Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans (30 page)

The homes most typical of New Orleans architecture at the turn of the century were the shotgun houses, so called because one could fire a shotgun from front to back without hitting an obstruction. The shotgun was a string of rooms lined up one behind the other, usually without a hallway. It afforded no privacy and little ventilation. It was the cheapest house on the market.

The bungalow, or double tenement, was as popular as the shotgun. In reality, it was a shotgun, or a pair of shotguns, under one roof with party walls. To avoid flooding, builders set them five feet off the ground on piers. Others had basements built in the ground floor beneath the residence, which served as cellars, never built in New Orleans because of the high water table. Such houses were called raised bungalows. None of these houses were invented in New Orleans, but were built to suit the city’s needs. However, once they were embellished with New Orleans favorite touches—louvered French doors, floor-length windows, Carpenter Gothic cornices and brackets, and gables with stained glass windows—they took on a personality of their own. They became “typical New Orleans.”

At last, a gifted engineer in New Orleans by the name of
A. Baldwin Wood
invented a heavy duty pump, which could rapidly raise great quantities of water, carry it vertically, and relocate it nearby. With this invention, the city entered an era of land reclamation that would revolutionize its geography, and nothing would ever be quite the same again. Previously uninhabitable areas would now be open to settlement. None of this was to happen quickly, however, or without great difficulty.

Draining the backswamp was a Herculean task, requiring both time and money. A system of drainage canals had to be built to carry the displaced water to Lake Borgne or Lake Pontchartrain. Levees had to be built to secure the newly-drained land. Pumping caused the backswamps to fall considerably below sea level, making flood controls a matter of life and death. A series of dikes had to be built along the lake to keep out tidal surges. Even then, a line of inner protection levees was needed to connect the levee systems of lake and river. In 1899, Orleans Parish passed legislation to install its first pumping system. Within ten years, much of the backswamp had been pumped out, but on the newly drained land, nothing could be built without driving pilings to considerable depths.

Drainage: Pumping Stations

Today, there are twenty-two pumping stations in the city, making it the largest drainage system in the country. The city is under-laid with a network of 1,500 miles of drain pipes and more than 240 miles of canals (which is more than Venice, Italy, which has 68 miles of canals). The drainage system has a combined capacity of forty-five thousand cubic feet per second.

Pumping Station No. 6 on the Metaire Relief Outfall Canal (now called the Seventeenth Street Canal) was once the largest pumping station in the world. Now, that title goes to the pumping station on the Harvey Canal, completed in 2011.

Since 1899, New Orleans has provided its residents with pure drinking water. The river is the largest supply available in the United States with 309 billion gallons daily, approximately the amount consumed in the rest of the United States.

The Building of the Lakefront

In spite of the high cost of land, the city moved inexorably lakeward. By the mid-1920s, it became inevitable that something had to be done about the lakefront. The levee itself was inadequate, and the old lakefront was seedy and ugly with its fishermen’s shanties and its two amusement parks connected to the city by streetcar lines. As early as 1873,
W. H. Bell,
City Surveyor, had suggested a plan for the lakefront combining flood protection with land development. Fifty years later, in 1924, the state legislature asked the
Board of Commissioners of the Orleans Lakefront
(the Levee Board) to design and carry out such a plan. The Board was to make the lakefront more beautiful with improvements that would pay for themselves. No one denied it was a large order.

The
Levee Board
,
like the Dock Board
, was a powerful body. It had been organized in 1890 and put in charge of 129 miles of levee, 27 miles on the river and 94 miles of inner-city levees. It could levy taxes, expropriate land, run rights-of-way through property owned by other public bodies, and maintain its own police force.

When the Levee Board
at last revealed its plans for the lakefront, the residents of the city were astounded. A stepped concrete seawall,

Administration Building Tower of Shushan Airport (now New Orleans Municipal Airport), built in 1934 on a man-made island at a cost of $4.5 million.
(Courtesy Shushan Collection, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans)

five a
nd a half miles long, was to be built on the floor of Lake Pontchartrain
, approximately three thousand feet from shore, on which the lake waves could roll up and dissipate at the top. After this, the enclosure would be filled in with material pumped in from the lake bottom outside the seawall. Behind the seawall, the filled area would be raised five to ten feet above the lake levee, making it one of the highest parts of the city. When complete, the city would have not only a new levee but also a whole new lakeshore with two thousand acres of prime land to be disposed of by the Levee Board.

After two hundred years of cutting itself off from the river by constructing warehouses, railroads, and docks, the city was now discovering a new waterfront to be lined with beaches, boulevards, parks, and a municipal yacht harbor. The Shushan Airport
, now the New Orleans Municipal Airport
, constructed on a man-made peninsula at a cost of $4.5 million, was completed in 1934. It was one of the biggest and best in the country.

The depression came, and with it came the Works Progress Administration, which looked upon a public work of this magnitude as manna from heaven, for it offered employment to thousands.

