Who Kill-A Da Chief?

Come on in, the insane world of Louisiana politics, crime, punishment, lynching, looting, graciousness, rumor, and just plain interestingness is just fine.

It’s the Beauregard- Keyes House on Chartres Street. Still there to this day. Fancy garden now. A museum to Pierre Gustave Toutant (P.G.T.) Beauregard and author Frances Parkinson Keyes. Here’s the interior courtyard side:

The place is fascinating, and very New Orleans.

In 1826, wealthy auctioneer Joseph Le Carpentier hired James Lambert to build him an elaborate home. I don’t want to know what or who exactly he got wealthy auctioning in New Orleans. It’s not really straight up French; the building has been banged on and added to and changed quite a bit. The Greek Revival theme for the front is not French. But then again, like many things of that time and place, things change.

The house was built reversed from the original plan, for starters. All the outbuildings in the back, plus the back of the house was added later. The Greek portico and one of the flights of stairs in the front was a later addition. It’s everything, like a place that washed back and forth in the wake of empires would be. But the bones of the wide center-halled house are still in there.

The little paired doors of the French style are everywhere.

And there’s blood and sweat and refinement and conundrum all over the place.

Beauregard only lived there for two years, and never owned it. He was a big deal in New Orleans, and always was, so it’s natural they’d play up the link. He took it over from a family of famous chess players, of all things, who had purchased it from Le Carpentier. The world’s first chess champion, Paul Morphy, was born here. He was of Portuguese, Irish, Creole, and Spanish descent. Now that’s New Orleans. He was a sensation, then he lost his mind. The coroner’s report said Morphy died from taking a bath, after a long spell of wandering around the city talking to imaginary voices. That’s pretty New Orleans, too.

So after the Civil War, Beauregard moves in, moves out, and a Sicilian family buys the place- the Giaconas. Wine merchants. Gangsters?

People thought they were. But people think everybody Italian is a gangster. There were all sorts of rumors about people being murdered in the house. But that’s the essence of all secret crime societies. They don’t announce themselves. Well, not exactly. They use barrels as a kind of semaphore.

There were a lot of Sicilians in New Orleans in the late 1800s, and the Black Hand followed them. What people never seemed to understand about the Black Hand, and other maffiyeh organizations, is that they existed mostly by preying upon honest Italian businessman. But many times the victims of the mobsters are simply assumed to be their compatriots by association, and end up on the wrong end of the backlash against the criminals. That’s if they don’ t end up stuffed in a barrel first.

In 1890, the Police Chief of New Orleans, David Hennessy, was murdered after he got to wondering why his men kept finding Italian-Americans strangled or shot or stabbed and stuffed into barrels, then left on the streetcorner. He was the first American to take on the association of mafiosi and their corrupt accomplices in the government. He paid for it with his life. His (likely apocryphal) last words were: “The Dagos did it.”

They rounded up hundreds of people with a vowel at the end of their name, and indicted about a dozen for the murder. There was a riot, and a mob lynched the suspects, along with ten other Italians who were unlucky enough to be handy. For years after that, the local Italian-American children were taunted with: “Who kill-a da chief?”

After the Giaconas, the property was owned by a politician and his wife, Frances Parkinson Keyes, who wrote about Paul Morphy and the history of the house, among many other things.

The elegant home of a man with a triple barrelled name that fought like a tiger for the confederacy and then fought for the rights of blacks to vote; a lunatic genius chess player who died from taking a bath; a southern belle author that once occupied the Governor’s mansion in New Hampshire; a wine merchant probably afraid of the Mob and the mob at the same time. Yup, that’s one address in New Orleans.

And now it’s a museum of sorts. But perhaps not of the the things they think it is.

Clouds On The Horizon

Today is very challenging.

I’ve listened to this piece of music for thirty years or so. It has a very calming effect on me. I like the pictures that this mashup has assembled to accompany the music. The music is elegant and simple, sorta; but then again sophisticated doesn’t really mean “busy,” does it?

