies,” the Salon quickly became an influential player in the cultural revival of the French Quarter during the 1920s. The mission of the Salon was “to revive, promote and continue the pleasant intercourse of the Salon, which gave grace and brilliance to the old society of this city,” with an emphasis on the historic preservation of the French Quarter. When Le Petit Salon was first organized, the French Quarter had experienced decades of neglect and decay. By 1920, preservationists, including members of Le Petit Salon, were making strides to protect and revive the historic neighborhood. 

Le Petit Salon’s members were often women of high social status and prominence from Uptown New Orleans. The Salon membership was a combination of old Quartier Club members and active members of Le Petit Theatre. Their gatherings on Thursday afternoons and receptions after Le Petit Theatre’s performances featured notable literary figures like Sherwood Anderson, Hamilton Basso, Roark Bradford, Oliver La Farge, Lyle Saxon and Tennessee Williams. These weekly meetings included literary and poetry recitals, historic and philosophical lectures, and musical performances by both club members and nationally renowned artists. New Orleans native and writer Grace King served as the first president of Le Petit Salon and organized the purchase of the Salon’s 620 St. Peter Street residence. King was born to a wealthy New Orleans family in 1852, and had deep loyalties to her Creole heritage, writing from “a sort of patriotism--a feeling of loyalty to the South.” Her work as a journalist and historian helped push Southern literature into the national spotlight. After her death in 1932, author and friend Lyle Saxon eulogized Grace King as New Orleans’s “greatest woman and our greatest writer.” Advice columnist Dorothy Dix followed King as president. On August 10, 1925, Le Petit Salon bought and restored the townhouse at 620 St. Peter Street for $13,500 to accommodate its growing membership. Constructed in 1838, the Greek Revival home was built for successful hardware merchant Victor David, an immigrant from France to New Orleans after the fall of Napoleon. Tulane architecture professor and preservationist Samuel Wilson credited Le Petit Salon with initiating the restoration of the French Quarter in the 1920s. One of the club’s greatest preservation successes was the formation of a committee appointed to the French Quarter Commission to prevent the demolition of the Beauregard-Keyes House in 1925.

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Gallatin Street’s close proximity to the port made it a quick and frequent stop for those who docked, worked, or lived near the booming economic area. Close to half a million immigrants came through New Orleans’ port between 1841 and 1860, and many of them didn’t make it past Gallatin Street. According to historian Judith Kellehar Schafer, the majority of prostitutes in and around the area were immigrant women. Prostitution, known as New Orleans' second most profitable industry, The second most profitable industry in New Orleans, prostitution, also benefitted from the transient guests of Gallatin Street.

Schafer cites a study published by William W. Sanger in 1858 on the sex industry. Sanger found that after women were entangled in sex work, they often died within four years. He also found that at least fifty percent of prostitutes had sexually transmitted diseases. Although Sanger's study is based in New York City, Schafer applies his findings to New Orleans, and she reinforces the prominence of venereal disease in New Orleans by citing the recurring ads in New Orleans’ papers during that period for “cures” and remedies for sexually transmitted diseases.

Gerald Capers notes that during the Civil War, when Union soldiers were stationed in New Orleans, venereal disease among soldiers (who were regular visitors to brothels) cost the Department of the Gulf “50,000 to 100,000 days of service.” If public women didn’t die of disease, they died from being subjected to violence at the hands of drunken patrons or angry bar owners. In 1857, a young Irish immigrant named Mary Jane died by the knife of an angry customer in John Swan’s brothel after refusing certain sexual services. Such violent acts were not uncommon on Gallatin Street.

While women were often victims of violent crime, some women were also active criminals. In 1859, three prostitutes were charged with larceny after working together to steal from a patron of Archy Murphy’s brothel, at which the women were employed. Another famous woman, Mary Jane Jackson, better known as Bricktop, skipped theft and went straight to assault. A scourge throughout New Orleans, Bricktop also worked for Archy Murphy until she was deemed too rough for even one of the roughest dance houses on Gallatin Street. It is said that she carried a knife personally designed with two five-inch blades on either end. In December 1861, she took her violent streak so far as to kill her own husband. The Times-Picayune commented on the murder as such: “Both were degraded beings, regular penitentiary birds, habitual drunkards, and unworthy of any further notice from honest people.”