To pay off its bonds, the Levee Board charged rental to the airport and the new Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park, completed in 1939, just before World War II.

CHAPTER X

Growth in a Modern City: After 1930

The late twenties and early thirties brought the city of New Orleans unemployment, soup lines, and deflated bank accounts. Like all other cities in the United States, New Orleans was suffering from the effects of the Great Depression. The people were without hope, and a hero was needed.

Huey P. Long promised a chicken in every pot to working men in the early 1930s.
(Courtesy the Deutsche Collection, Earl K. Long Library, University of New
Orleans)

When
Huey Pierce Long
was elected governor of Louisiana in 1928 and United States senator in 1932, Louisianians felt that they had found their hero. In Long, they saw the rise of the most colorful leader since Bernardo de Galvez.

The Kingfish

Long had built up one of the most powerful political machines in
the United States and, in the face of incredible obstacles, enacted his radical program by sheer exuberance of his personality. His doctrine was one of socialism, a revolution of the poor whites. “Every Man a King” and “A Chicken in Every Pot” were the slogans of his Share Our Wealth program. He believed and preached that no man should be allowed to earn more than $1 million per year and that everything he earned over that should go into a general fund from which the needy would be taken care of. There was a faction that hated him, but his power was such that his endorsement for any political office, state or city, was tantamount to election. His power over the state legislature made it possible for him to pass his entire legislative program.

He was virtually a dictator in Louisiana, and his power was felt most especially in New Orleans. In 1934, he sent the Louisiana National Guard down to Lafayette Street to the Orleans Parish Registration Office across from City Hall, where they broke the lock and took possession of the office. The militia had to be called out by
Mayor T. Semmes Walmsley
to try to prevent the seizure of the office. Military and police, heavily armed with rifles and machine guns, swarmed around the office and City Hall. Long was victorious, and the office was reopened under his supervision.

Long abused his right to use the state police during his administration and the subsequent administration, of his hand-picked representative Governor O. K. Allen, which he controlled. Because of this abuse, legislation was passed between 1936 and 1938 restricting the jurisdiction of the State Police in the city of New Orleans until the late 1970s.

Long was considered a saint and a king to the poor and downtrodden, who heard from his lips the first sound of democracy in action. They had been used to only one kind of government, the aristocratic, one-party kind. If Long wanted to be their dictator, they were willing in return for what he promised them. He rode into office on their backs.

Long found his start after he finished an eight-month law course at Tulane University
, passed the bar, and jumped into politics. On his thirtieth birthday, in 1923, he filed for governor and ran third. In preparation for running again, he made use of all the things that had needed attention in Louisiana for a long time: unpaved roads, the high illiteracy rate, school textbooks, and a Mississippi River
Bridge
. Promising all of these, he was elected to the office of governor in 1926.

The Kingfish, as he was called, published his own newspaper, the
American Progress.
He wrote a book,
Every Man a King,
in which he outlined his ideas for putting an end to the Depression. Another literary effort,
My First Days in the White House,
was a futuristic exercise in political egomania.

During his term as senator, Long made a history-making, if unsuccessful, filibuster against a bill backed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. For fifteen hours and thirty-five minutes, he read the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, parts of Victor Hugo’s
The Laughing Man,
chapters of the Bible, a monologue on Greek mythology, and a recipe for fried oysters.

Long made many enemies in Washington. A dozen or more senators would rise and leave the chambers whenever he stood up to speak.

Long was assassinated in the state capital in Baton Rouge on September 8, 1935, allegedly by Dr. Carl A. Weiss, whose father-in-law Long had gerrymandered out of office. Weiss was then riddled with bullets by Long’s bodyguards. Suspicion has lingered that it was Long’s bodyguards who killed Long.

In spite of his Mafia-like tactics, Long was a governor to whom the city is indebted for the Shushan Airport (now the New Orleans Municipal Airport), the extensive lakefront development, the Huey P. Long Bridge, the enlargement of Charity Hospital, the LSU Medical Center, and free school books in the public schools of Louisiana.

Mayor Robert Maestri

In 1936, the city was on the verge of bankruptcy when
Robert Maestri
was elected mayor. In less than two years, he put the city on a cash basis. Every morning, he drove around the city with an engineer, checking streets, sidewalks, drainage, and public buildings. Every afternoon, he sat at his desk, working to reorganize the archaic fiscal structure of the city and to improve municipal services. In 1942, he was re-elected almost without campaigning, but in his second term, gambling and extra-legal activities increased, which alienated the clergy. Maestri began to spend all his time running the Old Regulars, which he had fused with the Earl Long state-government organization. This alienated the uptown establishment.

A story has always been told that Maestri entertained Franklin D. Roosevelt on his visit to the city by taking him to Antoine’s for dinner. There, they dined on Oysters Rockefeller. Proud of the city’s seafood, the articulate mayor asked the aristocratic president, “How ya like dem ersh-ters?”