Satie was a interesting weirdo. He didn’t even want to be called a musician. He called himself a “phonometrician.” I liked that he called some of his later musical sketches “furniture music.” (d’ameublement) The term really doesn’t translate well. In French, furniture is called meubles –the movables. I think the term furniture music is more to mean furnishings, or wallpaper. The setting for other things. Perhaps he is the world’s first composer of movie scores. He’d have to be first. They didn’t have movies then as anything but a sort of laboratory oddity.

Erik Satie. Gymnopédies & Gnossiennes.

The music has a strange resonance. It was written before WWI, and it reminds me of being out of doors on a pleasant afternoon, and seeing a cloud forming way off on the horizon. There were a lot of clouds for a long time in France.

Saturday Morning Cartoons

When I was wee, Saturday was for cartoons.

Our parents would sleep late, a little, and we’d get up an fashion our own breakfast, after a fashion. Toast with butter and sugar mixed with cinnamon, and a glass of milk.

There were 3 VHF channels, on a little black and white TV. Channel 2 was there, the PBS station, but it was kinda sketchy. All it had was MisterRogers anyway, and even when I was 5 that was too lame for me. I saw it in the TV listings and it was printed as one word: Misterrogers. I didn’t realize it was a man’s name. I thought it was some sort of mystery story by by an orthographically challenged pirate or something. That would have been a lot more interesting, now that I consider it.

There were 2 UHF channels after a while. They were the equivalent of a lemonade stand. They’d get their hands on whatever they could for next to no money and broadcast it. The TV for UHF required you to tune it like a radio. You’d sit there like a Kinchloe and try to hit the dial just right to banish half the broadcast snow and stop the sizzling on the audio. And we’d watch drivel.

Speed Racer and Jonnny Quest and The Three Stooges and Clutch Cargo and Thunderbirds are Go! and whatever else the management could use to sell a few used car dealer ads and keep the lights on. Much, much, later, the people that produced entertainment noticed that the audience actually liked crap more than they liked anything serious, and TV became all crap all the time, endlessly subreferencing itself until you wondered if there ever was any onion to start with, or peeling the onion was the exercise itself.

My little son’s favorite thing is an advertisement in a language he doesn’t speak for a product he is unaware of that we can’t buy and wouldn’t if we could from a country he’s never been to: Pat et Stanley. And like his old man, he wanted to see it on Saturday morning. He’s pushing on my elbow right now. Let’s hear a few bars of that old Saturday morning polyglot non- sequitur pop-culture flotsam homesick jetsam blues, maestro. And look! A fresh Pat et Stanley today!

Kiwi!

And Crazy Frog!

Is it On Fire, Or Underwater This Week?

The Orleans Ballroom. It’s very New Orleans. Bad luck and mojo are my only friends, as they say.

Henry Latrobe started building it in 1816 for a fellow named John Davis, to go along with Davis’ theater next door. It burned to the ground, along with the theater and half the neighborhood, before he was finished building it. Very New Orleans, that.

Davis got busy right away and a year later he had it built. Um, rebuilt. Well, done, anyway. He rebuilt the theater next door, too. It was in that empty lot in the picture, attached to the ballroom. The theater burned down again in 1866, but the ballroom was saved. This grows monotonous, in an exciting kind of way. “Monotonous in an exciting kind of way” should be the town motto, if you ask me.

Like lots of things now considered authentic French New Orleans, the wooden balcony and screen are much later additions. Much of that ironwork you associate with the oldest part of New Orleans is not original equipment on the buildings.

They held grand balls in there, including one in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette, we are here! And not on fire for a change. Drop by.

Hey! In 1828, the ballroom was used as a meeting place for the State Legislature, when the government house –three guesses! –burned down. It’s a good thing that New Orleans floods from time to time, if for no other reason than to give the fire company a breather every now and then.

For about a decade in the late 1800s, the place was used as the District Court, too. Lot of arson cases were heard there, I suspect.

There’s a cryptic reference to a “sale” of the furnishings and fabrics of the place in 1836, which sounds like someone paid a few bucks for a few things and ripped out everything worth looking at on the interior of the building, so looting has a long history thereabouts too, I gather.

