On the evening of February 23, 1887, a crowd lined St. Charles Avenue to witness a procession of lanterns floating like a swarm of fireflies through the darkened street. First came the bandwagon, pulled along by four horses led by the famous acrobat…

In the late nineteenth century, bicycles appeared on city streets, country roads, and race tracks. Cycle racing in New Orleans rose with a tide of interest in sports—recreational and spectator—among the middle class. In the summer of 1891, the…

In September of 1887, New Orleans cyclists held the 3rd annual meet of the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), Louisiana Division, at the Audubon Park Race Track. Originally a horse racing track, it was used for the new sport of bicycle racing. The…

In the 1880s, along with the rise of spectator and participatory sports, cycling races appeared in New Orleans. The city's first bicycle club, the New Orleans Bicycle Club, formed in 1881. All members belonged also to the League of American…

The Audubon Driving Park Track was used in the late 1880s as a horse racing track. ("Driving" referred to horse riding.) Audubon Park, built in 1879, had been the site of the World's Industrial Cotton Centennial Exposition in 1884 and…

In August of 1890, work was completed on the clubhouse of the Louisiana Cycling Club (LCC) at 1637 Octavia Street. The Queen Anne-style building still stands at that address. The party celebrating its opening was attended by 200 people and claimed…

In 1892, the New Orleans Bicycle Club celebrated the opening of their new clubhouse in the Garden District, at the corner of General Taylor and Baronne. The plans were drafted by W.C. Williams and Brothers and the building was constructed by G.C.…

On a crisp Thanksgiving Day in 1887, a crowd gathered beneath the bare branches of the sycamore trees in the center of Canal Street. Bisected by multiple street railway beds and flanked by the lace-ironwork balconies of multi-story buildings, the…

Early on Easter morning 1886, around a hundred people gathered at the Henry Clay Statue outside A. M. Hill Jewelers at St. Charles and Canal. Hill, captain of the New Orleans Bicycle Club, stood dressed in a riding outfit of brown corduroy and knee…

In 1881, the New Orleans Bicycle Club formed in a building at Commercial Street and St. Charles, inside the jewelry and pen shop of A. M. Hill. A. M. Hill arrived in New Orleans at nineteen years old, following the end of the Civil War. He had…

In the 1930s and 1940s, the center of New Orleans literary life resided at 7221 Zimple Street, the Basement Bookshop and Library. Tess Crager opened the store in a little yellow wood-frame building that once had housed a butcher’s shop. Its earlier…

In 1965, sisters Rhoda Norman and Mary Kellogg opened the Maple Street Bookshop, the first in New Orleans to specialize in paperback books. As Tess Crager's Basement Bookshop had been in the 1930s and 1940s, the Maple Street in the 1960s became…

The ashes of poet Everette Maddox are buried on the patio at the Maple Leaf Bar, which, in the last years of his life, he made his home. It was here that he founded the readings series, now known as the Everette Maddox Memorial Readings Series, that…

After a long dry spell beginning in the early 1980s, poet Everette Maddox began writing again in 1988. The poems began to pour out of him, seeming to bubble up after the seven years in which he did not write. He wrote his poems on whatever was…

The Maple Leaf reading series is the longest-running poetry reading series in New Orleans as well as the South. In 1979, famed local poet Everette Maddox began the series with sculptor Franz Heldner and poet Nancy Harris. Maddox had moved to New…