As Storyville became an economic engine unto itself, the city’s reformers realized their mistake. Anderson eventually amassed an entertainment empire and a veneer of respectability (he was elected to the Louisiana legislature and spent 16 years there). Storyville even had its own publication, the Blue Book, a guide to each sporting house in the district. The most successful brothels grew prosperous enough to decorate in high Southern Gilded Age style, with chandeliers and fine carpeting proprietors vied to employ the most popular piano “professors,” who would entertain in the parlor while the women entertained upstairs.
‘Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans’ by Gary Krist (Crown)
EMPIRE OF SIN BOOK SERIAL
There’s also David Hennessy, America’s youngest police chief at 32, so upright he lived with his mother Buddy Bolden, the black cornetist who began playing “raggedy” music and today is credited with inventing jazz and the “Axman,” a serial killer armed with a hatchet, whose reign of terror felt supernatural to a superstitious city and whose identity is still unknown. Krist tells his story through some well-known characters of the time, including Tom Anderson, the “Mayor of Storyville,” a powerful and popular saloonkeeper and restaurateur and Josie Arlington, the madam of an elegant brothel on Customhouse (now Iberville) Street. It opened in 1898, and the next 30 years were some of its most dramatic in the city’s history as Storyville and its denizens were at loggerheads with “the city’s ongoing crusade for order, racial purity and respectability.” By the end of the 19th century, local reformers had had enough, and their unique solution was a vice district called Storyville - where, they believed, all manner of sin could be contained. And while there have been many fine books and articles written about the city’s Storyville era, when prostitution was legalized in a district adjacent to the French Quarter, Gary Krist’s “Empire of Sin” is certainly one of the most well-researched and well-written, a true-life tale of a sui generis American city that reads like a historical thriller.Īfter the Civil War, New Orleans was a place that the rest of rock-ribbed America looked upon, in Krist’s words, “with a combination of wonder, suspicion, and often abhorrence.” The city was largely unsegregated, mixed marriages were legal, and its reputation for liquor and licentiousness was already firmly fixed. Given the publication of so many books and articles about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, it’s instructive to remember that many of the city’s much-discussed problems - street violence, institutionalized racism, the push-pull between permissiveness and prohibition - existed for generations before the federal levees collapsed and floodwaters inundated the city. A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans
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