Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans (31 page)

The Lake Vista subdivision had been completed in 1938, just before World War II began. It was laid out in the “City Beautiful” design of Radburn, New Jersey, with a central “common,” pedestrian lanes, and cul-de-sacs to provide safe areas for children. Mayor Maestri called it the “poor man’s project,” but prices of land in this area of premium location and planning would prove the slogan absurd. It was to become one of the wealthiest in the city. Lake Vista is bounded by the lakefront and Robert E. Lee Boulevard, Bayou St. John, and the London Avenue Canal.

The next segment of lakefront moving eastward is occupied by the University of New Orleans West Campus. Its boundaries are the
lakefront, Leon C. Simon Boulevard, the London Avenue Canal, and Elysian Fields, bringing the total to 195 acres. In 1964, this land was leased to the Louisiana State University in New Orleans (it became the University of New Orleans in 1975) for ninety-nine years at one dollar per year.

Coming eastward, Lake Oaks subdivision has boundaries, which are slightly out of line with the other lakefront developments. It lies between Lake Oaks Parkway, New York Street, Elysian Fields Avenue, and Music Street. Completed in 1964, it consisted of 290 home sites.

Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park was located on a fifty-acre site on the lakefront from 1939 to 1983, abutting both West UNO Campus and Lake Oaks subdivision.

To the east of Lake Oaks, an additional 195 acres were leased to the East campus of LSUNO (now UNO) in 1964 for ninety-nine years at one dollar per year. It is bounded by the lakefront and Leon C. Simon Boulevard, Franklin Avenue, and Press Drive. On that site is also a multi-purpose indoor sports arena with a seating capacity of sixteen thousand. On the grounds between the arena and the lakefront, a beautiful altar was erected for the Papal Mass said by Pope John Paul II when he visited New Orleans on September 12, 1987.

The New Orleans Municipal Airport, formerly Shushan Airport, is today a facility for privately owned planes. All commercial airlines now operate out of New Orleans International Airport (now Louis Armstrong International Airport) in Kenner.

The seawall at Lake Pontchartrain, built at a cost of $2.64 million is the world’s largest grandstand. Along its five-and-a-half-mile expanse, there is a yacht harbor, boat marina, a university, public recreation areas, and an airport.

The Veteran Candidate

In 1964, when Mayor Maestri once again threw his hat in the ring, he was to find himself opposed by another reform candidate, the handsome, vigorous, thirty-three-year-old
deLesseps Story “Chep” Morrison,
a product of the silk stocking crowd, who was returning from a tour of duty in Europe as a colonel in the US Army. Before World War II, he had been in private law practice, had worked in the labor law section of the NRA, and had become a member of the state legislature at age twenty-eight. He had been reelected to the legislature in 1944 in spite of his absence. Attractive to both female voters and veterans, he was a natural for politics. He agreed to enter the race, although he thought he had no chance whatsoever of victory. No one was more surprised than Morrison when he defeated Maestri in the first primary (with the possible exception of Maestri himself). Maestri had a saying, “I was shaved without soap,” which meant that someone had gotten the best of him. He undoubtedly made that remark the morning after the primary.

Morrison’s organization was the Crescent City Democratic Organization. He was reelected for a second, third, and fourth term, serving all but the last year of his fourth term, when he resigned in 1961 to accept the post of United States Ambassador to the Organization of American States, which had been offered to him by President Kennedy.

School Integration

In 1954, the US Supreme Court, in its historical decision of
Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education,
ruled unconstitutional the “separate but equal” doctrine as applied to public education. New Orleans, like most southern cities, had never really implemented this segregationist doctrine, although it professed to do so. The Orleans Parish School Board had maintained for many years a distinctly inferior school system for black children.

A black girl enters first grade in 1961, integrating McDonogh Eleven School in Mid-City, after a judicial order by Judge J. Skelly Wright in 1960.
(Courtesy Times-Picayune Publishing Company)

The School Board fought the decision with delays, and the state legislature enacted a number of pro-segregationist statutes, all of which were cut down by the US Supreme Court. Some thought it would be best to close down the public schools completely, as whites had done after the Civil War. Mayor Morrison remained silent on the issue, as he did not feel responsible under state law for the public schools, only for the keeping of law and order.

On November 14, 1960, federal marshals escorted four young black girls as they entered first grade classes at two white schools. Crowds gathered, and some threatened the students and their parents. On November 15,
Judge Leander Perez
of Plaquemines Parish addressed five thousand New Orleanians at the Municipal Auditorium, exploiting their prejudices and racial fears and urging them to stop the four black children from attending the white schools.

The following day, thousands rioted in the Central Business District, finally forcing action. The New Orleans Police arrested 250 citizens after much violence and vandalism, including attacks on the black community.

In time, the turmoil subsided with the help of church groups as well as the academic and business communities. School integration was, at last, accepted, and there was a return to law and order.

Morrison’s terms in office signaled the end of a half-century of machine-dominated politics. On May 22, 1964, Morrison was en route to Mexico with his younger son, Randy, in a chartered plane on a combined business and pleasure trip, when his plane crashed into a mountain, bringing his career to an untimely end.

