Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans (15 page)

The New Basin Canal

Perhaps the greatest engineering feat accomplished in the Faubourg St. Mary and certainly the one which would do most for its economy, was the building of the New Basin Canal, opened for traffic in 1838. Two New Orleans entrepreneurs, Maunsel White and Beverly Chew, are credited with organizing the New Orleans Canal and Banking Company, which was chartered by the Louisiana legislature in 1831 (when the capital of Louisiana was in Donaldsonville). The company was to build a canal six miles long, sixty feet wide, and six feet deep, at a point “above Gravier Street” to Lake Pontchartrain. There was to be a turning basin at the city’s end, allowing ships to return to the lake, bow first.

The need for the canal had been growing as the American Sector grew. In 1828, there was not a paving stone in the Faubourg St. Mary. The site of the future St. Charles Hotel was a pool of stagnant water. There was not a wharf in the suburb. Drayage fees from the wharves on the riverfront in the Vieux Carré and from the Carondelet Canal (the Old Basin Canal) were enormous. The Carondelet Canal gave the Creoles access to Bayou St. John and thus to Lake Pontchartrain. It allowed them to control trade with coastal cities of Biloxi, Mobile, and Pensacola and with cities north of Lake Pontchartrain: Mandeville, Madisonville, and Covington.

Carondelet Canal (Old Basin Canal), circa 1900. Ran along Lafitte Street from Basin Street to Bayou St. John. Existed from 1795 to the 1930s.
(Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

The population of Faubourg St. Mary
continued to expand upriver and farther away from the old canal. It became increasingly difficult for the Americans to make use of that waterway. A new canal in the American Sector would allow them direct access to Lake Pontchartrain
and competition in the Gulf Coast trade.

Work was begun in 1832. The canal took six years to build. It cost $1,119,000, exclusive of the land, and it took the lives of eight thousand workers, who died of yellow fever
and cholera digging in the mosquito-infested swamps. It was a project of relatively greater difficulty than that of the Panama Canal given the differences in technology and equipment. Altogether, it was an awe-inspiring task.

There were no dredges in those days, so the digging had to be done with hand shovels. Mud was shoveled into wheelbarrows, which were rolled up inclined planks to the banks of the canal. The most primitive pumps were constantly in use to keep the ditch free of water. Ancient roots of giant, water-soaked cypresses had to be hacked through with hand-axes, because dynamite had not yet been invented. Pilings for the wharves were forced into the soil by tons of stone loaded onto their tops.

Laborers, mostly Irish and German immigrants, earned $20 per month plus room, board, and whiskey money, which amounted to $6.25 monthly. They worked through the heat and humidity of six interminable New Orleans summers in the swamps of Metairie Ridge.

When the canal was opened in 1838, there was a turning basin where the Greyhound Bus Station and the Union Passenger Terminal
are today. The landing was two blocks wide on Circus Avenue (now Rampart Street) between Julia Street and Triton Walk (now Howard Avenue).

New Basin Canal, circa 1929. Had its turning basin at S. Rampart Street between Howard Avenue and Julia Street. Ran from S. Rampart to the lake from 1838 to 1961.
(Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

From the beginning, the New Basin Canal
flourished. Howard Avenue in the 1850s, stretched from the turning basin of the new canal to the river and was lined with business houses of traders, speculators, agents, and merchants dealing in manufactured goods from everywhere in the United States. Merchants ran back and forth between the river and the basin as ships arrived and departed. Itinerant merchants joined their ranks, staying at the Washington Hall or Piney Woods Hotel, rushing out to buy and sell “on the levee,” where fortunes were made and lost.

Not only businessmen derived benefit from the New Basin Canal
. Pleasure seekers took the ride on mule-drawn barges from the city to the New Lake End, where there was little more than Dan Hickok’s Hotel at the site of the present day Southern Yacht Club. The flag-bedecked boats consisted of a cabin and a covered upper deck. Bands played for the entertainment of passengers. Tolls were collected from pedestrians on Old Shell Road and from boats on the water: 6½ cents for a man on horseback, 12½ cents for a bicycle rider, 37½ cents per ton on the waterway.

In 1946, a century later, the order came in to fill in the canal to make way for the Pontchartrain Expressway
. The work was completed in 1961. A wide, green expanse still exists on the route of the canal between Veterans Highway and Robert E. Lee Boulevard, the only reminder that a canal once ran there.

The Three Municipalities

In anticipation of the New Basin Canal’s completion, businessmen of Faubourg St. Mary requested a charter in 1836 for an independent city, such as had been granted in 1832 to the City of Lafayette. Alternatives were discussed, but the differences between the Creoles and the Americans had only sharpened into hostility in the past several years. In 1836, the municipal government of the city of New Orleans ceased to exist. The city split into three autonomous municipalities, each with its own recorder, who was the chief executive in his own municipality, and its own council. Each handled its own affairs, improvements, and taxes. Once a year, the general council, composed
of aldermen from the three municipalities, met with the Mayor in City
Hall (the Cabildo), to deal with matters having to do with the city as a whole (parish prison, old debts, license revenues, etc.).

