How New Orleans got to be the fun capital of the USA.
EMPIRE OF SIN is about New Orleans, but it’s divided into three segments. Gary Krist, the author, starts with a hook, the murders or near murders of grocery store owners in the Italian part of town, thought to have been committed by The Black Hand.
The second aspect of the book deals with Storyville. The mayor, council members, and businessmen were worried that the city had a bad reputation as a crime-ridden Babylon. They were willing to look the other way while prostitution houses, gambling, and what they considered sin went about its business, but they wanted to segregate it to one part of town, and that was Storyville. Krist centers on two vice lords, Tom Anderson and Josie Arlington. Arlington was a madam; Anderson owned several dance halls, with a hand in prostitution etc, ran an oil company on the side, and was a Congressman for almost the entire twenty years Storyville existed.
The third area Krist concentrates on is jazz music which evolved in the prostitution houses and dance halls of Storyville. I was surprised to find that one man was given credit for the origin of the music. Buddy Bolden played with such passion and volume that he influenced such previously more conventional musicians as “Jelly Roll” Morton, a Creole who played piano in some of the prostitution houses. Eventually we get to Louie Armstrong, who wasn’t among the first wave of jazz musicians. He was born to a fifteen-year-old girl and started playing in a band at the Home for Wayward boys. He eventually got a job as a stand-in for Joe "King" Oliver, whom he cited as a great influence.
Eventually the reformers win out, thanks mostly to prohibition and World War I. The War Department didn’t want its soldiers falling prey to the degradation and disease that existed in Storyville. A railroad terminal was also built on the border of Storyville, and passengers had to pass houses of ill repute in order to get where they were going. So, New Orleans was clean for a while, but the city was still playing second fiddle to Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas, and the city leaders finally realized that they could sell what was formerly known as vice, mainly the music and the partying (See Mardi Gras). Most of the great musicians, including Armstrong, had already left when their livelihood dried up. Something else unexpected occurred. Prior to the reform movement, the blacks, Creoles and whites intermixed and got along about as well as anyplace in the South. Afterwards, Jim Crow reared its ugly head.
About a hundred and fifty pages after Krist first introduces what the mayor thought was a serial killer, Krist returns to the case. More murders are occurring. Many of them have the same M.O. The intruder cuts out the lower panel of a back door, he stages the scene to look like a robbery, and he uses an axe he finds on the property, and he leaves it there when he’s finished with his grisly business. In the last section of the book, Krist identifies a possible killer, but he can’t prove it, so the case remains unsolved.
Kudos go out to Krist for including a bibliography, and index, and footnotes, something that pseudo historians these days don’t seem to find necessary. Krist also includes about a dozen pictures, usually at the beginning of chapters or sections. I enjoyed this book immensely and highly recommend it to history lovers and those who just like the city and are curious about how it evolved. Click here to post or read comments.
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