Category Archives: block information

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Plantation Style Architecture

Governor Nicholls 900 block

These were built in this style to minimize the effects of heat and flooding that were common in areas near swamplands and the Mississippi River, and  are generally raised on piers to stay above flood waters.  There is often a large central hallway to encourage air circulation and the galleries or porches wrap around the house and are usually very deep — providing shade in the summer, keeping the sun out of the house and creating comfortable outdoor living space.This house has an amazing amount of space around it in front, unusual for the French Quarter. According to the fantastic book “Along the Banquette”, it is the same house moved from Gabriel Peyroux property on Bayou St.John, to the “city” in 1781. If so, this makes this house one of the oldest in the city.
Also, the width is also unusual, as back in French rule,  taxation depended on the width of your house not the length. The camelback style (2 story living area rising from the back of the house) is often seen as a direct retaliation to those tax laws. Interestingly, after some taxpayers complained about camelbacks having lower taxes than they, the assessment was changed to the number of rooms in each home, which explains the lack of closets  and the use of armoires which continues to this day in many areas of New Orleans.

Plantation-an interesting word that should be explored more fully- It is often said that we resemble the Carribbean more than Europe and certainly the economic underpinnings do match- exploiting the few resources and having the few control the many is similar.

Plantation life is often told as a rosy time of entrepreneurial activity with its own culture and traditions, but certainly the grim reality of enslaved people doing the work needed and actually bought and sold as  property must be remembered as the main engine that ran this entire area. Remember that when you see “slave quarters” advertised as rentals, or walk by Maspero’s “Exchange” on Chartres that the history of slavery and subjugation does permeate the 1800s of New Orleans.

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Marcello Properties

Cafe Envie, owned by Marcello Properties

Carlos Marcello: Big Daddy In

The Big Easy (excerpt)

By the late 1940’s, Carlos had established his headquarters in a bar and restaurant that came to be known as Willswood Tavern. It sat on Highway 90, about fifteen miles west of New Orleans on the West Bank in Jefferson Parish. He would hold court here, meeting up with the men who ran his empire, dispensing justice to the unruly. He owned 6400 acres of swampland that spread away from the inn with lots of unique and handy bayous to hide bodies. After business, he would entertain his people on a lavish scale. A man with a gargantuan appetite, he imported a chef from Chicago, an ex-convict who had apparently been the personal cook of Al Capone. His name was Provino Mosca and his Italian cooking became legend in the area. Carlos built a small house near the tavern for the chef and his wife and son, and when it was time to move his head office elsewhere, Carlos left the tavern for his chef to continue operating under the management of his mother Louise, who by now had become widowed. Today Mosca’s son John runs the business know as Mosca’s, at 4137 Highway 90, Waggaman, producing food equally as delicious as his father did before him. Their two crab salads, garlic shrimp and chicken [a la grande] is food to die for, which not doubt may well have been the case fifty years ago for some of the visitors to this tavern on the green.

His illegal capital funded motels, restaurants, banks, beer and liquor stores, taxi and bus firms, shrimping fleets, gas stations, the list was endless. He claimed however, that he was simply a salesman for the Pelican Tomato Company and earned $1500 a month. On paper he was, and the fact that he also indirectly owned the company, whose biggest customer was the U.S. Navy, was incidental.

Carlos Marcello, owner of a tomato company and considered the Godfather of New Orleans crime was convicted on federal charges in the 1980s although the convictions were later thrown after he served over 6 years. He retired to old Metairie and died in the 1990s, with property throughout the French Quarter and regional area still under the family control.