The Vieux Carré was the First Municipality, Faubourg St. Mary was the Second, and Faubourg Marigny was the Third. Faubourg Marigny was less affluent than the other two. There was less rivalry between Faubourg Marigny and the Vieux Carré, because many of the residents of Faubourg Marigny were displaced Creoles.

By 1852, it was clear that such an arrangement was both inefficient and expensive. All jobs and efforts had to be duplicated. Tension between the communities had relaxed somewhat, so the municipalities reunited by a charter of the legislature. Faubourg St. Mary became the First District of the City of New Orleans; The Vieux Carré, the Second District; and Faubourg Marigny, the Third. Under the same charter, the City of Lafayette was annexed and became the Fourth District.

The new government was bi-cameral, with two chambers: one of aldermen, elected by the districts; the other of assistant aldermen, elected by the wards. This system continued until 1870, though suspended in 1862, when Union forces took control of the city. The American Sector, with its steamboat traffic on the New Basin Canal and its thriving commercial enterprises, had sufficient clout in 1852 to have the seat of government moved from the Cabildo in the Vieux Carré to the Second Municipality Hall on St. Charles Avenue (thereafter called City Hall, now called Gallier Hall).

Irish and German Immigrants

The two largest groups of immigrants to settle in New Orleans in the two decades before the Civil War
were the Irish and the Germans.

Before 1820, the Irish are hard to trace in population figures, since ports in the New World lumped British, Irish, and Scottish immigrants all together. From 1846 to 1856, because of the famines in Ireland, one-third of the immigrants entering America were from that country. By 1860, there were twenty-five thousand Irish living in New Orleans.

The Irish vied with the blacks for jobs digging ditches, collecting refuse, or stevedoring on the riverfront. As a group, they were viewed with disdain, not only because of the work they did but also because they were rowdy, boisterous, clannish, hot tempered, hard-drinking, and always eager for a fight. Their intemperate dispositions had, no doubt, been honed on the razor edge of hunger.

Besides the Irish colonies already mentioned on Tchoupitoulas, Julia, and Girod Streets near the riverfront, many of the Irish settled in an area now referred to as the
Irish Channel,
which is in the lower Garden District and may be bounded roughly by Magazine Street, the river, Jackson Avenue, and Felicity Street. Some say the boundaries extend as far as Louisiana Avenue, in which case it takes in no less than one hundred city squares.

Actually, the Irish Channel
was originally only one street—Adele Street—that ran two blocks from St. Thomas Street to Tchoupitoulas Street and lay between Josephine Street and St. Andrew Street.

One version of how it got its name is from the story of the Irish seamen coming up the river, who would see the light outside Noud’s Ocean Home saloon on Adele Street and cry out, “There’s the Irish Channel!” Another version is that Adele Street was often flooded after a rain. In reality, it was probably called the Irish Channel because so many Irish lived there.

Statue of Margaret Gaffney Haughery, friend of orphans. She sits on an old chair, dressed in a calico gown and shawl.
(Courtesy Tracy Clouatre)

In 1850, an Irishman could earn five dollars per day as a “screwman” on the riverfront, “screwing,” or packing, cotton into the ship’s hold. Their reputation as fighters often made the difference in obtaining these coveted jobs. Many claimed to be Irish even if they weren’t, so as to be thought handy with their fists.

The Irish lived simply in small cottages. Often, when Creoles abandoned their big homes on the riverfront to build finer mansions on St. Charles Avenue, the Irish moved into these riverfront homes. In time, they became known as the “lace-curtain” Irish.

Irish families were large, and their food was coarse but wholesome: corned beef and cabbage, Irish stew, potato pancakes, and red beans and rice. The neighborhood itself was respectable, but the riverfront
saloons gave it a bad reputation: Mike Noud’s Ocean Home
, the Bull’s
Head Tavern, and the Isle of Man. Today, Parasol’s Bar on Constance Street represents that green channel still present to entice Irishmen to celebrate their heritage.

One field in which the Irish excelled was fighting. The first official prize fight in New Orleans was between
James Burke
(alias Deaf) and
Sam O’Rourke
on May 6, 1836. Burke operated a club, the Boxiana, in which he taught the art of self-defense.
John L. Sullivan
trained at Carrollton Gardens. New Orleans was host to a fight between Sullivan and Jim Corbett in 1892 in the Olympic Club on Royal Street; Corbett won. They fought with gloves, because bare-knuckled boxing had been outlawed. In 1889, in Richburg, Mississippi, Sullivan fought an illegal fight of seventy-five rounds with Jack Kilrain. Most of the fans had come from New Orleans. The referee was
John Fitzpatrick
, who later became mayor of New Orleans.