Spillways

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mississippi River
threatened once again to divert its path, frightening New Orleanians. One threat of a diversion existed in a weak spot in the natural levee at a place called
Bonnet Carré,
where a crevasse had occurred more than once, carrying flood waters from the Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain
. If it had not been stopped, it might have gone directly on to the Gulf by way of the lake, instead of continuing its twisting path for 130 miles southward.

A second potential diversion was above Baton Rouge at a small town called
Morganza
on the west bank of the river. If the river had jumped its course there, it would have poured into the slot between the present Mississippi River levee and the ancient levee of Bayou Teche, a sluggish, swampy area twenty miles wide called the Atchafalaya River Basin, which flows slowly toward the Gulf. This was, by far, the most dangerous diversion the river could have taken, for if it would have strayed there, it would have stayed there, saving itself half the distance to the Gulf.

The crevasses at both
Morganza
and Bonnet Carré have since been repaired, and, in 1931, the Army Corps of Engineers built giant concrete floodgates, which now prevent a breach on either levee, but which can be opened if a flood crest approaches, allowing surplus water to pour into Lake Pontchartrain. The
Bonnet Carré Spillway
has been opened several times since it was built, but the
Morganza Spillway
very rarely, in particular for the record-breaking floods of 1973 and 2011.

The Bonnet Carré Spillway and the levees make it possible to divert three million cubic feet of water per second into Lake Pontchartrain, and eventually, into the Gulf of Mexico.

During and After World War II: The Lakefront

World War II not only brought a shortage of labor, materials, and, consequently, a moratorium on residential building; but also it cut a striking design into the lakefront area, making it the fringe of a mobilized city.

Lakefront during World War II. Most military installations existed from 1942-50.
(Map by Mary Lou Widmer)

From West End to the airport, the lakefront was lined with military installations beginning in 1942. At the western end, near the lighthouse, was the Coast Guard Station. This is the only installation that remains today. Moving eastward, in what are today the West and East Lakeshore subdivisions, were the US Army (Largarde) General Hospital (west of Canal Boulevard) and the US Naval Hospital (east of Canal Boulevard). Continuing eastward, after 1942 on the lake edge of the Lake Vista subdivision, which had been cut in 1938, was a second Coast Guard Station. Situated on the eastern bank of Bayou St. John, between Robert E. Lee and Lakeshore Drive, was a building housing the US Maritime Commission.

The Naval Reserve Aviation Base occupied an area on the lakefront between the London Avenue Canal and Franklin Avenue, Lakeshore Drive, and Robert E. Lee Boulevard. Included in this area were an Aircraft Carrier Training Center and a Rest and Relaxation Center, a tent city from which the amusements of Pontchartrain Beach were within walking distance.

On Lakeshore Drive, on the western corner of Franklin Avenue, the War Assets Administration condemned a 750-foot tract of land, had it appraised, and bought it from the New Orleans Levee Board. Here the Navy Assembly Plant was situated, according to maps of the period in the files of the New Orleans Levee Board. Some of the its engineers, however, recall the Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Company, which existed on the spot in the war years, with its ramp that allowed sea planes to be launched. At that time, there was a fence crossing Lakeshore Drive, and no vehicular traffic was allowed along the lakefront. After the war, the federal government sold the property to Nash-Kelvinator, and it was later acquired by American Standard. The property now belongs to the New Orleans Levee Board, whose offices are there.

Continuing eastward, between Franklin and Camp LeRoy Johnson Road, stretched the barracks of Camp LeRoy Johnson. This area is shown on the maps of the period as the US Army Bombing Squadron. Another interesting feature of this area was the German Prisoner of War Camp on the far western lakefront corner of this area (at Franklin Avenue and the lake).

Today’s New Orleans Airport was Shushan Airport at the time. During the war, it was leased by the United States Government, and it housed a National Guard Hangar and a ramp for launching seaplanes. Also, along its western wall was an area occupied by the US Army Bombing Squadron. Pan-American and Delta Airplanes used the Administration Building jointly with the government for limited commercial activities; Pan-Am moved to Moisant Airport in 1947.

By the late 1940s, after the war, the face of the lakefront was changing
to peacetime construction. Military installations were coming down and work was progressing on the residential area, which had been earmarked for residential use by the Levee Board. Lots were then sold to help pay off bonds. Plans had been on the drawing board since before World War II for five residential areas.

Once again, starting at the West End of the lakefront and moving eastward, the Coast Guard Station remains to this day at West End for the protection of boat enthusiasts. The Southern Yacht Club stands on the northernmost peninsula of West End, as it has for over a century. The Orleans Boat Marina has now been built on the west side of the New Basin Canal.

East and West Lakeshore subdivisions, completed in 1953, include 352 residential lots on the sites of the old Army and Navy Hospitals. The Mardi Gras Fountain is situated near the lake on the East Lakeshore subdivision. The East and West Lakeshore are bounded by the lakefront and Robert E. Lee Boulevard, the New Basin Canal and the Orleans Canal.

Lakefront after 1964.
(Map by Mary Lou Widmer)