Canal Street and the Central Business District Walk | New Orleans' American Sector (4K)

hey y'all it's andrew with free throws by foot new orleans today i'm going to take you for a walk through a neighborhood that a lot of our visitors see but that doesn't get i think the full credit it deserves it's right across the street from the french quarter it's full of hotels a lot of people stay there but then in the morning set foot outside their door head to some other neighborhood and never really get a full impression of the place where they're staying not realizing that it is the first american neighborhood in new orleans one of the oldest neighborhoods of any kind it's the home of a lot of beautiful buildings the world war two museums some great art spaces crazy monuments and a lot of great stories so we're gonna explore that with 4k video so this is a good one for your big screen with three-dimensional audio so it's a good one for your headphones if you've got them and i'm gonna share some stories as we walk give you the experience of being there as best we can so y'all drop us a like and subscribe give us a comment down below let us know what you think check out our videos in other cities via our other channels and if you'd like to tip your guide you can find the means to do that in the description down below thanks very much for watching here we go we begin y'all with a walk over towards canal street the edge of the neighborhood this is a neighborhood mostly like i said people stay in but don't give a whole lot of credit to and like the stuff that touches your eye a lot of the time is really vague really generic but it is full of surprises like a very unusual moorish revival catholic church this is the immaculate conception church and even if it's mostly an area where people stay even the places to stay are pretty uh vintage in their own right sometimes so illegally y'all bad role model [Music] uh on the other side of the street here we've got the very popular roosevelt hotel and the roosevelt is one of these places that has you know modern capacity and vintage style at the same time crazy elaborate lobby this entrance gives you a sense for the style in the interior it's uh especially notable at christmas you see our christmas video we spend a quick minute in there and their bar here really gives use the 1920s vibe so they've got a place so previously this place had what's sometimes called the first nightclub in the country it was a bar called the cave and it was themed so it was designed as a cave and they had employees dressed like mermaids so have some alluring person waving to you in the distance you know very much like a regular bar it was just more obvious that they were employees and not available but uh that place is no longer there sorry to say but what's there is the sazerac bar named for the city's signature cocktail and it's famous for you know similar atmosphere to the lobby of the place upscale vibe across the board and expensive but very good cocktails and they do a very good sazerac i think i'll tell you more about later on and they also were famous at one time still can do a good job with this for their ramos gin fizz this is a drink they bought the recipe for from its inventor and mr ramos who was the very unusual combination of a bartender and a preacher and he invented this drink that was extremely labor intensive but our famous governor huey long who's extremely fond of it we're actually going to be doing a video in baton rouge pretty soon we'll also tune into that for a bit more about you long if he's a favorite of yours and huey long actually brought the head bartender from the roosevelt to new york while he was there as a senator and uh had the guy train the new york bartenders how to make this dream quote unquote right and also uh legend holds that he built free interstate system airline highway just so he could get between baton rouge the state capital and new orleans really fast and be able to get his dream choice expediently we're on canal street now y'all this is the big wide street that divides the french quarter on one side from our neighborhood that we're focusing on today on the other side and i just want to point out this building the boston club this is one of the very few residences standing here a little crooked today as you can see which points out its age and the boston club is the third oldest social club in the country it's been here at this spot since the 1880s the constitution goes back to the 1840s and it's a highly exclusive club for moneyed anglo-saxon men which tells you a lot about the neighborhood that we are spending time with today that is the the force that tended to really make its mark on this place so [Music] i've been dodging mentioning a name for it so far just because i think probably the name is in flux right now so locals will tend to call this neighborhood i'm distinguishing between over here we have the french quarter on this side of the street we have the other one we tend to call it the central business district or the warehouse district which are you know not exciting even if they're true it is a business neighborhood it's where a lot of people offer their conventions or their conferences and it does have warehouses in it but that's far from unique here and it used to have a more distinctive name which was it was called the foeburg st mary and that's when it was brand new this was the second neighborhood more or less on this side of the river in new orleans history and faux board described these little towns that set up outside the city walls so there used to be a wall right here not exactly where canal street is but kind of on a diagonal dividing the french quarter from the nothing but le bionda over here so fauxburg saint mary or svalberg zombie would have been a perfectly good name but it also ended up back then getting referred to as the american sector and i think that's probably the most illustrative name that it's had so i'm gonna try to play a little branding game and call it the american sector today even though that's not a thing you hear out of people's mouths very often and it's not my idea i'm borrowing it and you'll see from where later on also i think a name change is inevitable because i said we call it the central business district technically that's just a part of the