Sustaining New Orleans : Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City / Barbara Eckstein

This page intentionally left blank SustainingSstasta g New Orleans Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City Barbara Eckstein First published 2006 by Routledge Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2006 Taylor & Francis The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. ISBN-13: 978-0-415-94782-4 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-0-415-94783-1 (pbk) Library of Congress Card Number 2005012589 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eckstein, Barbara J. Sustaining New Orleans : literature, local memory, and the fate of a city / Barbara Eckstein. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-94782-0 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-415-94783-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. American literature--Louisiana--New Orleans--History and criticism. 2. New Orleans (La.)-- Intellectual life. 3. New Orleans (La.)--In literature. 4. New Orleans (La.)--Civilization. I. Title. PS267.N49E27 2005 810.9'9763--dc22 2005012589 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com Taylor & Francis Group and the Routledge Web site at is the Academic Division of T&F Informa plc. http://www.routledge-ny.com For Robert Udick, 1957–1999, and Jim Knudsen, 1950–2004, friends of New Orleans and friends of mine. This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface xi 1 The Claims for New Orleans’s Exceptionalism 1 2 “Indiscourageable Progress”: The Decline of the New Orleans Streetcar and the Rise of A Streetcar Named Desire 31 3 Sex and the Historic City: A Walking Tour on the Wild Side 65 4 Malaise and Miasms: Dr. Percy’s Moviegoer and Public Health in New Orleans Environs 97 5 The Spectacle Between Piety and Desire: The Place of New Orleans’s Black Panthers and Ishmael Reed’s Neo-HooDooism 121 6 The Vampires’ Middle Passage: The World of Anne Rice and the Promise of New Orleans’s Coast 149 7 Mapping the Spirit Region: Sister Helen, the Dead Men, and the Folk of New Orleans’s Environs 175 8 Epilogue 211 9 Notes 219 10 Bibliography 261 Index 275 This page intentionally left blank List of Illustrations Figure 2.1 Streetcars and automobiles sharing space on Canal Street after World War II. (Historic New Orleans Collection, #1988.36147 NOPSI) 32 Figure 2.2 1929 removal of streetcar tracks on Dryades Street. (Historic New Orleans Collection, #1979.325.5208) 38 Figure 2.3 The Esplanade neutral ground in the 1920s. (Historic New Orleans Collection, #1979.325.5250) 39 Figure 2.4 The color screen moved from streetcar to bus. (Historic New Orleans Collection, #s 1979.325.6210 and 6234) 44 Figure 2.5 Burning of a streetcar and truck during the 1929 carmen’s strike. (Historic New Orleans Collection, #1988.31.241) 45 Figure 2.6 The Desire streetcar on a single piece of track beside the Old Mint museum, draped in crepe mourning the 1983 death of Tennessee Williams. (Historic New Orleans Collection, #1983.56.2, photo by Jan White Brantley) 49 Figure 2.7 Mayor Morrison with his sleeves rolled up. (Historic New Orleans Collection, #1996.65.1) 52 x List of Illustrations Figure 2.8 Brando’s body selling A Streetcar Named Desire (Kobal) 61 Figure 2.9 The streetcar named Desire running through the Quarter and through public memory. (Historic New Orleans Collection, #1979.89.7500) 63 Figure 7.1 Map of the spirit region, view one. (Property of the author, rendered digitally by Kelly McLaughlin) 192 Figure 7.2 Map of the spirit region, view two. (Property of the author, rendered digitally by Kelly McLaughlin) 196 Figure 7.3 Map of the spirit region, view three. (Property of the author, rendered digitally by Kelly McLaughlin) 198 Figure 7.4 Map of the spirit region, view four. (Property of the author, rendered digitally by Kelly McLaughlin) 201 Preface When, in the mid-1950s, Harvard social scientist David Riesman suggested that New Orleans and its residents be federally subsidized as were Yellowstone and its denizens so that they might serve as a living history and culture lesson for Americans, he was not being facetious. He was trying to imagine an object of rampant post–World War II consumer desire worth the purchase price. The further commodification of New Orleans did not seem to trouble Riesman as it later did architec- ture scholar Christine Boyer. When he asked himself “Abundance for What?” in an article by the same name, sustaining New Orleans was one answer he proffered. This book pursues two meanings of “sustaining New Orleans.” One is the perpetuation of the images and ideas and tales of New Orleans sustained in public memory—local and not—through a range of activi- ties and media, widely read literature notable among them. The other references the concept of sustainability, understood here to mean the struggle to balance the