Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007 - (Page 39)

New Orleans’ Fauborug Tremé Rooted in Tradition HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION The Tremé market was begun in 1839, spreading across present-day Basin Street and extending two blocks between Marais to N. Robertson Street. Streetcar tracks ran along Basin, passing through the middle of the market. PAST MEETS PRESENT Tremé’s past and present remain personal for me. My father grew up on North Villere Street in a shotgun house where he learned plastering at an early age and raised his siblings after Fall 2007/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 39 HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION lect. Then, of course, Katrina struck in 2005. Losing these the early death of his parents. His sisters often reminisced landmark homes that withstood the elements for centuries about their time working at the Tremé market. One of my is akin to watching a museum containing one-of-a-kind art mother’s first assignments as an idealistic young public classics destroyed or a centuries-old family album in school teacher brought her to Joseph A. Craig, Tremé’s pubflames. lic school for African Americans. As a young boy with Sylvester Francis educates visitors at the Backstreet Saturday chores, I rode my bicycle to Joe Dave’s meat marCultural Museum on Saint Claude Street about the Mardi ket on North Claiborne to buy “pickle meat” for Monday’s Gras Indians, brass bands, and Social Aid and Pleasure red beans. When Hurricane Betsy destroyed Holy Club organizations. But these days, the hefty, newly imRedeemer Church on Royal Street in 1965, my parents and posed $3800 fee for staging second-line parades threatens other parishioners migrated to Tremé’s St. Augustine these longstanding, uniquely New Orleans cultural maniChurch where I was an altar boy. As a teenager, I played festations. The rat-tat-tat of drums that Sited farther back from the enlivened the streets of Tremé has natural embankment of the largely dissipated as area musicians Mississippi River, Tremé dispersed around the country in the remains vulnerable to wake of Katrina. Regrettably, the periodic flooding, as depicted neighborhood symbolic of New here in 1849. Orleans music for centuries, the onetime home to the Caledonia, Joe’s Cozy Corner, and Little People’s Place, today possesses no active venue for live music.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007

Contents Friends & Letters Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Big Charity: A History of New Orleans’ Public Hospital Historic New Orleans Collection Making Groceries: A History of New Orleans Markets New Orleans’ Faubourg Tremé: Rooted in Tradition Jazz Notes Louisiana Association of Museums Chinatown New Orleans Louisiana Foodways A Question of Secession Louisiana Architecture Louisiana State Museum The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish Terra Incognita Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007

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