Three brothel owners on Gallatin Street were particularly violent—Archy Murphy, the brothel owner noted before, George Kent, and John Swan. In 1856, Swan successfully led a brawl of men and women against the police, then assaulted a man and beat a woman in two separate instances. Kent and Swan’s violence seemed to be a family affair. In 1858, the two bar owners’ wives were involved in a fight in which George Kent’s wife attacked and kicked the wife of John Swan. The bar owners had to be tough to run a club on this street, whose drunk and rowdy clientele could often hold their own in a fight and had very little to lose.

A group of men known as the Live Oak Gang frequented Gallatin Street. Although a motley crew, they were the closest thing to organized crime in the area. Herbert Asbury claims that the group earned their name by carrying around oak clubs, and because of their meeting place near the river in a pile of live oak knees. They were generally unwelcome in brothels because they were sure to cause a fight. The only club where they were welcome was Bill Swan’s Fireproof Saloon. Asbury claims that Bill Swan was once a member of the Live Oak Gang, but after Swan made a good amount of money, he invested in business rather than crime. The Live Oak boys were even violent towards one another. In 1886, the O’Brien brothers got into an argument at Bill Swan’s Fireproof Saloon that ended with the younger brother, Matt, shooting his older brother, Hugh. Hugh later died in Charity hospital. It was a gamble to trust a member of the Live Oak Gang, even if you were a member yourself.

Police were known to avoid Gallatin Street without a partner, especially at night. Antebellum-era police in New Orleans were understaffed and underpaid--two factors that Schafer claims made officers susceptible to bribes and apathy. However, some police officers took advantage of the underworld they were meant to protect. For example, in 1852, the Times-Picayune reported that a watchman on Gallatin Street threatened to shut down a woman’s brothel “unless she consented to certain propositions made by him.” In 1857, a police officer named Lieutenant Legget was accused of preventing the arrest of Arthur Guerin. A year earlier, Guerin had been dismissed from the police force after trying to cover up a murder on Gallatin Street. The murderer, “Dutch Pete,” former owner of the California House on Gallatin Street, had killed a man near his dance house. Guerin allowed for Dutch Pete to flee to Havana while Guerin “took care” of witnesses to the murder in New Orleans. The lack of police presence on Gallatin Street created an environment where crime and violence ruled the streets.

Of course, some police officers attempted to uphold the law. In 1860, for instance, Schafer cites that 36 women were arrested in Gallatin Street brothels and were sent to the workhouse for six months, but were soon let off on a technicality. Often, police would target prostitutes while ignoring the more violent crimes in the area. However, the bad cops outnumbered the good, and so prostitutes, drunks and criminals became the law enforcers of Gallatin Street.

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In March 1923, an oak tree was planted in Palmer Park to honor the death of Julia Blocker Montgomery, a nearby resident. The Daughters of the American Revolution dedicated the tree in memory of Montgomery, who often played with children in the park. She had reportedly told friends, “I wish I were an Oak Tree that I might live forever.” The tree, missing the original iron fence and plaque, can still be found in the park; when you walk into the park through the arch, the tree is on your left, on the side with the playground.

Montgomery had been a school teacher for fifty years in Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas, where she was “one of the leading women educators in the state," noted a May 1897 Times Picayune article. Julia had started a school in Mobile, Alabama, to support her family after her husband returned from service in the Civil War "broken in body and fortune." She was a mother of seven children, including Virginia Montgomery, described as a leading artist in the city and the designer of the Confederate monument in San Antonio. Montgomery retired from teaching at the age of 80 but remained a leading figure in civic organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and was invited to give public speeches and recitations of her poetry, which appeared in newspapers in New Orleans and Texas.