competing demands of social justice, environmental health, and economic viability. This book argues that these two definitions of sustaining New Orleans are mutually constitutive, or, more precisely, that they are two features of an ongoing dialectic. It further argues that widely read literature set in the city, through its engagement with urban folkways that shape and reshape public memory, has participated, for good and ill, in the framing of the city’s problems, the proposed solutions to those problems, and the perceived effectiveness of those solutions. I employ Southern regionalist Howard Odum’s 1930s vision of local folkways and national (or transnational) technicways working together to root and revise a region. It is the dialectic of platial folkways, xii Preface spatially circulating technicways, and the evolving region that I think of as the pulse of the place-tone, drawing on this conjunction created by Amiria Baraka in his review of David Henderson’s poetry.1 If I inevi- tably work Odum’s tripartite concept with post-structural humanist hindsight rather than the commitment to collecting and cataloguing that typified his social science method, I also look beneath my feet for foundational principles necessary for sustaining the local place and its inhabitants. The post-War literary texts in question are Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, and Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking. The first chapter, “The Claims for New Orleans’s Exception- alism,” explicates the conventional land use in the greater New Orleans metropolitan area alongside telling examples from the extensive body of oral and informal histories that claim, through their folkways, New Orleans’s exceptionalism. Pursuing the claims for exceptionalism also through the distinctive features of the greater New Orleans bioregion, this initial chapter links these geographical conditions to the tales about the city that have been repeated and refashioned over time to meet the social or political, economic, or emotional demands of their tellers and their critical moments. These folkways circumscribe all material decisions, I argue; they are, like the encroaching waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River’s will to change, always with New Orleans. Central to these dynamic folkways is a lingering and racially evolving nineteenth-century image of the city as feminine. I pursue this line of thought from New Orleans frontier streets to the rage for simulacra at the close of the twentieth century. I then specifically focus my lens on the evolving permutations of ambiguous voodoo queen Marie Laveau, arguing that her racial, class, and religious indeterminacy alongside the claims for her abiding power and even status are foundational to any analysis of the city. The next three chapters take up key issues in the sustainability of New Orleans: mass transit, preservation, and prostitution in and around the French Quarter; African American demands for equality; and the growth of the petrochemical corridor. Specifically, the second chapter examines the reciprocal relations of New Orleans’s post-War transit decision concerning the streetcar named Desire and Tennessee Williams’s simultaneous overnight success. The third chapter investi- gates the uneasy relationship of sex and historic preservation in the French Quarter at mid-century, paying particular attention to the transformations between the mid-1930s when Algren first saw and wrote about the Quarter’s wild side, and the mid-1950s when his Preface xiii revised narrative was published under the title A Walk on the Wild Side. The fourth chapter takes the lid off of the late 1950s New Orleans that Percy’s moviegoer suppresses through passive spectatorship and Kierke- gaardian despair and that the city contained within the riverfront barriers of railroad tracks, levees, warehouses, and wharves. Inside that boiling pot are desegregation, anti-Communist xenophobia, local and global environmental hazards on an unprecedented scale, and New Orleans Carnival traditions designed to render multivalent chaos as hierarchical parade. Percy’s protagonist faces choices among competing claims for social justice, public health, and economic viability that do not disappear, but are only differently mediated when he retreats into movie theaters. I pay particular attention to the protagonist’s response to Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets, a film that penetrated New Orleans waterfront even before a visual corridor through its riverfront barriers was reopened to the public. But Kazan’s plot finds a foreign threat to national public health at the nation’s backdoor rather than the toxins coming down river. The book’s final three chapters explore three texts that use Laveau folkways to address the city’s problems.

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