Page:EB1911 - Volume 19.djvu/550

 grocery houses; and on North Peters and Custom House streets the sugar and rice industries are concentrated. Little of history or tradition is associated with the American Quarter, with the exception of the former site (before 1900) of the Clay statue in Canal Street where Royal Street and St Charles Avenue begin, which was the scene of popular meetings in the Italian troubles of 1891; here, in Liberty Place, a triangle at the intersection of Canal, North Peters and Tchoupitoulas streets, on the scene of the fight of the 14th of September 1874 between conservative citizens and the radical authorities of the state, is a granite memorial called the Liberty Monument. The Customs House, long renowned for its “marble room,” is in the old city, just off Canal Street. The corner-stone was laid by Henry Clay in 1847. The Boston (1845) and Pickwick (1857) are the best known of the general social clubs, and the Harmony (1862) of the Jewish clubs.

It is the French Quarter in which the history, poetry and romance of New Orleans are indissolubly united. The memory of French dominion is retained in the titles, and in the foreign aspect as well, of Toulouse, Orleans, Du Maine, Conti, Bourbon, Dauphiné and Chartres streets; while even more distinctly the Spaniard has superimposed his impress on stuccoed wall and iron lattice, huge locks and hinges, arches and gratings, balconies, jalousies, inner courts with parterres, urns and basins with fountains, and statues half hid in roses and vines. There are streets named from its Spanish governors: Unzaga, Galvez, Miro, Salcedo, Casa Calvo, Carondelet and the baron Carondelet’s Baronne. The moated and palisaded boundaries of early days are indicated by the wide, tree-planted and grassy avenues named respectively from the Canal, the Rampart and the Esplanade that once lay along their course; the original “commons” outside the walls are commemorated in Common Street; and the old parade ground in the midst of the early town’s river front, now laid off in flower-beds, white-shelled walks and shaven shrubbery, and known as Jackson Square, still retains its older name of the Place d’Armes. With this quaint, sunny and dusty old square is associated nearly every important event in Louisiana’s colonial history. This was the place publique, associated with traffic, gossip, military muster and official acts of state. On one side is the cathedral of St Louis, first built in 1718, burned in 1788, rebuilt in 1792–1794, and largely rebuilt again in 1850. Flanking the cathedral on one side stands the calaboose (Calaboza, 1810), and on the other the Cabildo—so named from the municipal council that sat here under Spanish rule, when it was the government house and palace of justice. Both buildings are to-day used as law courts. The Cabildo is a dignified two-storey structure of adobe and shell-lime, built in 1795; an incongruous mansard roof was added in 1850. On the 30th of November 1803, in the council hall, the city keys were handed back to the representatives of the French government and the people of Louisiana were absolved from their allegiance to the Spanish king; and here, only twenty days afterward, with similar ceremonies, the keys of the city passed from the hands of the French colonial prefect to those of the commissioners for the United States. In the old Place d’Armes a bronze equestrian statue (1846) of Andrew Jackson by Clark Mills is a remembrance of the ceremonies attending Jackson’s triumphal entry into the city after the battle of New Orleans in 1815. In 1825 Lafayette was lodged in the Cabildo as the city’s guest.

The appearance of the square was greatly changed in 1849, when the Baroness de Pontalba, in whose estate it was then comprised, cut down the ancient elms that shaded it and laid it out in its present style of a French garden. She also is responsible for the low brick “Pontalba Mansions” on the north and south sides of the square. The Babel of Tongues in the French Market (1813), on the site of an older market, immediately below Jackson Square, and at the “Picayune Tier” just adjacent, is an interesting feature of the city. Near the Cathedral, in Orleans Street, is the convent of the Holy Family, a brick building housing a negro sisterhood founded in 1835, and formerly the scene of New Orleans’s famous “quadroon balls.” The archiepiscopal palace (1730), said to be the oldest building of the

Mississippi Valley, is part of the unchanged original Ursuline convent; it was used as the State Capitol in 1831, and then it was the residence, and since 1899 has been the administrative office of the archbishop, and houses a colonial museum with the ecclesiastical records. The French Opera House (1860) was the successor of various French theatres built after 1808. The carnival balls are given here. New Orleans was by far the earliest of American cities to have an annual opera season.

The 18th-century fortifications about the old city were destroyed about 1804. The United States Branch Mint (1838) occupies the site of Fort St Charles (destroyed 1826), where Jackson reviewed his troops as they marched to Chalmette. Just outside the Vieux Carré is Beauregard Square, formerly known as Congo Square, because in early days the slaves were wont to gather here for their barbaric dances. The Hotel St Louis (1836), rebuilt in 1884 as the Hotel Royal, was the seat of the Republican reconstruction governments of governors Kellogg and Packard, and the prison fortress of both, respectively in 1874 and 1877, when the whites rose against Republican rule; its rotunda was also once a famous slave mart. Many other spots in the Latin Quarter are of scarcely less interest than those mentioned, not excluding those which were made famous by the romances of G. W. Cable, and whose only title to historic consideration is that which his imagination has given them.

City Park (216·6 acres, partly water), lying between the city and the lake, is notable in the local duelling annals of earlier days. Audubon Park (249 acres) was once the sugar plantation of Étienne de Boré, who first successfully made granulated sugar in 1795–1796; earlier experiments had been made in 1791 by Antonio Mendes, from whom de Boré, who established the sugar industry, bought a plantation in St Bernard Parish. The park was bought by the city for $180,000 in 1871, but was little improved until 1884, when the Cotton Centennial Exposition was held here. It contains to-day a state Sugar Experiment Station, in which a part of their work in course is done by the students in the Audubon Sugar School of the State University at Baton Rouge, and Horticultural Hall, the only one of the Exposition buildings now standing, with a display of tropical trees and plants; opposite Audubon Park is the campus of Tulane University. West End is a suburban resort and residential district on Lake Pontchartrain.

A noted feature of New Orleans is its cemeteries. Owing to the undrained condition of the subsoil, burials are made entirely above ground, in tombs of stuccoed brick and of granite and marble. Some of these are very elegant and costly, and many of the burial-grounds, with their long alleys of these tombs of diverse designs, deeply shaded by avenues of cedars and magnolias, possess a severe but emphatic beauty. Jews and the poor bury their dead underground in shallow graves. The oldest cemetery, St Louis No. 1, contains the graves of many persons notable in history. St Roch’s Campo Santo has a wonder-working shrine, and is the most picturesque of the old burying-grounds. Metairie, on the site of an old race track, is the finest of the new. It contains a monument to the Army of the Tennessee and its commander, Albert Sidney Johnston, with an equestrian statue of Johnston by Alexander Doyle, and a monument to the Army of Northern Virginia surmounted by a statue of General T. J. Jackson. In Greenwood Cemetery is the first monument erected to Confederate dead, given by the women of New Orleans. At Chalmette (on the Mississippi, about 5 m. E. of Canal Street), where the battle of New Orleans was fought in 1815, there is a National Cemetery, in which some 12,000 Union soldiers in the Civil War are buried.

Population.—The population in 1900 was 287,104, New