In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter 2 Preservation and Profit in the french Quarter In the mind of the preservationist, there is a sign on every French Quarter building: Do Not Touch. Orleanians will not be skyscrapered, monorailed or rocketed into the twentyfirst century while there’s still some good living left in the twentieth. —charles suhor (1970) “New Orleanians have not saved the French Quarter . . . It’s the out-of-towners who did it.” At least that was how Mary Morrison remembered it. In 1939 she and her husband Jacob, an attorney and half-brother of future New Orleans mayor Chep Morrison, moved from Mississippi to a nineteenth-century cottage on Governor Nicholls Street. The Morrisons, along with other “expatriates of the United States,” found in the French Quarter a quaint community with affordable, charming houses that evoked the romantic images of French Creole families popularized by George Washington Cable, Grace King, Lyle Saxon, and other southern writers. “Everyone down here was from somewhere else,” she recalled. She remembered a colony of Chinese restaurateurs and laundry operators on Bourbon Street, many Italian immigrants, and residents from around the country. “None of us had any money, we were Depression people. You could buy any property in the French Quarter back then for about $4,000.” Like Paris’s Montmartre and New York’s Greenwich Village, the French Quarter’s exotic mystique and low cost of living attracted a Bohemian element of artists, writers, and other sojourners who stood on the cusp of neighborhood transformation.1 Despite the initial wave of preservationists who joined them in the 1920s and 1930s, however, the French Quarter remained a blot on the city in the eyes of many New Orleanians. The Morrisons and the few preservation-minded French Quarter pioneers they joined were at odds with the broader public view of the old district into the 1940s and even 1950s, a time when most civic leaders still zealously eyed developments that might return New Orleans to the forefront of American cities. Despite the colorful history and architectural treasures of the Vieux Carré, as late as 1952 only about two dozen of the approximately fifteen hundred householders listed in the city’s Social Register resided in the old French section. Some civic leaders wished, privately and even publicly, that the French Quarter might be consumed by fire or leveled to build new structures. Preservationist Lou Wylie, who had served as publicity hostess for Pan American Airways at International House, later recalled that at a party for Mayor Chep Morrison’s first inauguration in 1946, she heard downtown merchant Leon Godchaux, bottler William Zetzmann, and Louisiana governor Sam Houston Jones remark that “the Vieux Carre needed a good fire so the business section wouldn’t have to grow out Canal Street.” Even Mary Morrison ’s brother-in-law, once he became mayor, confided to a visiting journalist that he would gladly trade “all of the glamour in the French Quarter for a few blocks of really modern apartments.”2 For many longtime New Orleans business and civic leaders, preservation seemed antithetical to the progress they sought. The French Quarter of the 1940s merely marked time. Preservationists renovated some buildings as others crumbled or even toppled into the narrow streets below. Reflective of the transitory state of the Vieux Carré, whose warehouses, breweries, hotels, and other commercial buildings punctuated the mosaic of Mediterranean rooflines, four French Quarter lumber companies and wrecking yards serviced the gradual demolition of structures old enough to have greeted General Benjamin Butler’s Union occupiers in the Civil War. Preservation pioneers mined these wrecking yards for period architectural adornments to refurbish their houses. Mary Morrison described the swapping of hardware by “beachcombers” who paced the buckled sidewalks with heads lowered so as not to miss discarded artifacts. While the attention of artists, writers, and civically active socialites contributed to the transformation of the neighborhood from ethnic ghetto to cultural preserve, the arrival of bourgeois residents like the Morrisons ensured that the Vieux Carré would assume a mythical presence in the city’s development. The shared experience of architectural salvage and the act of restoring an urban neighborhood to an imagined heyday bonded Mary Morrison and her neighbors together as cultural guardians of the city’s past and united them in one common purpose—to resist alternative visions for the French Quarter’s future which compromised their own.3 Although the French Quarter had attracted outside comment in the popular press as an exotic tourist destination even in the...

Share