Tag Archives: New Orleans

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Public Markets in New Orleans

Just like the French Quarter itself, the style of the public markets in New Orleans has more to do with the Spanish and American eras than the French. In 1763, when the Spanish gained the tiny French colony, the population of New Orleans was only around 3,500 and no permanent market building yet existed, although open-air commerce had long operated at the river. In 1791, the city’s Spanish administrators built a market at present-day Decatur and Saint Ann, after first attempting one at the corner of Chartres and Dumaine. The Halle des Boucheries  –  the Meat Market – erected in 1813 still exists (where the market’s longest tenant,  Café du Monde has operated since 1862), accompanied for a few decades by architect Henry Benjamin Latrobe’s water works and by market buildings built in the years 1822-1872.

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A 1819 architectural rendering depicting the design of a pier to cover the suction pipe of the pump for supplying water to the City of New Orleans by Benjamin Latrobe who helped design the US Capitol and is considered the father of American professional architecture.  Sadly, Latrobe died of yellow fever while building this system.

This area stretching along the river at the “back” of the Quarter became known as the French Market in the 19th century, undergoing a renovation in the 1930s thanks to the New Deal, again in the 1970s and in 2005/ 2006, each renovation further erasing more of the original building layout and any visible reminders of their use. Luckily, the number of descriptions devoted to the market by visiting dignitaries still combine for a detailed and lively view. Latrobe wrote in his journal in 1819:

“Along the levee, as far as the eye could reach to the West and to the market house to the East were ranged two rows of market people, some having stalls or tables with a tilt or awning of canvass, or a parcel of Palmetto leaves. The articles to be sold were not more various than the sellers … I cannot suppose that my eye took in less than 500 sellers and buyers, all of whom appeared to strain their voices, to exceed each other in loudness….”

And another in 1874:

“New Orleans’ French Market had more tropical merchandise, including bananas, pineapples, coconuts, oranges, and limes as well as an amazing variety of shellfish, including crab, lobster, shrimps, and “enormous oysters, many of which it would certainly be of necessity to cut up into four mouthfuls, before eating,” reported Charles Dickens in All the Year Round.

Since that first market, another 33 were to join it by the 1940s. This gave New Orleans the largest market system in the U.S., with only Baltimore as a serious competitor, according to author Helen Tangires in her landmark book “Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America.”[1] The list of the city’s markets is a history and geography lesson of its neighborhoods and civic leaders: St. Mary, Poydras, Washington, Carrollton, Ninth Street, Soraparu, Magazine, Dryades, Claiborne, Treme, St. Bernard, French, Port, Jefferson, Second Street, Keller, LeBreton, St. Roch, St. John, Ewing, Prytania, Mehle, Memory, Suburban, Rocheblave, Maestri, Delamore, McCue, Lautenschlaeger, Zengel, Guillotte, Doullut, Behrman and Foto. Local market historian Sally K. Reeves [2] wrote, “ These well-dispersed centers of food and society played an essential role in the city’s cultural, economic and political life. They also generated their share of crime, grafts, rule defiance and contract disputes.”

Only some of these buildings remain (around 15 as of 2005) with only two still operating as city-owned public market buildings: the French Market and the St. Roch Market, both down river of Canal Street, and only a few blocks from each other. The St. Roch Market escaped the auction block in the 1930s through neighborhood pressure and was recently reborn as a controversial food hall after Hurricane Katrina. Before 2005, it spent  decades under private, half-hearted use that closed off most of the building to use. Besides those two, the only other that operates in some manner close to its beginnings is what had been the St. Bernard Market and is now a grocery store known as Circle Food, also only a few blocks from the others. Walking through its colonnade, one notes its practical market design and appreciates the superb retail location at the intersection of Claiborne and Saint Bernard Avenues. This store serves the 6th, 7th and 8th ward Creole community primarily, but also shoppers across the region looking for foods known to New Orleans families of every ethnicity. From the current Circle Food site: “coons, rabbits, pig ears & lips, turkey necks & wings, ham hocks, chicken feet, cow tongue, lunch tongue, beef kidney, oxtails, and special fresh cuts of veal including veal seven steaks.”

In her 2005 University of New Orleans thesis on food and markets, researcher Nicole Taylor traced each remaining public market building in the city and its current use. Some of the buildings have even retained their WPA-era plaque to remind passersby of its market history.

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LAUTENSCHLAEGER MARKET  Photo: John W. Murphey © Creative Commons BY-NC-ND

She noted in her analysis, “The changing values in American planning and development did affect New Orleans, only more slowly. The Depression years brought change in New Orleans with some large projects conducted by the WPA, but the markets were not replaced, only renovated. While the rest of the country was beginning to demolish old neighborhoods and replace the old homes and storefront businesses with modern buildings, high rises and highway systems in the name of progress, New Orleans’ operation of municipal public markets continued[3].”

