Inspired
by Decline: Old Quarter Feeds Creativity
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If "the seed must die to generate
new life," it was the post Civil War demise of the old Creole
society in the New Orleans French Quarter that gave rise to a
world of romantic reminiscences about it. Those enigmatic Creoles--
be they private, penurious, prideful in their poverty--left their
indelible mark on the world they built. The sprit of what went
before absorbed and co-opted those who came afterwards, those
who inherited the remnants of the kingdom. Living with the dense,
semi-fortified streetscape, a world of light and shadow known
for withholding some of her favors, they came to grips with the
sense that something about the place and the people was elusive.
Thus was born the New Orleans fiction of George Washington Cable
and Lafcadio Hearn, of Grace King and Kate Chopin, in the waning
years of the 19th century. As historian S. Fred Starr has written
of Hearn especially, they "invented New Orleans." And
if Creoles resented being probed and analyzed, ridiculed and
fictionalized, perhaps it was because they were the un-self-conscious,
uninvented, genuine article.
Time wore on and time wore down the neighborhood. No longer a
place of grace and wealth, it became a place for the displaced,
for the poor, the immigrant who lent his flavors to the heady
mix of place and people. It all came together at the Old French
Market, where the scenes and scents of vital life swirled into
a piece with historic precedent. This was a place for those who
were comfortable with a dense urbanism, risk-takers who found
a little or a lot of dirt and disorder, clutter and confusion
somewhat acceptable.
Nineteen hundred was the winter of existence in the life of the
Quarter. Its people were as poor and as worn as its streets and
its buildings. As the one-eyed, night-watching Hearn had recounted,
the populace lived in warrens, washed food and body in courtyard
fountains, and worked from dawn to sunset. But if the seeds of
growth were buried, the earth was fertile. Photographers arriving
in 1920 were as astounded to see it as archaeologists finding
treasure. With careful lens they captured the Quarter as it emerged
unretouched from its postwar decline. Scenes captured by photographers
Tebbs and Knell of the 1920s presented a stark contrast to the
polished views commissioned by the city in the work of Lilienthal
fifty years earlier.
Writers and painters followed. The starving artist could find
in the Quarter an inexpensive room with a picturesque view of
rooftops looking like Left Bank Paris, piano music drifting upward,
and kindred spirits, human and bottled, at every neighborhood
corner. If it is a natural part of an artist to find virtue in
decay and a sultry atmosphere, saints abounded. William Faulkner,
writing from a Pirate's Alley flat in 1925, composed this take
on Jackson Square at nightfall:
"He opened the street door. Twilight
ran in like a quiet, violet dog, and nursing his bottle,
he peered out across an undimensional feathered square across
stenciled palms and Andrew Jackson's childish effigy…."
(Mosquitos,
1927).
Writers of the Twenties and Thirties flocked
to the Quarter. Along with Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest
Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Roark Bradford, Tennessee Williams,
Truman Capote, Lillian Hellman, Lyle Saxon, and Hamilton Basso
were among those who found their way to the Old Square of New
Orleans for inspiration. They found it in peeling paint and shadowy,
overgrown courtyards, in a heavily Black and ethnic population,
in an environment where people lived out customs, found parts
of day-to-day survival on the stoops of crumbing cottages,
and valued old things, because in them, one found comfort.
Peeling paint and timeworn surfaces have given way to fun,
food and entertainment. But the Quarter's atmosphere of creativity
has endured for residents and visitors. Try your luck with
inspiration in a quiet corner. You just might be surprised
to find it.
Sally Reeves is a noted writer and historian
who co-authored the award winning series New Orleans Architecture.
She also has written Jacques-Felix Lelièvre’s New
Louisiana Gardener and Grand Isle of the Gulf – An Early
History. She is currently working on a social and architectural
history of New Orleans public markets and on a book on the contributions
of free persons of color to vernacular architecture in antebellum
New Orleans.
