Orleans New Orleans of Campanellaamazon.com on New of Campanellaamazon.com Richard order on by Geographies Richard order Please by Geographies U Please RBAN G EOGRAPHIES P ART II Orleans New Orleans of Campanellaamazon.com on New of Campanellaamazon.com Richard order on by Geographies Richard order Please by Geographies Please ORPHOLOGY OF A ETROPOLIS tom up, forming spontaneously by the aggregation of people M M at river confluences, road intersections, resource-extraction Analyses of urban morphology—the shape, form, struc- sites, forts and outposts, and other convenient locales. They ture, and growth of a city—often start with a distinction expand in irregular star-like patterns, and only when perma- between planned and unplanned towns. Planned towns are nency seems assured do they come under governmental au- premeditated visions executed in a top-down fashion, by a thority—and planning. centralized authority with the aid of engineers and survey- Most French settlements in North America were planned, ors, who lay out networks of streets and blocks. In histori- but because France’s New World endeavors were more com- cal times, planned towns represented the imposition of or- mercial than colonial or imperial in their objectives, carried der and rationality in a remote and Orleansthreatening wilderness. out by individuals or companies granted trading rights, no Unplanned towns, on the other hand, derive from the bot- standard urban design was consistently executed throughout New Orleans of Campanellaamazon.com on New of Campanellaamazon.com Richard order on by Geographies Richard order Please by These perspectives of urban growth were made by digitally co-registering eight historical maps, delineating those areas depicted as de- veloped, then overlaying the results in yellow on an elevation map and comparing them to satellite-based information for 2000. From its initial 0.3-square-mile footprint at the French Quarter in the 1700s, the deltaic metropolis now spans about two hundred square miles across four parishes. Map and GIS processingGeographies by author. 91 Please 92 Urban Geographies the French possessions of Canada, the Great Lakes, the Mis- the more rigid and orderly end of the urban-planning spec- sissippi Valley, and the Gulf Coast. This contrasts with the trum of New France, featuring a symmetrical grid pattern Spanish towns and cities established to the southwest, which with a central place fronting the institutions of church and were developed under a strict and consistent colonial policy state, dramatically perched upon a cusp of the Mississippi toward urban design, “under the careful supervision of the River. Surrounding the eleven-by-six-block grid were four monarch.”1 As a result, towns of New France featured a di- forts and three ramparts (some not actually built until years versity of city plats reflecting the physical geography of the later) inspired by the French military engineer Sebastien sites and the capacities of the founders, unified by certain le Pietre de Vauban. Even though a commercial enterprise common traits of French design. Quebec, Louisbourg, Mon- brought New Orleans to fruition, Bienville and his men in- treal, Detroit, Mobile, New Orleans,Orleans St. Louis, and other stilled in New Orleans a strong sense of central authority and French frontier communities all exhibited generalized grid military presence, quite contrary to the laid-back atmosphere patterns with centralized churches and places, situated along for which this city would later gain fame. The remote co- waterfronts and protected by fortifications. But no two were lonial outpost remained within that neat plan until 1788, identical: some were elongated; some were perfectly orthogo- after a catastrophic conflagration and growing pressure for nal in their arrangement of blocks while others comprised a more space triggered New Orleans’ first expansion beyond its series of rather haphazard sub-grids; some were behind forts, original confines. Suburban growth started with the layout of aside forts, or within forts. “Because of their variety,” wrote the Faubourg St. Mary that year, and would continue within urbanist John W. Reps,New “French colonial towns have some- the parish for roughly the next two hundred years, and well what more charm and interest than can be found in the Span- beyond parish lines. After 1788,Orleans the dynamics of New Or- ish settlements. Indeed, in such cities as Quebec and New leans’ urban morphology became a bit more complicated: it Orleans, where the original French character has not been expanded in a fashion planned at the intra-subdivision scale, entirely obliterated,of the quality of the urban scene or town- but unplanned at the macroscopic, citywide scale, guided scape surpasses virtually anythingCampanella else of its kind in Northamazon.com invisibly by the factors of proximity, topography, econom- America.”2 ics, infrastructure, demographics, opportunity, and circum- New Orleans was the epitome of a planned town, con- stances. The goal of this chapter is not to recount the stage- ceived in 1717, initiated in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, by-stage history of this expansion,4 but rather to identify the sieur de Bienville, and designed and surveyed in 1721-1722 unwritten “rules”New that explain the why behind the where of by Le Blond de la Tour and Adrien de Pauger.3 It representedon New Orleans’ expansion beyond that original sixty-six-block grid known today as the French Quarter. 