Montgomery’s birthdays in her later life were noted consistently in the Times Picayune as the Daughters of the American Revolution celebrated their oldest member. A 1919 article commemorated “New Orleans foremost club woman” and the “beloved chaplain” of the DAR, noting her birth month “always brings her a succession of affectionate testimonials from friends and fellow members in the city’s clubs and patriotic societies who delight to do honor to their beloved co-worker.”

She made national news when she became the "oldest college student in the nation" at the age of 85, taking courses at Tulane in Spanish. She also continued to offer music lessons in voice, piano, and guitar, and was described as a "suffrage leader," finally receiving the right to vote two years before her death.

Montgomery died in November 1922 at the age of 91 and was buried in Metairie Cemetery. Her obituary revealed an even more remarkable life -- if true. She was born on a plantation near Carrollton, Mississippi, in 1831. Her family, claiming “squatter sovereignty,” had taken the land from the Choctaw Indians without government approval or paying any money.

Her maiden name was Blocker, and she claimed an incredible heritage: she was part Native American and her great-great grandmother was Pocahontas; part French and a descendant of Marie D’Ammonnett, a lady in the court of Marie Antoinette who had fled the French Revolution and used her jewels to buy the land that is currently the site of Petersburg, Virginia; and part Austrian, descended from Prince Von Blucher.

Prior to being a teacher, she worked as a newspaperwoman and had interviewed celebrities like Oscar Wilde, who "expostulated on the homeliness of pots and pans" and "regretted" that they were "not more beautiful," she told a reporter.

The obituary closed with an excerpt from one of her poems, “Stand and Salute as the Flag Goes By”:

The mind and the heart and the loyal soul

Are far above Time’s haughty control

And throw o’er the form of more than four score

A mantel of love that will last forevermore

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In 1940, the patient population was between 400 and 450 and a massive renovation was underway. The improved hospital created individual rooms for 450 patients and the 13” thick concrete walls made the buildings as fireproof as possible. Fire was always a concern.

Here’s a list of what was built in 1940:

• 17 two-story dormitories

• 20,000 square-foot recreation building with library, theater, canteen and ballroom

• Over two miles of two-story corridors that link all patient buildings together

• Facilities' engineering building

• Staff dining hall

• Residence for Daughters of Charity, a Catholic nursing order

All of these improvements cost around 4 million dollars.

To your right, the two-story buildings with the orange metal awnings are female patients’ dorms. The dormitories are arranged in two quadrangles connected via covered corridors. This provided patients, many in wheelchairs, access to all buildings. Creating a fireproof hospital was a major aim of the last renovation, so even the patients’ room furnishings were metal instead of wood.

Every dorm had 30 individual rooms--each with an oscillating fan and radiated heat for winter. Each floor had shared bathrooms and a common parlor. The original design provided men and women with separate dorms. Later on, when patient couples ran away and returned married, they developed a thriving “suburbia” of homemade cottages towards the rear of the facility so that they could live together.

A Carville “date” often involved a hot-plate in the woman’s room, a card table across the threshold with the man sitting in the hall. In the 1960s, one of the dormitories was remodeled into apartments to allow for the cohabitation of couples. Each apartment had a private kitchen and bathroom.

Dormitory #24 was designated the “Carville Mall,” where free enterprise thrived. A patient could open her own shop to provide goods or services to fellow patients.

Some popular patient-run businesses included a radio repair service, a barber shop, a bicycle repair shop, a beauty parlor, a photography shop, and even a dry cleaner's.

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Gwen Bristow, though not originally from New Orleans, was a great contributor to both Southern literature and the Times-Picayune newspaper. She helped mold the face of Southern writing into what it is today, influencing entire generations of New Orleanian-based writers.

Bristow was born in 1903 in South Carolina, where she spent her childhood. [1] After graduating from Judson College, located in Marion, Alabama, in 1924 with a degree in both English and French, she continued on to study at the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Colombia University in New York. [2] It is hardly surprising then, that Bristow went on to become a successful historical novelist with her fiction firmly rooted in the South, as it was as much a part of her life as writing was.

