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The French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, a melting pot of culture and influence, forged by hardship and tragedy, and regarded for its equally mixed architecture and talented residents.
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The French Quarter, or Vieux Carré as it has been known for three centuries, is the original area from which the grand city sprung up. Due to its age and unique architecture, it has become one of the most protected and coveted historic districts in the country. Still, there was a time in history when we very nearly lost all of it to modern architecture and city redevelopment. To understand why anyone would want to tear this place down, and ultimately what changed their minds, I must take you back to the beginning, to an age long since past, and a landscape that would be unrecognizable today.
In 1682, after a long voyage to the New World, the French claimed the large swath of land occupying the western side of the Mississippi River and stretching from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. After much surveying, the first colonies sprang up in 1699 in their new territory. They called it Louisiana. They intended to use the new land for military purposes and to grow commercial crops for their empire. Commandant Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville was asked to establish a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi River, allowing the empire to ship goods out of the territory.
During an expedition to survey the best location closest to the Gulf, Bienville found a small native trading post at a crescent bend in the river. The Choctaw people, who were the dominant tribe in the area, called this place Bulbancha, which translated to "place of many tongues" due to the various languages and dialects the trading natives spoke. It was at Bulbancha that Commandant Bienville would establish Nouvelle-Orléans in 1718, or what we would call today, New Orleans. And as for the Bulbancha trading post, it continued to operate under the control of the new settlers. It eventually became known as the French Market, which still exists today as a flea market for locals and tourists alike.
To operate the plantations, the French enslaved the native tribes, but when a larger workforce was needed, they started importing African slaves. This would start the infamous slave trade in New Orleans, as the historic French Quarter would become the hub of that business for the entire American South for the next 150 years.
When it came to the architecture of the French Quarter, the first buildings were made from timber. This proved to be folly in the high humidity of southern Louisiana. An example of this was when the French government sent over nuns to establish the Ursuline Convent in 1727. Their first permanent building was completed in 1734, but it was made of timber with wood-clabbered sidings. Just nine years later, the structure was completely rotted through and in extreme disrepair due to the weather and annual river flooding. So, work began on a new building with brick walls and was covered in stucco to protect the structure from the weather. This proved to be a new standard for construction designed in the city. The new convent was completed in 1752 and still stands to this day, considered one of the oldest, if not the oldest, structure in the city of New Orleans.
To find another example of French colonial architecture is Madame John's Legacy on Dumaine Street. It was completed in 1788, but it is reminiscent of what you would have seen in the first years of New Orleans' existence, mostly a wood construction. Except that Madame John's has a stucco-faced ground level. This is because by the late 1700s, New Orleanians had accepted that occasionally the city would flood, and the houses needed to be built to withstand sitting in water for a period of time.
The Mississippi River in this area of Louisiana was constantly depositing silt and soil, creating new land and continually reshaping the river delta as the water always flowed in a path of least resistance to the Gulf. But each year, during the heavy rains up north, the Mississippi would overtop its banks, flooding the marshes surrounding it. Though the Quarter was built on the highest elevation in the area, it was barely above the surface of the river at the time, and so every year, the citizens would find that their city streets were inundated with several feet of water, with nothing to do but wait for the water to subside.
To protect against this seasonal flooding, the French started building a system of levees to surround the city. They were earthen embankments, creating a wall around the Quarter, separating the colony from the river and from the swamps that surrounded it. The levees were quite effective. In fact, the one along the riverfront of the Quarter is still the original and has held after all these years. This levee technology gave prospective plantation operators an idea to drain the swamp surrounding the city to create land for new crops to grow in the nutrient-rich soil. They ended up building and maintaining their own levees and transported their harvests to the ports along Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi.
In 1763, after about 40 years of slow growth, a lack of profit, and issues operating the community so far from the fading power of the French Empire, King Louis XV handed over control of Louisiana to his ally and relative, King Charles III of Spain. The Spanish then took advantage of the city's potential as a port of trade. They modernized the infrastructure to improve the quality of life for the citizens and to increase the capacity to move goods in and out of the river delta.
