The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

Bourbon Street, two things paramount to a successful union were in dangerously short supply. There was no space (more than half of John’s stuff was in storage and the two closets had been cramped since well before he got there) and absolutely no privacy (in addition to the steady stream of workmen, there was also Betty, whose daily arrival—to putter, to water, to change what had to be the cleanest air-conditioning filters on the planet—was announced by a great clanking ring of keys and a sporadic off-key whistle). It was time to call a realtor.
    The first part was easy—we already knew where we wanted to go. Tired of the urban confines of the Quarter, we decided to follow the path the Americans who arrived in New Orleans more than 150 years before us. Like them, we sought serenity and safe haven just a few miles up the river in one of the earliest “suburbs” of the city—in the comparatively bucolic and extraordinarily lush environs of the Garden District.
    The Garden District began life as the sugar plantation of Jacques-François Esnould Dugue de Livaudais, a powerful landowner who also built the city’s first racetrack. Livaudais had been building a plantation house intended to be the grandest in all of Louisiana when especially severe spring floods destroyed his crop as well as the house’s beginnings. His wife, Celeste de Marigny, daughter of an even more illustrious planter, chose that moment to leave her husband and move to Paris; when she got the plantation in the divorce settlement, she sold it in 1832 for the then-whopping price of $490,000. The purchasers hired one of Napoleon’s former engineers to divide the property into a fourteen-square-block area with spacious lots they marketed to the growing population of Americans making fortunes off of everything from lumber and cotton to the manufacture of jute-sacks. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, New Orleans had become an increasingly commercial city. Its port was the natural point of entry for coffee and European manufactured goods, and the natural point of shipment for goods coming down the river from the Midwest and the East, as well for all those commodities making the Americans rich. By 1850, New Orleans was the wealthiest city in the South and its most recent denizens needed places to live.
    The French Quarter, the original city, was controlled and populated by Creoles, old-line aristocrats of French origin who had held sway over New Orleans for more than a hundred years and who had no use for the tacky, nouveau riche Americans. Until the Livaudais lots became available, the newcomers had been crammed in a narrow strip between Canal Street, the eastern boundary of the Quarter, and Jackson Avenue, where the Livaudais plantation began. Though some tourist brochures still subscribe to the romantic portrayal of the area as having been settled by a stable, Southern-born, agricultural aristocracy, the majority of the houses were built by ambitious businessmen who hailed from such distinctly un-Southern climes as England, New York, Maine, Philadelphia, and New Jersey, and who often lost their fortunes as quickly as they made them. In the interim though, they managed to show off plenty, building elaborate Greek revival mansions or Italianate villas and creating the first real gardens in the city. Until then, most of the gardens in New Orleans had existed within the walls of courtyards, much like mine on Bourbon, small and hidden from view; now there was not only lavish space, but land made rich by seasons of floods like the one which had been Livaudais’s downfall. The sudden profusion was, apparently, a dramatic sight. Mark Twain, a frequent visitor to the Garden District house of his friend the writer George Washington Cable, wrote that “the mansions stand in the center of large grounds and rise, garlanded with roses, out of the midst of swelling masses of shining green foliage and many-colored blossoms. No houses could be in better harmony with