During her year at Columbia, she worked as a secretary, earning money by typing papers for others and writing for trade journals. [2] After graduation, she moved to New Orleans and began writing for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and eventually met her husband, Bruce Manning, who was a journalist for the Item. [2] Together, they wrote and published their first book, The Invisible Host.

Bristow moved to Connecticut briefly and worked on her fourth novel, which she had trouble selling, before moving to Hollywood, where she began a trilogy in 1930 set in Louisiana that followed, "...the lives of two families from pre-Revolutionary days to World War I: Deep Summer, Handsome Road, and This Side of Glory." [2] All three did very well and she continued on with a string of best-sellers.

Bristow moved back to New Orleans, where she died in 1980 at the age of 76. [1] In 1989, she was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame because although she, "...was neither born in Alabama nor died there, she had very close Alabama connections," where she completed her undergraduate degrees. [2] Much in the same way, while she was not born in New Orleans, she did have close ties to the city, and she had as much of an impact on the city as the city seemed to have on her.

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Emma Barrett, a self-taught jazz pianist and vocalist, was born on March 25, 1897, and began performing in venues across New Orleans at just twelve years old. [1] Despite being unable to read music, Barrett was often in high demand and quickly became a fixture in the New Orleans Jazz scene. [2] In addition to recording her own work, Barrett performed and toured with The Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

When she first began gracing New Orleans with her unique voice, she was known as the "Bell Gal" for her sense of style. She had a habit of, "...wearing a red dress, red woven skull cap and attaching bells on her garters that jingled as she tapped her feet to glorious jazz rhythms." [1] Barrett's sense of style never faded and she could be seen performing in clubs on Bourbon Street dressed in her trademark outfit into her eighties. [2]

Barrett's fashion sense was not the only thing that caught the attention of jazz-enthusiasts along Bourbon Street, however. At a time when it was considered “…unladylike to play the trumpet or saxophone,” Barret flocked to voice and piano. [2] By 1923, Barrett was playing with, 'Papa' Celestin and later, Bébé Ridgley's Original Tuxedo Orchestra. [1] During her time working with these, and many other, major names in Jazz, she further developed her musical style. Her favored approach with the piano was known as the "pile-driver attack" and can be best described as blunt, while her vocals were noted for their, "...naughty double entendres with...perfect delivery." [1]

By 1947, the Bell Gal was also often referred to as "Sweet Emma", and she was working steadily at Happy Landing, a local club. [1] Throughout the 1950s, she created and worked with her own band Sweet Emma and the Bells [1]. Barrett began recording her music in the 1960s. She released her first recording for, "...her own album for Riverside Records New Orleans: The Living Legends in 1961," and at this time, she also began working with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. [1] The Preservation Hall Band specialized in Dixieland-style jazz, and could almost always be found somewhere on Bourbon Street, especially at the Preservation Hall on Saint Peter Street in the French Quarter, where they were hired as an attraction to draw patrons to the new art gallery, which they quickly outshone. [1]

Despite the multiple tours she and her Preservation Jazz Hall Band went on - including a one to Disneyland in 1963, and a few overseas - and a write up about her in Glamour magazine, Barrett remained true to her city, spending most of her time in the French Quarter. [1] She and the Preservation Jazz Hall Band even briefly appeared in the movie "Cincinnati Kid," which was filmed in the city in the mid-1960s. [1] Even a stroke that left her partially paralyzed could not slow Barrett down, and she continued to contribute to the French Quarter's jazz scene right up until her death on the 28th of January, 1983. [1]

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National press coverage of the Upstairs Lounge fire was rather light and short-lived considering the scale of the crime. Coverage in New Orleans was insensitive and callous; newspaper reporters described “bodies stacked up like pancakes” and groups of “mass charred flesh.” The New Orleans States-Item detailed the investigation of the fire, mentioning that “in one corner, workers stood knee-deep in bodies [and] … the heat had been so intense, many were cooked together.”