There are conflicting accounts of the use of the ballroom for what were called “quadroon balls.” A quadroon was a description of someone who was of one quarter black ancestry. There was a dizzying assortment of social rankings in New Orleans based on ancestry, and the quadroon balls were one of a number of ways for a sort of common-law marriage to be arranged between white men, and women of African, Indian, and Creole ancestry. The arrangement was called “Placage.” I much prefer the term free blacks used for it: “Left-handed marriage.” That’s wry.

In a marvelous turn of events, a young lady that had been destined for a left handed marriage rebelled against the idea, and became a nun instead. Henriette DeLille saw Placage as an affront to the Catholic sacrament of marriage. She spent her life in opposition to the practice, and in the aid and education of the poor of New Orleans. In 1837 the Vatican formally recognized her organization as what would later become The Sisters of The Holy Family.

The Sisters of the Holy Family, all African-American nuns, bought that ballroom in the 1880s and used it for a school for poor children until the 1960s, when they sold the property to a hotel.

There’s a fad for advertising ghostly happenings in lodgings to get a kind of vibe going in the hospitality business. The ballroom is part of a hotel now, and they’re trying to play up some supposedly ghostly happenings there. In New Orleans, that’s superfluous. The whole town is a layer cake of haunts.

When it’s not on fire, or sublime, anyway.

Down The New Orleans Rabbit Hole Again

The internet will make you a lot of friends you don’t know.

Our friends we never met over at Maggies Farm have linked to my little riffs on American architecture. We like their boats, so we’re going to put them in our blogroll. Anyway, they seem to like the odd and unusual building styles we’ve dredged up. And they had a question about the provenance of a building in New Orleans. I don’t care if they were fooling; I’m going to answer it anyway.

We’ve lost our minds about New Orleans before here on this page.

Good Morning America, How Are You

Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?

Crescent City Fais Do Do

At any rate, the picture of the building in the Vieux Carre in New Orleans on Maggies Farm is an example of another pre-Victorian style we need to cover: French Colonial. And if you’re talking about French Colonial, you’re basically talking about New Orleans. So let’s. It’s such an ancient and wonderful cock-up of a place. It’s nasty and marvelous and sedate and wild and eternal and ephemeral and every other damn thing. And right from the get-go, it was French.

For the most part, French Colonial doesn’t exist anymore. It’s like New Orleans. Ancient, but burned, flooded, looted, neglected, and occasionally so overrun by attention that there’s next to nothing of it left, unless you look for ghosts. I do.

New Orleans is full of the ghosts of French Colonial architecture.

The real thing doesn’t look all that much like Bourbon Street: It looked like this:

That’s the Olivier House. Its original owner was born in Lyon, France. That’s French. It’s being demolished when these pictures were taken 60 years ago. it was built in 1820, but the style was even older. It’s a French Colonial Plantation house. You could probably find something similar in Vietnam or Africa somewhere.

The real estate under it was too valuable to keep it standing inside the city limits. Its ghost is underneath numerous houses over a number of city blocks now. Here’s how the French did it differently than their English counterparts up north:

• Lots of doorways leading outside
• Stairways outside, not in interior stairwells
• Rooms enfilade, opening one into another without hallways linking them
• Double doors and windows and shutters
• Big gallery porches under a roof
• Interior courtyards
• Slave quarters and kitchens in outbuildings

They had a sort of urban version of it, too:

That’s the Gaillard House. 1820s. Has that continental medieval look to it . Fronts right on the street. Skinny, paired doors and windows with shutters for privacy. Attached to its neighbors. It turns its back on the street and shelters a courtyard in the back, like many city properties do to this very day:
D’Artagnan, is that you? Not shabby inside:

The stories that come out of the mists for these buildings boggle the mind. We’re running long, and late today. Tune in again and read about:

Friday: The ballroom that burned down before it was built.
Monday: The Confederate general and the mafia
Tuesday: Judge Wisdom, and Master Builder, Contractor, and Undertaker Charles Pride.