Category Archives: ain't dere no more

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4th of July

Seems to me its been about 20 years or so since New Orleans has begun the fireworks on the river on the holiday. The dueling barges is kind of a fun idea, especially as they outlaw personal fireworks in the city. Of course, all you have to do is go across the river to Gretna to buy some!
I suppose the 4th on the river has its beginnings in the 1984 World’s Fair where I remember they had nightly fireworks, although that seems excessive, so maybe I am wrong.
World’s Fair

Fireworks are not a huge part of New Orleans history. My memory was (when visiting my grandparents in the 1960s and 1970s) that we went to Pontchartrain Beach on the lake to view fireworks on the 4th. That park was pretty cool and this from someone who grew up most of the year in amusement park capital-Ohio. My mom actually met Elvis Presley at this amusement park way back in the early 1950s, when he was appearing nearby. The family story goes that a crowd was watching him play a carnival game, and when trying to wend his way out, he stepped on my aunt’s foot. My mom chided him and he gave her the stuffed animal he had won.
Sadly, Pontchartrain Beach closed in the early 1980s and is now a part of struggling University of New Orleans campus. I rode the Zephyr on that last day and like most people, walked off with a souvenir-mine was not a Presley gift but a mannequin arm that held my carnival beads for years in a place of honor in my courtyard.

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The “at least one useful thing on every block of Bourbon” list

100-Bourbon House
200-Galatoire’s and the site of “Owen Brennan’s Vieux Carre” Restaurant, the original Brennan’s restaurant (moved to Royal in 1956).
300-Jazz Park resting place and bathrooms at the Royal Sonesta Hotel
400-Still looking
500-Chris Owens (both she and the club) and Ramada bathrooms
600- Pat O’s Courtyard, Michael (waiter at Sammy’s), Court of 2 Sisters Thruway, Congresswoman Lindy Boggs’ home til 2005.
700-Marie Laveau’s Voodoo Shop, Fritzel’s
800-Washing Well, Bourbon Pub, Oz
900-Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop (piano bar), Lafitte’s In Exile, Clover Grill
1000-Postal Emporium/Frame Shop
1100-The Nelly Deli
1200 -2 lovely magnolias over sidewalk
1300-Kingsway Studio, owned by Daniel Lanois in the 1990s as a recording studio for groups such as Emmylou Harris, the Neville Brothers, Pearl Jam, Peter Gabriel, R.E.M., Robbie Robertson, Sheryl Crow, Iggy Pop, Luscious Jackson, Cowboy Mouth, Joe Henry, and Michelle Shocked. Before that, it was the home of Germaine Wells, the original big-hatted French Quarter Easter Parade doyenne and operator of her family’s restaurant Arnaud’s.

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Link to Bergen article

T-P writer Doug MacCash has written another charming piece about New Orleans, a bit removed from his usual art critic duties. He interviewed Margarita Bergen, a FQ fixture, ostensibly to talk about her love of champagne for the New Year’s Day edition, but every story with her is fascinating to read. The Bergen shop was one of the best (well-managed and well stocked) frame and poster shops in the Quarter throughout the 80s and 90s, closing around 2000 I think. This was during the heyday of poster sales in New Orleans, when it seemed a multitude of young drifters were framing in the back of every shop to support their drinking habits while clerks in front sold hundreds of posters of  misty  streetcars to tourists. Many mortgages were made on Jazz Fest poster sales alone; based on their windows, the Bergens did a brisk business on the Sitting Duck series for far longer than anyone else. (Now they have a shop on Decatur with my old Royal Street gallery boss, Casell.)

Cash cow poster series

Bergen article

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So, THAT’S where the library went…

1853 Providing that Fisk Library, founded under the bequest of the late Abijah Fisk, together with a lot and building on the corner of Bourbon and Customhouse (now Iberville) Streets, be transferred and assigned to the Mechanics Society of New Orleans to be held and used by them for the same purposes and trusts under which now used. The said library to be preserved and enlarged and be known as the “Fisk Free Library”.
1881 Requesting the President of the Mechanics Society to turn over to the City the Fisk Free Library together with the lot and building on the corner of Bourbon and Customhouse (now Iberville) Streets, so that said property may be administered in accordance with the will of Abijah Fisk bearing date of Nov. 27, 1843. Also providing that the library be removed to the room in the City Hall Building known as the Public School City Library, and that the rental accruing from lot and building on Bourbon and Customhouse Streets be applied solely to the enlargement of the library.
1894 Providing that the Public Library shall be kept open daily for access of the public between the hours of 9 A.M. and 3 P.M., and from 6 P.M. to 10 P.M. Sundays and Holidays excepted.

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840 North Rampart-Rock n’ Roll history

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum designated Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Recording Studio as a historic Rock and Roll Landmark, one of 11 nationwide.
A few J&M recordings, including Fats Domino’s single “The Fat Man,” Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin Tonight” and Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” have sometimes been called the first rock n’ roll record.
Now a launderette, you can still hear Fats Domino at the piano if you listen closely enough when the rinse cycle comes on..
Then stop by and see the Matassa boys at the family store at St. Phillip and Dauphine and get some red beans for later…
from Frank Etheridge’s 2006 (?) Gambit story:
Matassa then opened a studio in a larger space on the 500 block of Gov. Nicholls Street in a former cold storage space for avocados — “great sound there,” he says — and then later expanded further when he moved to the 700 block of Camp Street in a building that also housed offices for his Dover record distribution business as well as a studio. Matassa also had a plant in Jefferson Parish to manufacture the records.

“I was trying to be a factor on the national level,” Matassa explains of his expansion in the years leading up to the mid-’60s. “But every time I went to a bank for a loan, they’d throw me out. Unfortunately, people in New Orleans with money at the time were only interested in real estate deals or oil deals. That’s why Nashville made it with the music industry, because the city had a couple of sympathetic banks.”