The Intersection of Magazine and Gravier Streets

Last month, I reviewed a murder mystery call Chasing the Devil’s Tail by David Fulmer, set in the Storyville era of New Orleans in the first decade of the 20^th century. Fulmer has written three additional stories in the same series, and I just finished the second one, Jass. The detective in the stories, Valentin St. Cyr, lives on Magazine Street. I didn’t know precisely where on Magazine until I read in Jass that he and another character take a short stroll from his walk-up apartment (with a balcony) to the corner of Magazine and Gravier Street.

That intersection in New Orleans is four doors from where my father’s printing business was located from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. The area was all small businesses – printing businesses, a lawyer’s office, a shop for nautical instruments, The Board of Trade (with Board of Trade Alley paralleling Magazine from Gravier to Natchez streets), Steve’s Sandwich Shop, the Bon Ton Café and several others. (The photo above is of the 400 block of Gravier Street, directly across from where my father’s building was.)

I grew up at that intersection. We lived in the western suburb of Metairie, but I spent many weekends and many summers right near that intersection at 424 Gravier Street.

The building, which my father rented first from “Old Man Bossier” (pronounced BOSS-ee-a) and then from his widow, was four stories, and narrow and deep. The first floor had an office in the front, where my father’s desk and the secretary’s desk were, cordoned off by a wall from the rest of the floor, which contained the composing room, a huge old paper cutter with a vicious blade, long tables for collating and papers and stuffing envelopes, a gigantic safe that held nothing but old pre-canceled postage stamps, a folding machine, another room containing an addressograph (and the coffee area) and postage meter machine, the bathroom and then doors leading to a patio enclosed by brick buildings on four sides but open to the sky. The first floor had a 20-foot ceiling.

To reach the second floor, you walked up a very long flight of stairs, where you’d find the printing presses and the room for shooting negatives (this was back in the days before computers) to burn into the plates for the letterpress printers. The third and fourth floors were what we kids called “the haunted floors” – unused, containing old furniture, Mr. Bossier’s rolltop desk and broken chair, old boxes and bottles (which had contained something of an alcoholic nature). The fourth floor was lighter, but just as dirty as the third; it had a skylight and had been used for storage. We found old Sugar Bowl posters from the 1930s up there.

The building was old; my guess would be that it had been built in the 1880s or 1890s. What I didn’t know, until I read Jass, was that the entire area had been largely residential at one time – apartments and town houses. I knew it only as a business area two or three blocks from Canal Street and two or three blocks from all the big bank buildings on St. Charles and Carondelet avenues. It was also the perfect location for Mardi Gras – just two block from where the parades went by.

I probably could not count the number of envelopes I labeled, or the number of magazines (including the publication for the New Orleans employees of Shell Oil) I addressed with that addressograph. I was very close to the postage meter, too; we spent a lot of time together. In the summers, I would do all of those things, and usually serve as the delivery boy, pushing the red card filled with boxes to Shell Oil, Whitney Bank, various ad agencies in the business district and the French Quarter, over to the Rault Center on Loyola Avenue, and a lot of other places. I got to know downtown New Orleans pretty well in my junior high, high school and college years.

In the mid-1970s, the building was sold, and my father had to find a new place to rent, which he did a few blocks away on Magazine Street. He was there only for a few years, and then moved again to the final location for his business, at 501 Baronne. But 424 Gravier is forever stamped in my mind as the place my father had his business.

Today, interestingly enough, the area has moved back in the residential direction. Most of the buildings in the 400 block of Gravier (including the one my father rented) are now condos and townhomes. The Bon Ton Café is still around the corner on Magazine Street. Steve’s Sandwich Shop is long gone. The Board of Trade Building is still there, and still has a nice patio area.

Valentin St. Cyr would likely recognize the area.

A Story of Storyville

It has been said that the state of Louisiana is comprised of three parts: North Louisiana, Cajun Louisiana and New Orleans. That’s actually an oversimplification – there’s also what are called the Florida parishes – stretching from Baton Rouge eastward to Mississippi and north of Lake Pontchartain.

My mother was born and raised in New Orleans, down in the Ninth Ward that became famous during Hurricane Katrina. I was born and raised in New Orleans, growing up in the Jefferson parish suburb of Metairie. My father was from Shreveport, in north Louisiana.

After he was discharged from the Navy at the end of World War II, my father moved to New Orleans to work. His parents weren’t exactly pleased. New Orleans had a reputation, a well deserved reputation, one that today’s Bourbon Street is only a very pale remnant of. And then he married someone from New Orleans. My grandmother got over that, but she never got over his decision to raise her grandson in the fetid swamp of iniquity called the Big Easy.

I survived. My upbringing was pretty standard Baby Boomer American Suburban.

New Orleans had a reputation for political corruption (more like a Central or South American city than a U.S. city). And it had a reputation for, well, the loosest of morals. That came from primarily from a section of town called Storyville, a legally constituted district where prostitution was allowed. There were other parts of the city where prostitution flourished, but Storyville was the epicenter. It lasted for 20 years, from 1897 to 1917, when it was closed down at the demand of the general commanding a nearby Army base after four soldiers were killed.

Very little of Storyville physically remains. It encompassed 24 square blocks west of the French Quarter and north of Canal Street. Popular legend says jazz was born there, but actually it was born all over the city.

Last fall, we were visiting New Orleans, and in a French Quarter shop near the Café Du Monde (coffee au lait and beignets!) I found two mysteries by a writer named David Fulmer. Both are set in New Orleans, and both are largely about Storyville.

I just finished reading the first one, Chasing the Devil’s Tail, published in 2003. A private detective, Valentin St. Cyr, is trying to find a serial killer who’s murdering the denizens of the brothels. It is graphic, with some rough language, and I hesitate it recommend it for those reasons. It is also a riveting story, and historical figures walk through its pages, like photographer E.J. Bellocq, jazz piano player Jelly Roll Morton, Miss Lulu (a madam), Tom Anderson, a state senator who “governed” Storyville, and Buddy Bolden, the cornet player who was instrumental in the birth of jazz.

It is extraordinarily well researched. Fulmer drew from the archives of Tulane University and scholarly historical works from LSU and the University of Alabama. He places the reader right in the middle of New Orleans history at the turn of the 20^th century, and it’s a portrayal that’s both gripping and accurate. It is also gritty and, as I said, graphic.

Part of what Fulmer does is to describe the intricate and complex racial situation. New Orleans society was highly structured, and that included the descendant of slaves and the offspring of slaveowners and slaves. The story’s detective, Valentin St. Cyr, has an Italian father and a mixed white-black mother. One thing I learned by reading this story is the level of discrimination immigrant Italians faced in New Orleans society at the time (that had largely disappeared by the time I was born, although there were vestiges).

Reading this story reminded me of some of the more sordid aspects of the culture I came from. It wasn’t all great food and Mardi Grad parades. It also reminded  me of my Southern Baptist grandmother in Shreveport, who would have been a young wife with three young children living in central Louisiana when Storyville was at its height. I understand why she was concerned.