In its front-page article about the fire, The Times-Picayune featured a photograph of the burned body of MCC pastor Reverend William R. Larson stuck in between the burglar bars blocking a window on Chartres Street. Eyewitness Stewart Butler remembers, “The press and news sources treated this horribly. The Times-Picayune printed the names of those who perished in that fire. If they had been in the closet, they weren’t in the closet anymore.”

The sensationalized and homophobic reporting of the local and national press reached its zenith when WVUE Channel 8 reported, on air live, an anonymous phone call saying that “the bar was fire-bombed by a vigilante group that has declared war on homosexuals in New Orleans. The caller, a woman, said the group calls itself “Black Momma, White Momma.” The news anchor went on to say that the group was made up of “several women, as well as five men, who have been sexually attacked by homosexuals.” The newscaster concluded by stating that the caller “said the group is planning more attacks and has maps outlining their future targets.”

Only the alternative newspaper the Vieux-Carre Courier editorialized against the horrible visual and written representations of the fire victims; the mainstream media quickly lost interest and little else was published about the fire and the ensuing investigation. One of the most likely suspects in the arson investigation later committed suicide. The crime has never been officially solved.

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The Upstairs Lounge had served as the home of a religious denomination, the Metropolitan Community Church; however, no church would allow a prayer service for those who died, except for the pastor of St. George’s Episcopal Church. Father Bill Richardson held a small prayer service for the fire victims on June 25, 1973, for about 100 people, and he was severely criticized for it.

On July 1, St. Mark’s United Methodist Church held a larger prayer service and memorial for the victims of the Upstairs Lounge; almost 300 people attended. This memorial was more public than

the one at St. George’s, and many journalists and photographers waited outside the church to expose members of the closeted gay community in New Orleans.

Stewart Butler attended the July 1st services, and he remembers that everyone was offered the option of exiting through a back door of the church in order to avoid being potential stigma and harassment from affiliation with the memorial. No one chose this option; instead, everyone decided to face the media and present a unified front to honor those who had died in the fire.

In the decade after the fire, a museum exhibit presented the history and contributions of the New Orleans Fire Department, but the tragedy of the Upstairs Lounge, with the largest number of fire-related deaths in city history, was not included. In 2003, after thirty years of neglect from the larger community, a plaque dedicated to the victims was installed on the sidewalk in front of the door that led to the Upstairs Lounge.

The plaque is small and embedded in the sidewalk, so not many people notice it. The fire is featured in some city tours, but these are mostly ghost tours that focus on supernatural phenomena instead of emphasizing the victims’ humanity and acknowledging the cultural and political effect of the fire. Such tours do not mention the implications that the fire had for the city’s LGBT community. Many believe that in the long term, the Upstairs Lounge massacre served as New Orleans’ version of the Stonewall Rebellion in that it catalyzed LGBT community unification, organization, and resistance.

The Upstairs Lounge Fire was the largest mass killing of LGBT people in United States history until the tragic shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida on June 12, 2016. The Pulse tragedy led to an outpouring of LGBT solidarity worldwide, and a renewed interest in the history of the Upstairs Lounge Fire.

These stories are shared in memory of those who perished in the Upstairs Lounge fire:

Joseph Henry Adams

Reginald Adams, Jr.

Guy D. Anderson

Joe William Bailey

Luther Boggs

Louis Horace Broussard

Herbert Dean Cooley

Donald Walter Dunbar

Adam Roland Fontenot

David Stuart Gary

Horace "Skip" Getchell

John Thomas Golding, Sr.

Gerald Hoyt Gordon

Glenn Richard "Dick" Green

James Walls Hambrick

Kenneth Paul Harrington

Rev. William R. Larson (MCC Pastor)

Ferris LeBlanc

Robert "Bob" Lumpkin

Leon Richard Maples

George Steven Matyi

Clarence Josephy McCloskey, Jr.