Finally, the 20th century collapse of the public market system in the U.S. assisted by the emergence of refrigeration and the supermarket came to New Orleans and the city began to sell off its magnificent markets, leaving its vendors to an uncertain fate. Many set up permanent stores nearby,  with some even continuing their original business to this day. But not until the modern farmers market revival arrived in New Orleans in 1995 with the first open-air Crescent City Farmers Market did significant numbers of farmers, fishers and foragers begin to trickle back from outlying parishes to once again sell their goods. The CCFM organizers even spirited away the last few farmers still selling at the old French Market, leaving New Orleans’ original market only suitable for tourists. In 2003 however, CCFM arranged for the return of farmers to the French Market by offering a regular Wednesday market in the 1930s-era Farmers’ Market shed. The French Market Corporation, the private/public corporation that has formally managed the market district for the city since the early 1930s, also began to search for other artisanal entrepreneurs to operate permanent stalls on either side of the aisle. The effort has not been entirely successful in luring locals back but it is important to note that besides the farmers market on Wednesdays, the French Market now includes a local artists co-op, respected  cooperative and healthy  cafes, a thriving artist colony around Jackson Square, a cooking demonstration stage and regular cultural events on site.

The upshot is that unlike most other American cities, New Orleanians can participate in the same public market tasks as previous generations, including at the same spaces used for that activity since the city was new.

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The 1878 Hardee map of New Orleans, showing many of the markets.

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A pic that historian Richard Campanella posted of a 1930s renovation design idea of the St. Roch market that was never used.

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The interior of St. Roch Market after the WPA renovation

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Photographer Roy Guste shot the inside of the St. Roch as the city began to renovate it in 2012.

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The Saturday Crescent City Farmers Market in its new location as of October 2016. It spent exactly 21 years at the corner of Magazine and Girod before moving to Julia and Carondelet. These open-air markets only allow producers and harvesters to sell directly; no resellers allowed.

[1] Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003

[2] Author of “Making Groceries: A History of New Orleans Markets.” Louisiana Cultural Vistas 18, no3. Also author of upcoming book on New Orleans public market system.

[3] Taylor, Nicole, “The Public Market System of New Orleans: Food Deserts, Food Security, and Food Politics” (2005). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. Paper 250.

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Imagining the Creole City: The Rise of Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: Review

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One relevant reason for this book is the recently reignited protests centering on race inequities and immigration across America, a conversation that is always sadly necessary in the American South. Local historian Rien Fertel addresses it by writing about the elite Creole literary circle that, starting in the 1820s/1830s, largely created and sustained the story of the region’s “exceptionalism.” That era of virtuous manifest destiny – not just in the South of course- is largely to blame for the lack of understanding among those who continue to grow up amid their own ethnic myths in the U.S.

For New Orleans, most people know the story of Creole culture only through Creoles of color who continue to inhabit the city, partly because they are largely responsible for much of what we continue to value culturally in New Orleans such as live music, public and family culture, and informal Carnival activities. But it is also convincingly identified here as resulting from the profiled writers unapologetic and sometimes incorrect assertion of their whiteness and its embedded privileges during Reconstruction through the turn of the 20th century. Yet the historical details contained here give those actions context and perspective; Fertel’s description of the politics of post-Louisiana Purchase New Orleans and the concern from the White House on any potential allegiance to the Old World as partially responsible for the Creoles’ sensitivity about the eclipse of their history is especially informative.

By offering individual profiles of prominent writers of Creole history starting with eminent historian Charles Gayarré, “Transcendentalist” New Orleans Choctaw missionary Adrien Rouquette and through those writers who took up the “cause” in the 20th century, including Grace King, Robert Tallant and Lyle Saxon, Fertel offers a human-scaled trek through that complicated history and time. Having the book end with the profile of George Washington Cable and his more inclusive history of the city,  he shows the reordering of history that began with Cable as well as the tension among writers, which (partly) led to Cable’s self-imposed exile from the city. Fertel does his best to fairly catalogue both good and bad (or the long and the short) of that tension; for example, he shares how Grace King’s later-in-life acknowledgement of Cable’s value to the city showed the potential for change among those earlier devoted only to the “gallant” Creole story.

The details gathered by many of these writers will continue to offer us a rich tapestry of Louisiana life and cannot be entirely eclipsed by their love of heroic epics or even their insistence on racial “purity” and entitlement that belied the truth that existed in the tumultuous and complicated times of Jim Crow’s America. Yet, the dismissal of most of these writers works in the last 50 years as provincial cheerleading with either a stated or unstated allegiance to the “Lost Cause” should be a lesson in these Tea Party days and is vitally important for any writer in these times to consider.

 

View all my reviews

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Vanishing Foodways Campaign

I have been a Slow Food member in the past and have always been a supporter of their innovative food system work. By supporting all aspects of the cultural milieu in which local farmers, foragers, and harvesters create and sustain their livelihoods, Slow Food is a key component in food sovereignty work locally and globally. Campaigns like this one illustrate the inclusive and thoughtful approach of many of their chapters.
Slow Food New Orleans is launching Vanishing Foodways  as an ongoing effort to collect stories from people and regions whose foodways and cultural traditions that are at risk of vanishing.  Please visit our GoFundMe campaign and become part of this initiative.  The GoFundMe campaign features a  fabulous video created by artist Voice Monet, who will be part of our 25-person Louisiana-Vietnam delegation to Terra Madre,  the international gathering of people from 150+ countries in Italy, September 22-26.

