Urban Landscape Change in New Orleans, LA: the Case of the Lost Neighborhood of Louis Armstrong

University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations Dissertations and Theses 5-21-2005 Urban Landscape Change in New Orleans, LA: The Case of the Lost Neighborhood of Louis Armstrong Willard Fields University of New Orleans Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td Recommended Citation Fields, Willard, "Urban Landscape Change in New Orleans, LA: The Case of the Lost Neighborhood of Louis Armstrong" (2005). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 151. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/151 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by ScholarWorks@UNO with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. URBAN LANDSCAPE CHANGE IN NEW ORLEANS, LA: THE CASE OF THE LOST NEIGHBORHOOD OF LOUIS ARMSTRONG A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The College of Urban and Public Affairs by Willard Fields B.A., Trinity University, 1991 M.A., University of New Orleans, 1998 May 2004 Foreword: Parading on Empty Streets: The Lost Landscape of the Cradle of Jazz On Liberty, Perdido, Franklin and Poydras there were honky-tonks at every corner and in each one of them musical instruments of every kind were played. At the corner of the street where I lived was the famous Funky Butt Hall, where I first heard Buddy Bolden play. He was blowing up a storm. That neighborhood certainly had a lot to offer. (Louis Armstrong 1951, p. 22 and 23) But the site of this parade- the cold, empty streets of the Central Business District- betrayed [the mayor’s] claim to street level authenticity. Those streets flanked by glass and steel skyscrapers- which are the mayor’s corridors of power and, arguably, his real constituency- yielded up no followers who would join into the parade. (Regis 1999, p. 496) On a hot evening in August of 2001, a group of participants in the Louis Armstrong Centennial Conference gathered to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Armstrong’s birth with a tour of the jazz master’s old neighborhood in the central business district of New Orleans. Many in the crowd of more than forty people had undoubtedly read about this neighborhood in Armstrong’s autobiography Satchmo. In Armstrong’s eloquent, almost lyrical prose style, tales of the grinding poverty and violence of the neighborhood are counter-posed with street scenes of ecstatic musical transcendence. Armstrong describes a world of street parades, honky-tonks, and church choirs filling the streets with music. A diverse set of characters from prostitutes to church people to judges to jazz musicians populate Armstrong’s portrait of his neighborhood. Armstrong’s recollections provide an important description of what turned out to be the first landscape of jazz1. ii On this afternoon, the neighborhood that helped send Armstrong off into the world with the rich musical heritage of jazz was deserted. A sea of empty parking lots surrounded the last few nineteenth-century buildings. Only a few blocks away, the Superdome and business towers vaulted into the sky, protected from the low-income neighborhoods to the north by the elevated wall of Interstate-10. The only sign that jazz had sprung from this area was a mural of a clarinet painted on the side of the high-rise Holiday Inn, the self-proclaimed “jazziest hotel in New Orleans.” During the 20th century, the Perdido Street neighborhood was transformed from an area “that had a lot to offer” for Louis Armstrong to a corridor of power and parking lots that “yielded up no followers who would join the parade” (Regis 1999, p. 496) for the 1998 inaugural of then-Mayor Marc Morial. The question of how the vibrant, flawed neighborhood of Armstrong’s childhood became a forgotten parking district of a modern central business district is the subject of this work. Two basic angles are taken to address this question. First, addressing this question requires both a cultural and morphological understanding of change in this neighborhood. This work seeks to address landscape change as the interface of cultural and morphological change. To accomplish this, this work examines the changes in the built environment that transformed the landscape of jazz, with its densely packed, diverse mix of dwellings, honky-tonks, stores, and governmental uses, into a lost landscape of surface parking, abandoned buildings, and specialized high-rise uses. Through the use of detailed records of land use change found in planning and insurance documents, augmented by a time-series of aerial and ground photographs, both the chronology of change as well as the specific physical changes of the area are iii documented. This physical portrait is expanded to include the voice of early jazz found in the descriptions of the area by both jazz scholars and the musicians themselves. Second, this descriptive approach is broadened through an analysis of the political economy of landscape change in the New Orleans central business district. The transformation of Armstrong’s neighborhood into a part of the central business district was affected by a series of urban planning documents created by the political and business elites of the city. Each of these plans sought to make major changes to the essential morphological structure of the city to enhance the power and prestige of the downtown core. The methods used for achieving their goal of creating a solid central business district mirrored the nationwide currents of modernist planning thought. While New Orleans lacked legislative authority to enact “urban renewal” practices until 1968, the modernist philosophy of these practices was at work in the city well before this date. Major street widening and Interstate building projects cleared out low-income residents in linear swaths while the core of Armstrong’s old neighborhood was cleared for a new Civic Center complex. The result of these major changes was de jure urban renewal2. Structure of Dissertation This dissertation is broken up into three main parts. First, a literature review section provides an overview of the important concepts and methodologies employed in this work. Chapter one explores the meaning and use of public space in the contemporary city. A near universal complaint about the quality of contemporary public space is the problem of lost space or units of poorly designed and used spaces. Chapter one explores how urban design scholars and historians have explained the growth of these areas. Chapter two concludes the literature review section. This chapter articulates the iv methodology to be used in tracking land use change in this work. The techniques of the urban morphologic approach are explored and articulated in this chapter. In the second section, the intersection of morphological and cultural change in New Orleans is explored. Chapter three presents the results of an urban design analysis of the contemporary central business district of New Orleans. This analysis utilizes lost space indicators to track the extent of poor urban design in the CBD. To provide a strong footing for in depth discussions of morphological change in New Orleans, chapter four looks at the historic morphology of New Orleans from its founding through 1900 with a special emphasis on the cultural roots of the city. Chapter five presents a morphological and social portrait of the early twentieth century Perdido Street area that Louis Armstrong called home. This area formed the backbone of the landscape of the cradle of jazz, the place from which jazz was incubated. Chapter six looks at how this amazing place was gradually altered from the 1920s to 1937 through an examination of Sanborn and photographic evidence3. Chapter seven utilizes government and photographic evidence to articulate the important morphological changes that occurred in the city during its high modernist transformation from 1947 to 1974. While complete Sanborn records do not exist for this period, the detailed planning record provides ample evidence of the dramatic changes that altered the area socially and morphologically. The dissertation concludes with two chapters that explore the issue of appropriate landscape management. Chapter eight explores the concepts of modernism as articulated by Marshall Berman. Berman’s intricate discussion of the tension between the modern imperatives of change and the desire to preserve is applied to landscape v changes that have been identified in Louis Armstrong’s old neighborhood. In this chapter Armstrong, who lived in the neighborhood, and Robert Moses, whose plans helped alter it, conceptually meet on Perdido Street. Their meeting tells us a great deal about the importance of historic landscapes and the people who make these places home. The final chapter provides an examination of the current efforts in New Orleans to revitalize the jazz district around the Perdido Street area. This concluding chapter explores the possibilities of utilizing design review as a mechanism to positively mange the unique landscape of the Perdido Street area. In addition, a technical appendix is presented to help define the specific techniques that were utilized in the construction of the historic morphological model of New Orleans. The techniques utilized in this dissertation proved to provide an excellent framework for exploring historic city change at the micro-level.

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