The French Quarter, also known as the Vieux Carré, is the oldest neighborhood in the city of New Orleans. After New Orleans (French: Nouvelle-Orléans) was founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the city developed around the Vieux Carré ("Old Square" in English), a central square. The district is more commonly called the French Quarter today, or simply "The Quarter", related to changes in the city with American immigration after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.[4] Most of the extant historic buildings were constructed either in the late 18th century, during the city's period of Spanish rule, or were built during the first half of the 19th century, after U.S. purchase and statehood.
The district as a whole has been designated as a National Historic Landmark, with numerous contributing buildings that are separately deemed significant. It is a prime tourist destination in the city, as well as attracting local residents. Because of its distance from areas where the levee was breached during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as well as the strength and height of the nearest Mississippi River Levees in contrast to other levees along the canals and lakefront,[5] it suffered relatively light damage from floodwater as compared to other areas of the city and the greater region.
History[edit]
The French claimed Louisiana in the 1690s, and Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville was appointed Director General in charge of developing a colony in the territory, and founded New Orleans in 1718. In 1721, the royal engineer Adrien de Pauger designed the city's street layout. He named the streets after French royal houses and Catholic saints, and paid homage to France's ruling family, the House of Bourbon, with the naming of Bourbon Street.[6][page needed] New Orleans was ceded to the Spanish in 1763 following the Seven Years' War. The Great New Orleans Fire of 1788 and another in 1794 destroyed 80 percent of the city's buildings, and so nearly all the French Quarter dates from the late 1790s onwards.
The Spanish introduced strict new fire codes that banned wooden siding in favor of fire-resistant brick, which was covered in stucco, painted in the pastel hues fashionable at the time. The old French peaked roofs were replaced with flat tiled ones, but the still largely French population continued to build in similar styles, influenced by colonial architecture of the Caribbean, such as timber balconies and galleries. (In southeast Louisiana, a distinction is made between "balconies", which are self-supporting and attached to the side of the building, and "galleries," which are supported from the ground by poles or columns.)
When Anglophone Americans began to move in after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, they mostly built on available land upriver, across modern-day Canal Street. This thoroughfare became the meeting place of two cultures, one Francophone Creole and the other Anglophone American. (Local landowners had retained architect and surveyor Barthelemy Lafon to subdivide their property to create an American suburb). The median of the wide boulevard became a place where the two contentious cultures could meet and do business in both French and English. As such, it became known as the "neutral ground", and this name is still used for medians in the New Orleans area.
During the 19th century, New Orleans was similar to other Southern cities in that its economy was based on selling cash crops, such as sugar, tobacco and cotton. By 1840, newcomers whose wealth came from these enterprises turned New Orleans into the third largest metropolis in the country.[7][page needed] The city's port was the nation's second largest, with New York City being the largest.[8]
The development of New Orleans famous ornate cast iron 'galleries' began with the two storey examples on the Pontalba Buildings on Jackson Square, completed in 1851. As the most prominent and high class address at the time, they set a fashion for others to follow, and multi-level cast iron galleries soon replaced the old timber French ones on older buildings as well as gracing new ones.[9]
Even before the Civil War, French Creoles had become a minority in the French Quarter.[10] In the late 19th century the Quarter became a less fashionable part of town, and many immigrants from southern Italy and Ireland settled there. From 1884 to 1924 an estimated 290,000 Italian immigrants, a great deal of them from Sicily, arrived in New Orleans and settled in the French Quarter, which acquired the nickname "Little Palermo."[11] In 1905, the Italian consul estimated that one-third to one-half of the Quarter's population were Italian-born or second generation Italian-Americans. Irish immigrants also settled heavily in the Esplanade area, which was called the "Irish Channel".[12]
In 1917, the closure of Storyville sent much of the vice formerly concentrated therein back into the French Quarter, which "for most of the remaining French Creole families . . was the last straw, and they began to move uptown."[13] This, combined with the loss of the French Opera House two years later, provided a bookend to the era of French Creole culture in the Quarter.[14] Many of the remaining French Creoles moved to the university area.[15]
In the early 20th century, the Quarter's cheap rents and air of decay attracted a bohemian artistic community, a trend which became pronounced in the 1920s. Many of these new inhabitants were active in the first preservation efforts in the Quarter, which began around that time.[16] As a result, the Vieux Carré Commission (VCC) was established in 1925, spearheaded by Elizabeth Werlein. Although initially only an advisory body, a 1936 referendum to amend the Louisiana constitution afforded it a measure of regulatory power. It began to exercise more power in the 1940s to preserve and protect the district.[17]
Meanwhile, World War II brought thousands of servicemen and war workers to New Orleans as well as to the surrounding region's military bases and shipyards. Many of these sojourners paid visits to the Vieux Carré. Although nightlife and vice had already begun to coalesce on Bourbon Street in the two decades following the closure of Storyville, the war produced a larger, more permanent presence of exotic, risqué, and often raucous entertainment on what became the city's most famous strip. Years of repeated crackdowns on vice in Bourbon Street clubs, which took on new urgency under Mayor deLesseps Story Morrison, reached a crescendo with District Attorney Jim Garrison's raids in 1962, but Bourbon Street's clubs were soon back in business.[18]
The plan to construct an elevated Riverfront Expressway between the Mississippi River levee and the French Quarter consumed the attention of Vieux Carré preservationists through much of the 1960s. On December 21, 1965, the "Vieux Carre Historic District" was designated a National Historic Landmark.[3][19] After waging a decade-long battle against the Vieux Carré Riverfront Expressway that utilized the newly passed National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, preservationists and their allies forced the issue into federal court, eventually producing the cancellation of the freeway plan in 1969.[20]
The victory was important for the preservation of the French Quarter, but it was hardly the only challenge. Throughout the 1960s, new hotels opened regularly, often replacing large sections of the French Quarter. The VCC approved these structures as long as their designers adhered to prevailing exterior styles. Detractors, fearing that the Vieux Carré's charm might be compromised by the introduction of too many new inns, lobbied successfully for passage in 1969 of a municipal ordinance that forbade new hotels within the district's boundaries. However, the ordinance failed to stop the proliferation of timeshare condominiums and clandestine bed and breakfast inns throughout the French Quarter or high-rise hotels just outside its boundaries.[21] In the 1980s, many long-term residents were driven away by rising rents, as property values rose dramatically with expectations of windfalls from the planned 1984 World's Fair site nearby.
More of the neighborhood was developed to support tourism, which is important to the city's economy. But, the French Quarter still combines residential, hotels, guest houses, bars, restaurants and tourist-oriented commercial properties.
Effect of Hurricane Katrina[edit]
As with other parts of the city developed before the late 19th century, and on higher land predating New Orleans' levee systems, the French Quarter remained substantially dry following Hurricane Katrina. Its elevation is five feet (1.5 m) above sea level.[22] Some streets had minor flooding, and several buildings suffered significant wind damage. Most of the major landmarks suffered only minor damage.[23] In addition, the Quarter largely escaped the looting and violence that occurred after the storm; nearly all of the antique shops and art galleries in the French Quarter, for example, were untouched.[24]
Mayor Ray Nagin officially reopened the French Quarter on September 26, 2005 (almost a month after the storm), for business owners to inspect their property and clean up. Within a few weeks, a large selection of French Quarter businesses had reopened. The Historic New Orleans Collection's Williams Research Center Annex was the first new construction completed in the French Quarter after Hurricane Katrina.[25]