Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007 - (Page 55)

Chinese restaurant, Kee Sing, opened on Dauphine Street), and 73 in 1892, when there were three Chinese restaurants. By 1898, those numbers more than doubled to 198 laundries and eight restaurants. While one-fifth of the laundries and half the restaurants operated in or near Chinatown that year, others were scattered evenly citywide, much like Italian grocery stores were distributed well beyond the Sicilian enclave in the lower French Quarter (“Little Palermo”). In both cases, the dispersion minimized competition with peers and maximized convenience to clientele. Since family members often lived near, above, or behind the laundry, the laundering niche tended to disperse the Chinese community beyond Chinatown. One such family operated a laundry at 1132 Carondelet and lived in a back room on two beds and a canvas cot. The father, Lee Bing, had arrived to New Orleans as a child in 1913 and was schooled at the Chinese Mission. One of his six children, born in 1932, would become one of the most prominent and popular figures in local public life, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee. Even as they dispersed, Chinese New Orleanians regularly went to Chinatown for social and institutional functions, for specialty items and laundering equipment, and for Chinese foodstuffs. A Tulane Avenue grocer would stock, according to a Times-Picayune reporter in 1920, “the queer Chinese wares, the embroideries, the tiny sandals, the dried shrimps, the jars of fiery confections and preserves” over which hung “a sinister atmosphere, to the foreigner.” New Orleanians of all backgrounds regularly visited Chinatown. The Yee Wah Sen Restaurant on South Basin, according to the Daily Picayune in 1911, catered to both the “toughest specimens of the underworld” and “respectable members of … polite society,” serving both blacks and whites (in segregated seating), such that the “aristocrat … rubs elbows with the hoi polloi.” The curio shops specialized in linen, ivory, silk kimonos, and mandarin coats popular with uptown debutants, as well as musical instruments and narcotics for nearby red-light districts. Recalled jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton, “I was personally sent to Chinatown many times with a sealed note and a small amount of money and would bring back [for the prostitutes in Storyville] several cards of hop. There was no slipping and dodging. All you had to do was walk in to be served.” Among the drugs available for delivery to Storyville were “opium, heroin, cocaine, laudanum, morphine, etcetera.” Surrounding Chinatown were some of historic New Orleans’ most fascinating back-of-town neighborhoods. Along South Rampart Street were tailor shops, clothing stores, jewelers, and other businesses owned by Orthodox Jews who catered to a predominantly black clientele. Nearby was the so-called “uptown district” of Storyville (a.k.a. “Black Storyville,” or “the Battleground”), counterpart to the more famous Storyville located across Canal Street from 1897 to 1917. One block from Chinatown stood the elegant Knights of Pythias Hall (1907), once the largest black-owned building in the nation. Dispersed throughout this area were landmarks associated with the emergence of jazz, among them the birthplace of Louis Armstrong, who reminisced about the area (circa 1907) in his elder years: “The neighborhood was consisted of Negroes, Jewish people, and lots of Chinese…. The Chinese finally moved into a little section of their own and called it China Town, with a few little beat-up restaurants serving soul food on the same menu of their Chinese dishes. I used to hear the Negroes braggin about their Lead Beans and Lice. That’s the way a Chinese waiter would order it for you…. My Mother + my Step Father used to take me + Mama Lucy (my sister) down in China Town + have a Chinese meal for a change. A kind of special occasion.” Why There? Geographers are guided by two fundamental questions: Where? and Why there? An analogy to seed, soil, and water aids in understanding why New Orleans’ Chinatown formed where it did. Chinatown’s “seed” was the Chinese Mission, which initially attracted Chinese to this area. While a few Chinese businesses existed in this area a few years prior to the founding of the Chinese Mission, a cluster did not really form until after the mission was operating. Chinatown’s “soil” was the abundance of reasonably priced, structurally appropriate commercial real estate, close enough to downtown to maximize convenience, yet far enough away to remain economical. It was well within walking distance of the commercial, cultural, and political heart of New Orleans, yet close enough to the undesirable back-of-town to keep the rent down. Streetcar lines connected it with the rest of the city. It was as good a place as Fall 2007/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 55

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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