Category Archives: people

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Cafe Amelie

Grabbing some wifi at CC’s on St. Philip just now, I ran into the chef from Cafe Amelie, Jerry Mixon who was picking up some caffeine to start his and Danny’s day at the restaurant. This restaurant is a jewel in the middle of the French Quarter and the history of the Princess of Monaco courtyard (that it sits in) is fascinating. This was Prince Albert’s wife (the one from the 1880s, not the son of Grace Kelly). The Princess of Monaco was born as Alice Heine at 910 Royal; her family was instrumental in the cast iron balcony business. Cast iron was fashionable throughout the US in the 1840s and 1850s, but in New Orleans has remained so. Richard Campanella (social scientist, author of New Orleans Then and Now, Bienville’s Dilemma among others) has done research on cast iron work and theorizes that there was a bit of “Keeping up with the Jones” attitude in why you see more elaborate iron work, the closer you get to Jackson Square/wealthier homes.
Heinrich Heine, the well known, highly respected German-Jewish romantic poet & philosopher, was her great uncle. Like Baroness Pontalba, she did not enjoy married life and left the restrictive royal family life she married into and moved to Paris where she entertained artists and such at her salon in Paris. Her family tried to get part of her 6,000,000 dowry back from the Grimaldis but were unable. easy come easy go, I guess. Or maybe freedom is really just a word for nothin’ left to lose.

The hexagon tower seen from the front was commissioned by renowned architect Henry Howard. The courtyard is fabulous for sitting and eating Jerry’s wonderful gumbo with a cocktail in the evenings.

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A Better Mousetrap

If you were ambling down Royal Street back in the early 1970s, you probably went into a store that was owned by Roger Simonson on Royal Street. Closed around 1974, A Better Mousetrap sold posters, cards, and any hot new item of the time..  Roger was raised in Peoria, moved to New Orleans in the 1960s (following his older brother to the area) where he went to UNO and happily found his forever home.  Roger went on to own other businesses after ABM, but spent most of his remaining years as a high-end kitchenware salesman and then as a cab driver. His uniform was usually jeans and a button-down shirt with a snappy tie during the day (and short shorts and clogs in the summer!), a leather-booted lighter peeking from his pocket and after 5 pm,  beer or a gin and tonic in his hand (cheap gin was always the choice). Roger was seen throughout the 80s and 90s at The Steak Pit, Sloppy Jim’s Bar (much more on that place sooner or later), Rawhide, and Mama Rosa’a among other Quarter places. Some may also remember him during his time running the Persian Boy Gallery on Decatur in the 1990s, until PB owner Roger Bogle’s murder shut all of his businesses down.

A Better Mousetrap didn’t last long, but it foretold the trend to fun kitsch/card shops in the Quarter. Roger was one of two longtime Quarter characters that came from ABM: Sooner or later, you’ll meet the other in an interview here with ABM employee Sam, who continues to work in the French Quarter.

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Yeah you rite!

A sampling of the many neighborhood and class-based accents in New Orleans circa 1983 from the documentary YEAH YOU RITE! by Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker.
LOUIS ALVAREZ and ANDREW KOLKER, twice winners of both the Peabody Award and the duPont-Columbia Journalism Award, have over the past 25 years produced critically praised documentaries on American culture, treating important topics in American life with a unique mixture of humor and poignancy. In addition to People Like Us, Alvarez and Kolker have tackled motherhood (MOMS), politics (Vote for Me and Louisiana Boys — Raised on Politics), accents (American Tongues), sexuality (Sex: female), and the globalization of pop culture (The Japanese Version). Kolker and Alvarez began their careers in New Orleans and now live in New York City.
New Orleans accents

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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.