Duane George "Mitch" Mitchell (MCC Assistant Pastor)

Larry Stratton

Mrs. Willie Inez Warren

Eddie Hosea Warren

James Curtis Warren

Dr. Perry Lane Waters, Jr.

Douglas Maxwell Williams

Three unknown white males buried in New Orleans’ Potter’s Field remain unidentified.

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Thirty-two people died in the Upstairs Lounge Fire, making it the deadliest fire in the history of New Orleans. In the fire’s aftermath, many New Orleans residents revealed prejudice against LGBT people and culture. Survivor Stewart Butler recalls the silence he had to endure the day after the fire: “The next morning I still -- so many people, especially those who witnessed any of it were almost immobile. I had to go to work, and I was in the closet at work, so I couldn’t say one word about it.”

Of the 32 people that died in the fire, four of the bodies were unclaimed because the families refused to identify them out of fear that others would find out that their loved ones were gay. Many members of the New Orleans community, even those who were assigned to investigate the fire, either largely disregarded the fire or refused to take it seriously.

Many people with strong religious convictions had interpreted the fire as a form of divine retribution, punishing those for being gay. Instead of releasing the unidentified bodies to the Metropolitan Community Church for proper burials, the city buried the four bodies together in a potter’s field cemetery. In addition to this blatant disregard for the victims and the survivors, no one was ever prosecuted for the crime.

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June 24, 1973 seemed like any other night at the Upstairs Lounge. The Metropolitan Community Church had just finished a worship service and was hosting a social event with free beer and food for about 125 people. As the night went on, this number dwindled to about 60, almost all remaining people being dedicated members of the church. Around 8:00 pm, the buzzer rang at the only entrance to the Upstairs Lounge. When the door was buzzed open from the upstairs bar, someone doused the wooden staircase with lighter fluid and then threw a lighted torch into the stairwell. The flames rushed into the Lounge very quickly, and the entire bar was on fire within minutes.

Jimmy Massacci, owner of the building, and his father, also a previous owner, both witnessed the fire. Massacci believes the arsonist was a regular at the bar, due to his familiarity with the door buzzer system used by the patrons. He stated that since the door on Iberville Street “was kept locked, whoever did it had to be a regular and had to know the routine.”

According to Stewart Butler, “Because of the materials that covered the walls of the stairwell and the upstairs, it went up like a fireball very, very quickly. Buddy Rasmussen, who was the bartender that night, knew that there was a fire escape in [a back] room [and] called for people to follow him. Undoubtedly some didn’t hear him, and by then some were already enveloped in flames. He managed to get out quite a number; I don’t know how many.”

Had the Upstairs Lounge building had been outfitted with proper fire safety measures, most of the congregation would have survived. The single emergency exit was not marked, however, and bars covered the windows.

Butler remembers, “I walked around and I was just absolutely horrified, mortified, in total shock at what was going on, because some of the patrons were trying to get out of the windows, notwithstanding the bars. Actually, I understand one person did manage to squeeze out between the bars and get out that way, but there were others who were totally burned to death up against the bars trying to get out.”

Massacci now operates the Jimani Bar on the first floor of the building. The former site of the Upstairs Lounge is used as a storage space.

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In the early 1970s, LGBT culture in New Orleans remained hidden from the public eye. Instead of openly expressing sexuality and engaging in public displays of affection, most LGBT people were “in the closet” and would socialize in bars that catered to the gay community.

On Halloween day in 1970, the Upstairs Lounge opened to cater to the less affluent gay and lesbian people of New Orleans. Higher-class patrons frequented bars on Bourbon Street closer to the Marigny, while the area closer to Canal Street, the “Gay Triangle” catered to the working class, similar to the Stonewall Inn in New York City. These LGBT clubs were centers of the community and often served as social spaces for purposes other than recreation, such as community organizing and freedom of expression.

The 1970s was a progressive decade for LGBT individuals in New Orleans. The Gay Liberation Front began to organize in late 1970. The short-lived group organized some of the first gay political demonstrations in New Orleans, such as protests against police brutality. 1972 saw the first Southern Decadence festival arise, which would lead to one of the biggest LGBT oriented festivals in New Orleans.