The Suburban Explosion

After the Mid-City and Lakefront areas were well settled, the population of the city continued to grow, consuming the land like locusts, especially in the aftermath of World War II. By 1950, the internal area of the city from the river to the lake had been filled.

In the late 1950s, the population rolled like a wave beyond the Orleans Parish line into the East Bank of Jefferson Parish, following the direction of Airline Highway (which ran from Baton Rouge
to
New Orleans and was built by Governor Huey P. Long between 1930 and 1932). Veterans Highway, which paralleled Airline Highway, now became the main street of Jefferson Parish. Moisant Airport became New Orleans International Airport (later the Louis Armstrong International Airport). In 1957, the twenty-four-mile long Lake Pontchartrain Causeway spanned the lake between Jefferson Parish and St. Tammany Parish. The world’s longest bridge, it offered commuters the opportunity to work in New Orleans and reside in Covington, Mandeville, or Folsom. The second causeway span was completed in 1969.

Shopping centers in Jefferson Parish mushroomed: Lakeside Shopping Center, Clearview Mall, and Fat City in Metairie and the Esplanade Mall in Kenner all held shops and restaurants.

By the 1970s, another vast suburban area was waiting only for the completion of the Interstate Highway 10 to follow the pattern of Jefferson Parish, but this time it was on the opposite extremity of the city. It was New Orleans East, which, in the early 1970s, began to feel the trickle of the first wave of population. As early as the 1960s, houses and businesses had already begun to crop up in New Orleans East in an unorganized fashion along the newly-built Chef Menteur Highway, which cut across New Orleans East in much the same way that Airline Highway cut across Jefferson Parish.

Soon, it was evident to land developers that real estate along the route of the new I-10 would be worth its weight in gold. New Orleans East is fifty square miles and a community where, eventually, 250,000 people would live, which is equal to one-fourth the total area and population of greater New Orleans.

Because of the speed with which this expansion took place and the enormity of the area it covered, New Orleans has become, in the last quarter century, a city within a city. At the center is the old New Orleans. On the outskirts is suburbia. In this respect, it is different than most big, urban communities and is following a national pattern.

Sad to say, much of this newly developed land is sinking, and many of the new subdivisions are subject to flood. Unlike neighborhoods that had developed at a snail’s pace before World War II, each with its individual architectural personality (for example, Gentilly Terrace in the 1920s showed a preference for Spanish mission-style houses of white stucco and red-tiled roofs), the new suburbs seem boring and homogenous.

There was one more direction in which the population could move, and it rapidly did so in the early 1980s. That direction was southward from the west bank of the river in the direction of Bayou Barataria. This may prove to be the largest surge of all.

The Mayors after 1961

W
hen Morrison resigned in 1961, the City Council voted to make
Victor H. Schiro
interim mayor. Schiro was, at the time, Councilman-
At-Large on the City Council. Born of an Italian father who had been involved in the banking business in Honduras, Schiro spent much of his boyhood in Honduras, where he learned Spanish as a language that was of great value to him when he was traveling in Central America representing the city as mayor.

Aerial view of the city in 1960.
Left to right:
Civil District Courts Building, City Hall, State Office Building, State Supreme Courts, and the New Orleans Public Library.
(Courtesy New Orleans Public Library)

As a young man, he attended Tulane University and graduated from Santa Clara in California, after which he spent three years in Hollywood, working under Frank Capra in movies. In World War II, he served in the Coast Guard for three years. Returning to New Orleans, he worked as a program director and announcer for radio, entered the insurance business for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and then opened an insurance company of his own.

His first effort in politics was his vigorous support of a Home Rule Charter for New Orleans. Mayor Morrison endorsed him in his candidacy for City Council, and in 1950 he was elected Commissioner of Public
Buildings and Parks. In 1954, he won a seat as Councilman-At-Large on the City Council, which had been established as part of the Home Rule Charter in 1954. He was reelected in 1958 for a four-year term, but took over the office of mayor when Morrison resigned in 1961.

Mayor Victor H. Schiro: Changes in Racial Tolerance

In the summer of 1961, when Schiro assumed office, he was immediately confronted with the problem of school integration, which was, as yet, far from solved. The episode of the previous fall, with the black children breaking the segregation barriers and the abusive by-standers jeering at and spitting on them, had brought New Orleans to the attention of the nation, and criticism had been strong. Intent up on preventing such an incident in 1961, Schiro instructed the police to set up barricades to keep die-hard segregationists a good distance away from the school children. In this way, additional demonstrations were avoided, and school integration proceeded more smoothly.

Schiro ended the segregation of restrooms at City Hall. He appointed the first black executive assistant to the mayor’s office and was the first mayor since the end of Reconstruction to sanction the appointment of blacks as heads of important boards and commissions.

These changes in racial tolerance and good will were no doubt exactly what the city needed to prevent similar racial upheavals that occurred elsewhere in the 1960s. New Orleans was one of the few cities with a large black population where violence did not erupt during the period.