Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007 - (Page 45)

New Orleans’ Faubourg Tremé Rooted in Tradition Association found their voices at the Globe Hall on Saint Peter near North Rampart Streets. A MULTICULTURAL NEIGHBORHOOD As the 19th gave way to the 20th century, Tremé embraced a goodly mixture of industrial, residential, service and religious points of reference. Offering wood and charcoal, rags and junk, hardware, paints, and oils, commercial concerns settled in between the houses and corner drugstores. The sprawling Pelican Brewery arose on North Villere Street between Esplanade and Hospital (now Governor Nicholls) Streets. On North Claiborne Avenue, every four minutes, mule-powered yellow streetcars of the Canal and Claiborne line clopped toward the vegetable markets at St. Bernard Circle. Lumberyards, stables, and corner grocery stores flanked the cobblestones on Ursulines Street. An imposing Parish Prison occupied an entire city block on Orleans Street between Tremé and Marais. Here, 11 Italian immigrants were apprehended by a vigilante mob in 1891. The prisoners were shot and lynched on lampposts on Saint Ann Street after being acquitted of murdering the city’s police chief. To the other side of Parish Prison stood the Tremé market (built in 1839), the St. Louis cemeteries, and the sporting houses of Storyville, New Orleans’ infamous legalized red-light district. The populace of Tremé contained a range of colors, classes and countries of origin. In 1900, a sample demographic of the 1100 block of North Claiborne included black and white native inhabitants along with those born in Germany, Mexico, the West Indies, Scotland and France. Occupations in the block included carpenters, a physician, a grocer, a baker, a barber, masons, laborers, slaters, clerks, cigar makers, a blacksmith, and bartender. Today, walking the streets of Tremé provides a journey into that storied past. Few of the street layout or names have changed over the centuries. You can walk the same streets past the same structures where generations of Tremé residents have lived. The Ross Cottage at 1131-33 Governor Nicholls received its name from free black Phillipe Ross who built the domicile in approximately 1837. Similarly, the Fall 2007/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 45 HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION Urban renewal projects throughout the 20th century prompted the destruction of many residential blocks in historic Tremé. The Municipal Auditorium (above) opened in 1930, adjacent to Congo Square (right), pictured here following a rare snowstorm on February 14, 1895. In the 1960s, 16 blocks were razed to make way for the 32-acre Louis Armstrong Park (left).

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

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.