Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008 - (Page 43)

share similar architectural types. Parts of New Marigny held water for weeks after Katrina but its many raised structures mitigated catastrophic damage to the neighborhood. At its core, New Marigny is a tightly knit working-class community but it shoulders the burden of urban blight that existed before the storm. Although stained by pockets of crime and decay, New Marigny is also a neighborhood in revival. Welcome signs, porch swings and flowering front gardens spruced up a shotgun house on Frenchmen Street. On North Claiborne, Mona’s Accents flower shop delivers roses. On Elysian Fields, renovator Sheila Julien worked hard at reviving a 150-year-old house and expressed joy about other nearby efforts. During the day, teenage girls walked down Marais Street slurping multi-colored, refreshing snowballs from Charlie’s Sweet Shop. At dusk, white-haired ladies sit on porches as a picture from the past. New Marigny retains the street-culture traditions of New Orleans. In the 1960s, activist Jerome Smith of the Congress of Racial Equality began the Tambourine and Fan cultural organization which initiated the popular “Super Sunday” procession of Mardi Gras Indians from Bayou Saint John. Every Labor Day, the Black Men of Labor conduct their annual second-line parade from the spiffy Sweet Lorraine’s Jazz Club on St. Claude. For more than 50 years, the legendary Mardi Gras Indian Chief Allison ‘Tootie” Montana, now deceased, emerged from his North Villere Street home on Carnival Day to the delight of neighborhood admirers. During his tenure, Chief “Tootie” developed an appreciation for the community that appreciated him: “I wanted to give them as much as I could give them. Give y’all something pretty again,” he told me in an interview in 2000. His son, Big Chief Darryl Montana has held true to that tradition. Born and raised in this neighborhood, as I walked down familiar streets, there were those who remembered me as the teacher’s son — Mrs. Medley’s boy. Grocer Larry Cangelosi introduced me to 88-year-old Gladys Brown Anderson who lived behind the location of my grandfather’s former ice cream factory. “You look just like Veronica,” she told me. “Albert [Poppa Toca] used to sell ice cream a penny a scoop, strawberry, chocolate and vanilla. You could sit in that parlor, they had tables in there. You get five scoops of ice cream for a nickel.” Ms. Anderson illustrates that in New Orleans’ ancestral neighborhoods, a home is more than the land, building, or asking price. It is fundamentally a community with a rich legacy and stories to tell. Though my grandfather died before my birth, Ms. Anderson remembered the horses, the delivery carts, and the peddlers who sold Toca products around the neighborhood. “I like my little house,” Ms. Anderson stated. “They have beautiful houses in Slidell but I wanted to come back here. My mother died in this house. My father, my sister…” NEW ORLEANS’ FIRST “SUBURB” In 1806, Bernard de Marigny began subdividing plantation land for residential development to serve a growing population following the Louisiana Purchase. He contracted with surveyor and military engineer Barthelemy Lafon to bring his plan into reality. The contract offered $700 and “all the negroes who will be necessary to help.” He named the streets after relatives, friends and predilections. Rue De Craps (now Burgundy) paid tribute to Marigny’s affection for the game of chance. The name Rue D’Amour (now North Rampart) spoke for Summer 2008/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 43 THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION A corner store on the Faubourg Marigny side of Esplanade Avenue sold medicinal leeches in the late 19th century.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities George Rodrigue’s Louisiana: Cajuns, Blue Dogs & Beyond Katrina The Historic New Orleans Collection After The Flood Faubourg Marigny: The Creole “Suburb” Preserving New Orleans Jazz, One Generation at a Time: Conversation & Music with Tom Sancton Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Architecture Baton Rouge Photographs, 1863-1910 Jazz Notes The Ogden Museum of Southern Art Louisiana Association of Museums Nature of the “Beast” Louisiana State Museum Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008

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