The fires of 1788 and 1794 had largely wiped out the French colonial architecture across the Quarter, and in an effort to build the city back with better fireproofing, the Spanish regulated new construction using masonry and stucco exteriors and having roofing materials made of slate. While the new architecture of the city was very much Spanish colonial, there were still French influences, particularly because the citizens still retained their French language and traditions. Throughout this period, New Orleans was still a piece of the Old World blossoming on new soil.
As the Quarter continued to boom with the success of cotton and sugar plantations nearby, more people took residence in the city. The limited quantity of dry land in the French Quarter meant that new buildings sprang up ever closer to old ones. The neighborhood grew taller, each building narrower, and yet still competing for attention as the rich owners tried to show off their wealth. The citizens still prized their private gardens, however, and this gave rise to the implementation of hidden courtyards within the new townhouses, a feature that the French Quarter has become rather famous for.
Besides its hybrid architecture, St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square is actually the third cathedral to be operated on this site. The second one, which had replaced the first, was destroyed by the 1788 fire, and the next year, this one opened. It remains today the oldest continually operating Catholic cathedral in the United States. Next to the cathedral, to the left is the Cabildo, and to the right is the Presbytère. The Cabildo was originally constructed to be for the Spanish municipal government of New Orleans and completed in 1795. The Cabildo was designed in a Spanish colonial style with Neo-Renaissance elements and French-style cast iron railings. They finished the twin building, the Presbytère, in 1813, although by then the city was under the control of the Americans. In 1847, both the Cabildo and Presbytère were given French Mansard roofs with dormers. The new roofs were intended to shed rain water better. These buildings are a good example of the many hybrid styles of architecture within the French Quarter.
In 1788, we start to see the first expansions of the city beyond its square border. Plantations surrounding the city began dividing and selling their land for development. This gave rise to the nickname "The Crescent City," as the smaller neighborhoods on both sides of the Quarter contributed to its distinctive shape.
In the year 1800, the French reclaimed Louisiana from the Spanish, only to sell it to the Americans three years later for a sum of $15 million. The first papers for the Louisiana Purchase were signed within the walls of the Cabildo of the French Quarter. Soon, Yankees flooded the city, hoping to find new opportunities. The suburbs around the Quarter continued to grow, and as they did, new swampland had to be pumped dry and surrounded by expanded levees. Still, much of the city's growth was limited due to the occasional hurricanes bringing in high water that sometimes overtopped the levees and destroyed whole suburbs. Much of the city's expansion was really more about fitting ever greater amounts of people within the land that was already pumped out and protected.
Many people are familiar with the French Quarter's famous lacy cast iron porches, balconies, and galleries. However, prior to this heavily complex style, the buildings constructed during Spain's control sometimes featured railings or decoration of wrought iron, which was so expensive to shape that only the rich could afford it, which made it somewhat of a competition to show off the owner's wealth. But by the 1850s, Baroness Pontalba made popular the much more decorative cast iron that happened to be faster and a little cheaper to produce. It adorned the new Pontalba buildings on either side of Jackson Square and started a trend that was replicated across the Quarter.
As the mid-1800s rolled through, the city experienced unprecedented growth. The families that owned the prosperous plantations along the river were expanding. Soon, they moved into large neighborhoods of mansions that grew upriver along the banks. The historic Garden District is a preserved example of these vast expanses of wealthy suburbs.
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In 1865, slavery was abolished across the nation. The new free people had the right to earn a wage that they could keep, and the sudden expense of operating the massive plantations with huge workforces took its toll on the profit margins of such operations. As the rich citizens of the city had adapted to living a little more modestly, many of the extended families started selling off their townhouses in the French Quarter and retreating to the family mansions of the suburbs where they could stay together. It took about four decades of slow decline to make the Quarter go from an elite downtown to an aging relic of the forgotten past.
What accelerated the decline of the old town was the rapid expansion of the city due to a perfected pumping technology. In 1897, Allen Baldwin Wood developed high-efficiency screw pumps, which were made from a large diameter pipe fitted with a screw-shaped impeller. Within the pump was driven by powerful electric motors. This provided a pumping capacity never before seen. Large areas of swamps were boxed in by levees, and new pumping stations forced the water into man-made canals that drained into Lake Pontchartrain. This made land cheap and affordable, and people moved out of the expensive rented properties of the French Quarter and established homes in the large districts and wards of the city.
