Three Letters: from Andrea DuPlessis to Charles Henry Rowell

August 15, 2006
New Orleans

Dear Charles,

My parents moved to New Orleans in the early 1950s, and they divorced after one year of living here. My father ultimately moved to Florida, but my mother, an artist, had fallen in love with New Orleans and decided to make her home in this city.

My mother sold her paintings at a small shop on Royal Street, and worked during the day as manager of the Maison de Ville, a small hotel on Toulouse Street that still exists today. (She designed and painted one of the signs that used to hang above the sidewalk over the front door of the hotel. Today that sign is still displayed, but in Molly's at the Market, a bar on Decatur Street.) She often brought me to work with her, especially on weekends, and so I kind of became a version of Eloise of the Plaza (!)—playing with my turtle in the lobby, spying on the tourists in the courtyard, sneaking over to the Court of the Two Sisters patio to visit the huge parrot cage they had there. At the Maison de Ville, I used to love to hide behind and under the furniture in the small lobby and observe the people who stayed at the hotel. My mother, of course, tried very hard to contain my activities, and this made my forbidden adventures all the more fun.

We lived on Esplanade (in the same block where I live now). Eventually my mother was offered a job in the display department of a local department store, Maison Blanche, which was on Canal Street between Dauphine and Burgundy. Often I would meet her there after school and we would walk home on either Bourbon or Royal Street, which was always filled with the sounds of different jazz musicians (more jazz than anything else, then) who performed for the tourists in bars and restaurants. I remember once seeing a stripper on a balcony during Mardi Gras, at the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse Street. She had a huge snake wrapped around her as she danced for the people collecting in the street below. My mother told me to quit staring, and she turned toward Royal Street for the rest of the walk home. She told me to focus on the sound of the calliope on the riverboat—a sound which I still cherish today and which I miss if I must be away too long from New Orleans.

On Sundays we would go to the Parisian Room on Royal Street and listen to jazz all afternoon. It was one of the few places where children were welcome in such a setting. Sunday was my mother's only day off from work—and she wanted to spend the day with me and, at the same time, derive rest and relaxation from the stresses of being a single parent. I remember seeing Keely Smith and Louis Prima, and many other local jazz musicians there. Sundays were days we both looked forward to.

Charles, I telling you all this because I want to give you an understanding of the meaning the French Quarter has for me as I answer the questions in your interview, and to paint a picture of what it was like while I was growing up—yes, in Vieux Carré, which was always filled with such a diversity of people. Families and businesses populated the French Quarter, but artists there were legion. In fact, people sometimes referred to the Quarter as an artist colony. The gatherings of artists, along with the music that filled the streets and homes, made the French Quarter a unique center for the arts in the South.

The streets of the French Quarter were indeed a stage, and the figures who traversed it or lived beyond its many shuttered doors and windows and walled courtyards were a colorful cast of legions. I remember seeing the photographer Johnny Donnels, and Noel Rockmore, who was well known for his paintings of jazz musicians at Preservation Hall. I also remember seeing Conrad Albrizio. He created the murals in the train...