A frequent patron of the Upstairs Lounge, Stewart Butler, remembers, “The Upstairs Lounge was more of -- I thought -- a social club than it was a bar. All sorts of different activities took place there. They had occasion to sing, ‘We Shall Overcome’ with a ‘gay and straight together’ verse in it and that was sort of a rouser, if you will.”

Patrons often used a piano and a cabaret stage for entertainment, including shows and parties. Its reputation as a social club led the Upstairs Lounge to become a welcome home for the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), which established itself in the early 1970s. The MCC was the first openly gay church in the United States, and members often faced discrimination. MCC Pastor Reverend William R. Larson and Assistant Pastor Duane George “Mitch” Mitchell would regularly host social events for church members and members of the gay community.

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During the Second World War, a labor shortage developed as men began to serve in the armed forces. Women were increasingly encouraged to take over responsibilities on the home front. Women took jobs of all types: skilled and unskilled, manual and office. While men served overseas, women assumed support roles in the military and worked in various defense plants. Though not as celebrated, women also worked in one of the city's most visible industries.

From 1943 through early 1946, more than two hundred females from rural areas throughout the South as well as New Orleans neighborhoods worked on the streetcars. Positions with New Orleans Public Service, Inc. (NOPSI) paid significantly higher wages than the drug store and retail clerk positions typically afforded women. NOPSI trained the women alongside male recruits, and each woman was responsible for the same duties: operating the cars and performing impromptu maintenance; collecting transit fares; keeping the cars on schedule; and enforcing racial segregation within the transit vehicles. In Southern cities, African-American males were never considered for employment as transit operators.

Monitoring and adjusting the race screen proved to be the most difficult part of their job. Despite protests from the NAACP, federal officials refused to suspend the practice of racial segregation in the city. In many instances, white as well as black soldiers and sailors who had trained at bases throughout the South chafed at the Jim Crow requirement as they passed through the city on their way overseas. Soldiers often threw the "race screen" signs out of the windows. Military Police and New Orleans Police officers provided support for the women operators and arrested soldiers who protested the practice.

Once the men returned, the women were required to leave their positions. Most were informed when they showed up to work their shifts. Many were upset to see newly returned military veterans -- not just former transit operators -- assuming these jobs. The last women were released by February 1946. Some women transitioned into other jobs while many returned to household work. Transit company documents suggest that women earned the same rate of pay as men, but many of the women report being paid a bit less than the men, presumably to placate their male co-workers. Fifty years later during a 1993 reunion of the operators, a woman named Anna was celebrated because she had refused to "give up her badge" until threatened with arrest. Women would not serve as streetcar operators again until the mid-1970s, following advances made by the Civil Rights and Women's Rights movements.

Images are from the private collections of the late Mary Fischer, New Orleans' first woman transit operator, and the late Albert McCloskey Browne, former streetcar conductor, bus operator and accident claims investigator.

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Club My-O-My was a female impersonator club that originated and ended in the French Quarter. It flourished after first being kicked out of an informal, after-hours home in a fur warehouse in the Vieux Carre in the early 1930s, according to oral history in the New Orleans gay community. The Club My-O-My joined the older Wonder Bar in the West End area of New Orleans. The Wonder Bar eventually closed; from the 1930s through the 1960s, the My-O-My served as a popular part of New Orleans nightlife for tourists as well as residents.

The New Orleans club was one of several in the United States whose impersonators performed for heterosexual as well as homosexual audiences. Grayline Tours brought tourists by the busload for decades until a 1972 fire destroyed its lakefront location. The club relocated to the French Quarter for a short while before closing for good. The once risque club had been rendered too tame by the sexual revolution and changes in dress and mores. For the majority of its existence, the club allowed only white patrons and white performers.

The videos featured below were produced in association with New Orleans PBS Affiliate WYESTV-12 in 1996 and edited by Courtney Eagan and Billie Norris.

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