1 John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of the City Planning in the United States (Princeton, NJ, 1965), 56. 2 Ibid., 56, 64-87. “Rules” of Urban Expansion, 3 For an account of the siting of New Orleans, see Richard Campanella, Time and of Place in New Orleans: Past Geographies in the Present Day (Gretna, LA, 2002), 18- -circa Campanella amazon.com The first condition in the expansion of bourg to fau- bourg (literally “false town,” or inner suburb) was immediate adjacency to an existing urbanized area. Faubourg St. Mary Richard (1788), for example, was laid out immediately upriver from the original city (save for a narrow commonson unavailable at order the time for development), while the Faubourg Marigny was founded in 1805-1806 immediately below the city. The four new faubourgs—Duplantier, Solet, La Course, and Annun- by ciation—laid out in an imaginative classical form by Barthé- lemy Lafon in 1806-1810, were located immediately upriver from the Faubourg St. Mary, the first case of faubourgs ad- Geographies joining faubourgs.5 The Faubourg Tremé, founded in 1810, was again immediately adjacent to an established urbanized Richardarea, at the rear of the original city. Existing development, then, was a strong predictororder of the location of future devel- New Orleans’ population rose steadily from the city’s founding opment—until new transportation systems, in the form of to around 1960. It was slightly majority-black for most of its canals and railroads, altered spatial relationships. These new fi rst century, untilPlease Irish and German immigration in the 1830s transportation options diminished the need for immediate made whites predominant. The black population regained theby majority around 1976 and now comprises over two-thirds the population. Declining steadily since its 1960 peak, the city’s 36. total population is now at Depression-era levels. Graph and 4 See the eight volumes of the Friends of the Cabildo’s New Orleans Architecture analysis by author based on censuses, 1770-2003.Geographies(Gretna, LA, 1971- ) series for a detailed account of early city growth. 5 Ibid., vol. 1, The Lower Garden District (1971, reprint 1991), 7-12. Please Orleans New Orleans of Campanellaamazon.com on New of Campanellaamazon.com Richard Morphology of a Metropolis order on by Geographies Richard order Please by Geographies Please 93 94 Urban Geographies adjacency (read: minimized walking distances) in the expan- man habitation of this backswamp mostly comprised raised sion of the city, broadening the rule to accessibility. The tiny fishing camps and squatter shanties. So correlated was to- agricultural community at Bayou St. John, which dated to pography to urban development in nineteenth-century New 1708, exploited the natural Bayou St. John/Bayou Road por- Orleans than, at quick glance, city maps of the era resemble tage from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain, but elevation maps. The appellation “Crescent City,” which dates when the man-made Carondelet Canal increased accessibil- from the 1830s, described not just the shape of the river in ity to the bayou in the 1790s, it was subdivided into Fau- New Orleans but the shape of urbanized New Orleans,7 in- bourg St. John (1810). Canals, namely the New Basin and dicating the historical one-to-one relationship between the the Carondelet/Bayou St. John, made West End and Spanish river’s natural levee and the city’s expansion zone. Fort into lakefront ports and resorts,Orleans and the road following If land were conveniently accessible and well-drained, it the Metairie/Gentilly Ridge encouraged the development of qualified as a strong candidate for urban expansion. But it also farmhouses and the Faubourg Darcantel many years before had to be legally acquirable for subdivision. In most cases, at- New Orleans proper would envelope these areas. Ferries of tractive lands near New Orleans functioned as sugar planta- various forms have long connected Algiers with the original tions in the years prior to their subdivision. As pressure to de- city, and still do. The Pontchartrain Rail Road (1830) made velop increased, plantation owners eventually had to decide another otherwise inaccessible lakefront spot, Milneburg, between continuing in agriculture, with all its unpredictable into a booming mini-port and resort, while the New Orleans risks and rewards, or subdividing the land for development, & Carrollton Rail RoadNew (1835) led directly to the establish- either by hiring a surveyor and overseeing the process person- ment of Faubourg Bouligny and Carrollton, and indirectly to ally, or by selling the entire lotOrleans to a developer.