The Louisiana-Vietnam delegation to Terra Madre is the beginning of the the cross-cultural connections that the Vanishing Foodways seeks to create.  The Louisiana Coast and Vietnam’s Mekong Delta are two of the most abundant food producing regions in the world, yet are also two of the world’s most rapidly disappearing regions. Vanishing Foodways will video-document the Louisiana-Vietnam delegation’s experience at Terra Madre along with collecting stories from Terra Madre delegates representing regions that are experiencing the disappearance of their traditional and cultural foodways.

By collecting and sharing these stories, Vanishing Foodways aims to; 1) educate people that endangered foodways are not simply someone else’s problem,  2) engage people in the shared plight of all of our foodways & 3) empower people with simple daily choices that each of us can make to move the world towards reclaiming and preserving our vital cultural foodways that sustainably feed the world.
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Southern Decadence 2016 Parades

These routes are still tentative as of the time of this post. Check the website if, for some reason, you are in need of up-to-the-minute information.

There are two official Southern Decadence parades for 2016.

The FRIDAY NIGHT parade is a float parade through the streets
of the French Quarter presented by Toby LeFort and the Knights of Decadence.
The parade formation time is 6:15 P.M.
The parade starting time is 7:30 P.M.
 
HERE IS THE OFFICIAL PARADE ROUTE
OF THE FRIDAY NIGHT PARADE:

SD-Parade-Route-Friday16

The SUNDAY AFTERNOON parade is the traditional Southern Decadence
Grand Marshal Parade.  It is a walking parade with no motorized vehicles
except for one truck at the front of the parade that will carry the sound system
for the Southern Decadence Grand Marshals’ entourage.
The parade formation time is 1:00 P.M.
The parade starting time is 2:00 P.M.

HERE IS THE OFFICIAL PARADE ROUTE
OF THE SUNDAY AFTERNOON PARADE:

SD-Parade-Route-Sunday16

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1930s Jackson Square watercolor

By Alvyk Boyd Cruise, for  the Historic American Buildings Survey.

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Fick’s Guide to FQ: Sneak peek

LOVE her work and cannot wait for the book.

 

An illustrated guide to the French Quarter

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Gerber on the Big Easy

 

images.duckduckgoOf course I had noted Gerber’s pictures before, but like so many of our “journeyman” photographers, her work has most often been published in our ephemeral media and with that comes a tiny name credit all that marked it as hers, likely often missed. And oddly for such a visual city, the writer of words is usually given prominence over those who use a camera. It’s not that photographers are never celebrated: Gerber’s own photography mentor Michael Smith is renowned as are at least a half dozen or more names. But since working photographers are thankful to get one shot at a time published, it is often only when you see a number of photos together that the individual’s viewpoint emerges.

This book offers Gerber’s sensitive and sensible view of her city and of her neighbors. You notice she is often at near-to-middle distance, close enough to catch an eye or to elicit a smile or gesture, but not too close to  influence the moment, which points to her work as a photographer for Gambit and other news outlets. Action permeates her work, but just as often she appreciates a simple moment of acknowledgement. Humor more than glee, sadness more than despair make it seem like she just happened to photograph a thousand normal days here. And gives me a sense of the photographer quietly saying to me over my shoulder, “see that guy? he…”

The physical space of New Orleans is covered here, especially in the time of Katrina when less people were here and those who were did not need their picture taken (as Gerber well knows) but her favorite subject seems to be a single person. Even when there is more than one in the photo, the others are usually reacting to the protagonist. And that seems very right in a book about New Orleans since musicians, parades, sporting events and yes even murder scenes all have main characters who propel or narrate the action, all done publicly. Yet the choice of photographs and the layout of this book means the juxtaposition of two or more images on a single page or across two pages forces us to to consider each photo as part of a more complex story; even the choice of Chris Rose and Lolis Elie as the essay writers at the beginning tell us to prepare for that. A photo at the JCC uptown pool with white children jumping in is paired with two African-American boys landing on a pile of mattresses outside of a boarded up house. The two photos uncannily mirror each other in the physical layout and are connected by the childish joy seen in both but still, the divide is vast. Both the connection and the distance between linked images is presented again and again, although not with one image dominant over the other. As a matter of fact, the pairings or clusters seem necessary to tell the entire story of each. Buffalo Soldiers and NOPD on horseback, Metairie Cemetery gleaming and paved next to weedy, handwritten  Holt, Roller Derby girls as bulls on skates next to Mardi Gras Indians with horns, even David Vitter and his Canal Street Madam (well that one made me laugh)…all together tell the story. I don’t think I have seen the life here shared in photos any better.

Buy it here