The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island

Chapter 6. Pleasure Gardens in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: ‘‘Useful for All Classes of Society’’

Chapter  Pleasure Gardens in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: ‘‘Useful for All Classes of Society’’ lake douglas British-born architect Thomas Kelah Wharton (1814–62) came to New Orleans in 1853 as superintendent for the construction of the Customs House, and for nine years, during a golden age of urban growth and prosperity , he wrote about contemporary life in the antebellum community.1 On 2 May 1854, he described a rail excursion that he took with his family to Carrollton, a community several miles from downtown: The trip was delightful and the cool fresh breeze on the river bank quite invigorating after the heat and dust of a day in town. We met pleasant friends in the gardens and found every thing much changed, and not improved, since last May. The abrasions of the River have made a new Levee, far within the old one, absolutely necessary. Obliterating entirely one of the beautiful and far-famed gardens. The shade lane, too, of lofty oleander which last year was covered at this time with a perfect waste of blossoms. The pleasant walk on the river bank arched over with China trees.2 The lovely alleys of Cape jessamines, and the white bell flowered Yucca, from which years ago I derived my first impressions of the exuberance of southern vegetation, all, all, have vanished and in their place nothing but a long, bald, earthy, embankment, a wind dusty road, immense piles of cord wood (for supplying the steamboats ), with rail tracks in every direction to facilitate their transmission from point to point.3 Stagnant pools of muddy water between Pleasure Gardens in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans 151 the old Levee and the new. In short, deformity for beauty, utility for poetry, but the grand river still redeems it all, and the fresh green woods on the distant bank, and the fresh pure air blowing across its restless current.4 At first, this account appears to be little more than a description of a nineteenth-century open space in New Orleans—perhaps a public park— that had deteriorated significantly within a year, much to Wharton’s dismay . Neither the space nor its description seems to be of much significance for American urban history. What Wharton wrote about here, however, was Carrollton Gardens, a hotel in a landscaped setting created at the terminus of the streetcar line in the 1830s as an attraction to encourage the public to ride the streetcar and enjoy the refreshment and outdoor experiences the garden offered.5 Such commercial spaces, together with similar examples elsewhere in the country, are unexplored opportunities to investigate how nineteenth-century Americans perceived and used open spaces. Carrollton Gardens, in operation between 1835 and 1891, falls midway in a continuum of similar commercial open spaces in New Orleans that offered food, outdoor recreation, or amusements, the earliest of which dates from 1810. Sifting through seemingly unremarkable artifacts of everyday life such as newspaper advertisements, periodical articles, photographic images, and even sheet music, we find numerous references to open spaces similar to Wharton’s description. Known over time in nineteenth-century newspaper advertisements as ‘‘pleasure gardens,’’ ‘‘pleasure grounds,’’ ‘‘houses and gardens of pleasure,’’ and later as ‘‘amusement parks,’’ these commercial ventures were scattered throughout the community. Spatially, however, they were situated in an ill-defined middle ground between the public sphere and private property. Accessible to the public, albeit on the owners’ terms, these enterprises offered attractions their owners thought the public would embrace. Early nineteenth-century pleasure gardens in America were versions of European examples from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the end of the nineteenth century, they had evolved into amusement parks, typological precedents for the ‘‘theme parks’’ found throughout the world from the mid-twentieth century on.6 When one considers the wide variety of forms taken today by such amusement-oriented venues (not only theme parks but also waterparks, family entertainment centers, zoos, aquaria, ‘‘exploratoria,’’ science centers, resorts, and casinos), the millions of people 152 Lake Douglas who have patronized them, and the revenues they generate, the significance of pleasure gardens as key precedents in the general evolution of these designed landscapes becomes clear.7 Substantial evidence, presented here for the first time, situates pleasure gardens in several major nineteenth-century American cities, and anecdotal evidence suggests examples may well have existed throughout America, in commnities large and small, coastal and inland. Investigations of these...