In 1912, the largest pump Allen Wood ever developed was 14 feet in diameter and could pump 7,500 gallons of water per second. The pumping operations of the city had gone around the clock ever since then because, though they made the land dry, the city is still surrounded by water on all sides, and if left unchecked, the water would seep up through the spongy soil. As the soils across the city dried out over the decades, they began to compact. Buildings were constantly settling and doing so unevenly. Even the French Quarter, which sits on the higher ground, is not immune to this, having already sunk a few feet below the river water line. You'll find that many of the buildings are sagging in various spots, the pavement of the sidewalks buckle, and the roads become uneven and develop potholes faster than they can be filled. And as all that land settles, the entire city continues to sink further under sea level, making the levees that protect the city much more than a luxury; it has become a necessity.
By the turn of the 20th century, most of the rich population had moved out of the French Quarter, leaving behind the impoverished people. In a strange twist, the French Quarter, the Vieux Carré, built from the wealthy aristocracy that flourished from the free slave labor, had become a decrepit and largely neglected home for the lowest working class. Though it was more than just an impoverished cityscape, it was now an oasis of creativity and culture for the marginalized group left behind. From these ashes rose the new creations of art and jazz, a culmination of cultural musical influence that took the Western world by storm. However, despite the artists that emerged from the neighborhood, the city officials considered the French Quarter as an embarrassing slum. The buildings were falling apart, the once beautiful mansions were subdivided into small living spaces for large families, and as the new downtown rose up from Canal Street, slowly but deliberately, the historic buildings were being demolished and replaced.
In 1911, as part of an effort to encourage the redevelopment of the land of the French Quarter, a whole city block was demolished between Royal Street and Chartres Street to create the new Louisiana Supreme Court. This put the citizens on alert. The old 18th and 19th-century buildings, unique to New Orleans, were in danger, and the citizens that lived within them would face a housing crisis. All this history, the entire backstory of the French Quarter, has reached this turning point in time, and all of it mattered.
You see, it's easy to grow up in a city and get used to the sights of it. You watch as buildings age and fall into disrepair. Every day, you see particular neighborhoods fall further into a slump of neglect and, in some cases, lawlessness. It's because of this that when many Americans see such a thing, they can't help but wonder how much nicer their city would be if these areas were replaced with modern buildings and clean avenues. In the 21st century, we are used to seeing beautiful historic districts like the French Quarter and think of it as something special, something worthy of protecting. But up until the 1950s, people didn't always think that way. There was a fine line between antique and antiquated, as well as a line between historic and outdated.
So, when the 1910s rolled around, the Vieux Carré faced the threat of complete destruction. It took groups of people who appreciated the Quarter to go out and educate the public, to show them what made this neighborhood so special and so worthy of staying. And all the aforementioned history, as long-winded as it may be, is what ultimately changed public opinion.
In 1936, Elizabeth Werlein put together a group that lobbied the state legislature to put before voters a referendum amending the state constitution to create a new commission to oversee the French Quarter. This would give the city council the power to preserve the century-old structures of the Vieux Carré. By November 3rd, 1936, the amendment was approved by an overwhelming number of voters. The new Vieux Carré Commission made the French Quarter a historic district under their watchful eye, the second oldest in the country. This kind of protection allowed them to control how and when renovations to the buildings were performed, helping to maintain their integrity and originality.
As the French Quarter was cleaned up, the artists, cooks, and musicians within the district played a key role in maintaining a booming tourism industry. People from all over the world began visiting the little French neighborhood, bringing back the bustling streets as joyous trumpeting of jazz played out every day and every night. The town came to life with celebrations and libations. When the 1960s came around, a great number of buildings and structures around the Quarter and the city were registered as historic landmarks, adding further protections and helping to drive up visitation.
The French Quarter has become a place that educates us with its museums and stories. It thrills us with its legends of ghosts and creatures of the night, and it celebrates our cultural and personal diversities with all the warmth and charm of its traditions and citizens. It was founded on a rather dark and tragic history, but it lives today as a center for optimism and resilience. The French Quarter serves as a window into the past and yet a crystal ball into the future of a society full of hopes, dreams, and promise.
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