Jackson Jambalaya

A completely different set of public behavioral expectations was enforced back then.

long before government became husband and father. long before cultural marxists took full control of media and academia. long before society became shameless and simultaneously entitled.

A dirty thrash NO has more to offer than Anything Mississippi.

The last time (and it will be the last time) I was in the Big Sleazy, the French Quarter looked like the rec yard at Angola. It was 10 AM on a Sunday.

I for one, enjoy NO’s beautiful beaches.

7:01 am I guess you don't go to any parties or have guests over on a Saturday night and go to church on Sunday morning.
Your Angola dig was just tacky and mean spirited. Your mind looks like Parchman!

I’m here right now. The place smells like lemons. It’s clean as a whistle. Trash is picked up hourly. Neighbors smiling and helping each other. All sorts of different nationalities own stores and local shops. It’s a great place to be especially when th weather is crisp and clear. Bourbon is spotless.

I don't think anybody in that band was playing the same song.

In those days the Mafia controlled things. It was a much simpler time, and the biggest deterrent to crime was those who broke the law prayed the cops got to them before the Mafia. Crime was bad for business.

@6:33am I don’t think the poster meant to hurt your feelings. He was pointing out how rotten our culture in general has gotten, which has led to a great city like New Orleans being trashed. While it is still a beautiful city, there is no denying it’s nothing compared to its former glory. Even Bourbon street is full of weird smelling chicken “shacks” and most of the original businesses on Canal have shuttered and been replaced with garbage businesses. Like Prado’s new “Dubai Gift” in Fondren, actually! Between the rampant tweakers and the garbage humans that visit looking for a degenerate time, it’s not what it was.

Trash pickup is one bright spot - once the city threw out Richards (Hmmm). Otherwise, there is a story out there about how some cities have "risen" as the world has gotten smaller and others have "fallen." Jackson is certainly not as important as it was decades ago, but New Orleans has fallen much farther. At one time it was a commercial center like Atlanta or Nashville, but now not so much. I had a summer internship in NOLA in the early '80s and would hang out with the engineers after 5. Among the natives, this was a very sore point - how NOLA was going from a place where people worked to a "Big Ass Beers" and T-shirt shop tourist location. They would point out that you even needed to wear a jacket and tie to a strip club or you would get tossed out. The city makes a ton of money off Mardi Gras and such, but there has been a trade off.

The Big Easy jumped the shark during Katrina.

Wait, there was a time when the streets of the French Quarter didn't smell like urine?

Back in 1955 my dad drove me and my brother through that area. The doors to the many titty bars were all wide open, as were our eyes.

Guarantee there was a very strong BO scent year round due to the lack of deodorant and anti perspirant use.

"The Big Easy jumped the shark during Katrina."

As far as I can tell, Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans.

Houston, on the other hand, went down the toilet after Katrina, thanks largely to all the new residents.

No. That came later. The big billboard on the video's cover photo, says it all: Schenley. Duck AI informs me that the Schenley family were AUSTRIANS - upwardly mobile ones. And the names of classic New Orleans businesses are similar. Very little about New Orleans was French (but "French" was a marketable and plausible myth, so...).

The city, back when it functioned, was GERMAN. It was an off-brand sort of German - from the scary end of Germany. But it WORKED - particularly in a physical sense: flood control, the excellent water system, the streetcars, etc.: not surprising, considering that the most durable European vehicle going, the Gelandewagen (Mercedes G) is produced at that end of Germany.

New Orleans' florid furniture and architectural embellishments were distinctly 'Southern-end-of-Germany', too: not up to Berlin/Hamburg/Hanover standards of sophistication, but pretty-good, really.

I have immigration maps from 1900 and 1950, showing the most dominant nation of origin of each state's immigrants. The group you describe, were Louisiana's dominant immigrant group, during those years. This was the period when people (including my biological father) rejected by Ellis Island, were smuggled into port cities along the Gulf Coast. The Germans had already arrived, and BUILT New Orleans into a sparkling city, BEFORE what you describe.

At the time of the video, the element you describe, only operated with impunity, within the "French" quarter - and in the Warehouse District. At the time, CURBING crime was the farthest thing from their minds.

I noticed on KF's video how lean and well dressed many were. It was a pleasure seeing women who were fit and fashionably attired in long dresses, and many men in jackets and ties or slacks and pressed Cubavera shirts. I was an elementary student in Shreveport close to this era.

Thanks for this post.

I wish I could have watched the entire video, but I was triggered by the presence of the Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Circle; therefore, I couldn't watch the rest of it.

'Cubavera Shirts'!!! Thank you! I've been wondering what those awful things were called! An image search confirms. Apparently, they were the uniform for Sons of the South who were sent down to New Orleans, to rot & die (once it had been determined that they would never "find a girl").

In the late '80s, Greenville friends took us to the Esplanade mansion of one of those boys. He had some GRAND antiques, and had been sourcing grand antiques for his extended family, since the late 1950s. His family were simultaneously 'Old Delta' and 'Old New Orleans' - having one ancestor among Tulane Medical School's first grads, and, at the time of our visit, another member at Tulane's School of Architecture: in the same Romanesque building... and famous ancestors going back to the earliest days of America's possession of Louisiana.

At this very moment, there are other various members of that extended Delta family, damaged in one way or another, rotting and dying in New Orleans. So, like an old money version of Julia Reed's too-short life, their peregrinations continue, between the Mississippi Delta and the Crescent City.

But back to the one we'll call 'Sebastian' (after Sebastian Venable: and Tennessee Williams DID know the family - intimately - basing multiple characters on them). He'd opted for boarding school, up-East, where he was beaten and raped and ridiculed - and not allowed to leave, by his authoritarian father. "Once you start something, you see it to the END!" The stress (and a sugary diet) had given him deep Scar Acne, which repeated dermabrasion had only made more grotesque.

The family's sugary foodway, and a lifetime of drinking, had given him an ugly paunch. The Cubavera Shirts eliminated the need for tucked-in shirttails - and, because of all that pleating, stayed presentable in New Orleans' sticky heat.

That paunch - the noodle arms - the wasted legs and posterior - the pocked skin... that operatic New York/New Orleans/Delta Grandee accent! It was so SAD. And it was so similar to what you saw, all over the city - a look not confined to one race or class. 'Sebastian' simply had better antiques and diction and ancestors.

I'm just glad I live, now, in places close enough to other Saks Fifth Avenue stores, that I never have to set foot in New Orleans, ever again. Aside from faster passports and the airport, why would anyone go there, now?