Joe McKeever

"The Book" for Those Who Love New Orleans

During the Great Depression, in an attempt to put people to work and spur recovery, FDR and Congress formed the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Interestingly, the WPA did not just recruit laborers and skilled craftsmen, but assembled artists and writers and put them to work. (Students of politics will recall that FDR's right-hand man, Harry Hopkins, served as the administrator of the WPA.)

Artists painted murals in post offices all over America, where they can still be seen and enjoyed. Writers collected the stories and histories of communities across the country, most being recorded for the first time. These remain invaluable treasures today. One of the best of these was written about our city.

"New Orleans City Guide: 1938" is a fun read for anyone who knows and loves the Crescent City. First published, obviously, in 1938, it was reprinted in 1952 and 1983. The present reprint (2009) comes from Garrett County Press (http://www.gcpress.com). This book has been called the "masterpiece of the whole (WPA) series." I bought it at Sams Club for $12.32, a bargain.

I've been trying to assemble a representative collection of books on New Orleans for our associational office. It occurs to me that new staffers coming to work here will enjoy reading them and learning the history and culture of the community where God has sent them. They do not have to approve it or even like it, but they need to know it.

A few things from the book you might find interesting....

Bear in mind the year 1718 is the official founding date for New Orleans. "The earliest direct reference to a house of worship in the city is in the account of Father Charlevoix, who, when visiting New Orleans in 1721, found only ‘a hundred houses, and half a miserable warehouse, where Our Lord is worshipped.'"

Gradually the various Catholic orders sent in priests and nuns and got things going. The Jesuits arrived in 1837, bringing with them a number of educational institutions, including Loyola University.

The best known and perhaps earliest Protestant church still standing from those earliest days is Trinity Episcopal on Jackson Avenue. It's still an active house of worship and functions as a concert hall for the community. A Civil War general -- Leonidas Polk -- served as its pastor from 1855 to 1861 before going off to the war and becoming the "fighting general."

The dreaded Spanish Inquisition tried to gain a foothold in New Orleans in 1789 when Pere Antoine (you still see his name around) arrived with that as his agenda. Thankfully, Governor Miro put a stop to the sordid business and deported the priest. (A few years later, after Louisiana was sold to the United States, Pere Antoine returned and was a constant irritation thereafter to the powers-that-be.)

Southern Baptists rate three paragraphs in the book. The gist is that our people began arriving in 1816, sent here from the Triennial Convention (the forerunner of the SBC, which was formed in 1845). The Baptists started and stopped a number of times. "From a total membership of only twelve hundred in six churches in 1918, it has grown in the intervening years to more than seven thousand members in twenty-six churches." (Comparison: By the year 2000, we had 69 churches and 70 missions with a total of over 50,000 members.)

"In 1918 the Baptist Bible Institute, a school devoted to religious education, was founded, and, maintained by the Southern Baptist Convention, is now well established with an enrollment of more than two hundred." (That number is now well into the several thousands; the BBI, of course, is the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.)

In 1938 the city boasted five radio broadcasting stations, all downtown, and all open to receive visitors at any time with the exception of WWL which required appointments for tours. The transmitting equipment of WBNO, a commercial station with a power of only 100 watts, was owned by Coliseum Place Baptist Church.

The quickest and handiest way to sum up the food culture of this city is to think of it as like the great Mississippi which flows down its middle: the result of hundreds of smaller influences all come together. "Creole cuisine is a combination of the French and Spanish influence -- the Spanish taste for strong seasoning of food combined with the French love for delicacies -- and it originated in Louisiana. The slaves of Louisiana had their share in refining the product, and likewise the Indians, who gathered roots and pungent herbs in the woods." "Some of the restaurants of New Orleans are known the world over for their Creole cooking; yet you will be served just as fine a meal in a Creole home."

No history of this city is complete without a reference to the above-ground cemeteries. This description of the conditions that made them necessary was written in 1852:

"A grave in any of the cemeteries is lower than the adjacent swamps, and from ten to fifteen feet lower than the river, so that it fills speedily with water, requiring to be bailed out before it is fit to receive the coffin, while during heavy rains it is subject to complete inundation. The great Bayou Cemetery (afterwards St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 on Esplanade Avenue) is sometimes so completely inundated that inhumation becomes impossible until after the subsidence of the water; the dead bodies accumulating in the meantime. I have watched the bailing out of the grave, the floating of the coffin, and have heard the friends of the deceased deplore this mode of interment."

Those "adjacent swamps" the writer talks about were later drained and turned into low-lying neighborhoods. After Hurricane Katrina escaped the levees, these areas were mostly all flooded.

(I think of the cemetery in Gadsden, Alabama, where we laid to rest Mrs. Ruby Black last Saturday. The azaleas were in full bloom and the shade trees bathed the entire hillside in a lovely glow. I thought to myself, "If you have to be buried, this is the place!")

Well, I'll bring this to an end with a love story.

Cemeteries here contain fewer epitaphs than most since families all used the same grave for their dead. But among the most memorable found in the book are the ones that speak of duels ("died on the field of honor" and "victim of his honor") and this one, a testament to the love of theater manager James H. Caldwell for noted American actress Jane Placide. The words are from Barry Cornwall, we learn, and "were often on the lips of romanticists."

"There's not an hour
Of day or dreaming night but I am with thee;
There's not a breeze but whispers of thy name,
And not a flower that sleeps beneath the moon
But in its hues or fragrance tells a tale
Of thee."