neighborhood but we usually abbreviate that to cbd and the connotations around that acronym are changing rapidly so gonna happen one way or another y'all can see the the plushness of these facades so like this is what captain of industry type buildings look like in the early 1800s when this neighborhood developed you know we all know what type of industry buildings look like now but strong contrast lots of different materials these guys were coming down from the northeast so they brought eclectic tastes with them this guy in the middle is cast iron on the outside a lot of stone too which is uh not for one thing something that occurs in louisiana and not a great idea here anyway i'm getting a little ahead of myself basically the american sector was the place where american businessmen came and settled in in the years after the louisiana purchase so giving all this a little bit of context the french quarter behind the wall over here was the whole city from 1718 until 1788 it was surrounded by plantations including the land over here and in 1788 the guy who owned this plantation on this side decided to sell his property off and let it be subdivided into smaller properties first of many and you know pretty much all plantation owners in the what's today the metro area to have done that so at that point this becomes open for business and for residences and it happens first just on behalf of creoles the people who lived over here french spanish and poor west african extracted people and some of them do set up shop over here but mostly it is shop it is warehouses it's the odd personal home but then and you know you get americans coming in too and that's because a little ways up ahead beyond the uh soon to be four seasons hotel the tall one up there at the end you had the port expanding over into the forward summary and it also existed over along the french border and you know the mississippi is a big river so there were a bunch of people from the frontiers of the united states coming down and bringing their goods will come so they tended to set up shop along the waterfront over there and the creoles got a pretty big cut of the traffic that came through here so the us government thought why not change that and thomas jefferson president of the time sent some emissaries to napoleon and said can we buy new orleans and he said yes if you take all of louisiana which was big enough back then that it would have meant doubling the size of the united states and they did they bought the whole thing the u.s doubled in size and up and coming businessmen in the northeast what they heard was ready set go and they rushed down here in droves to be first to get a nip at the pie and you can see what a big deal the federal government made of this place because this was the custom house that they built so they invested this took a tiny little three decades and changed to build and when it was finished in the 1880s it was the second largest federal building in the united states which made it the second largest any building in the united states so that shows you they really thought new orleans was going to be the place to be and it was a lot of money passed through this building pretty unusual little spot because uh those column capitals make this a example of egyptian revival architecture and you can't look at it today without being reminded you know second largest building in the country that was before we had malls and mega hotels which loom over everything at this point but pretty impressive for its day or for any day and uh clad in granite it's brick on the inside thank goodness this thing is super heavy you can see it's in better shape than the boston club so it was well built and it was built in a way that caused it to sink really evenly but it did sink several feet before it stopped and that was like while it was under construction so big heavy stone buildings in the mud maybe that is another nickname candidate for the neighborhood stone building sinking into the mud this also was a hiding place for the governor of louisiana in 1874 as a sort of post-civil war civil war battle unfolded out here this is the era we call reconstruction and there was a a more or less installed government that was from the perspective of the of the ex-confederates who had not had a say in who was installed and as a result of that frustration the white league [Music] basically did a a huge massacre of the local police and installed themselves in charge of the state and this back then was the state capital so this was a uh it was a massacre both of police and of a march of black civil war veterans that was happening at the same time we call that the battle of liberty place and y'all may remember the monuments business that went down a few years ago here and the one of those that was removed least controversially and that had been proposed to be removed several times before one of the four was a monument celebrating the battle of liberty place which is put up pretty shortly after the fact so passing by now sazerac house had a glimpse of this on the way in this is a pretty newly installed location of the sazerac distillery tours are free so why not mention the sazerac bar back before check that out all of those for free i'm sure so the sazerac drink that i mentioned is the signature cocktail of new orleans the official cocktail of new orleans it's originally a cognac based drink and sazerac a company called uh default fee was a french cognac dealer and there was some kind of company called the sazurak house or the sazerath bar in new orleans changing locations pretty steadily going back to the 1850s at least and it was a place that sold that cocktail howdy making new friends y'all so the sazerac company today derives from local dealers in french cognac and uh and they have just recently made their way back to town that place opened just a couple years ago the ruby slipper super super popular place to get breakfast brunch and the pelham hotel that is above it this whole spot was the home for a while of the founder of new orleans as he's usually called this guy bianfeel the one who chose the site for new orleans based on observing and learning the way that it was used by native americans so this was where his house was originally this whole side of the city was his plantation and then it passed into the hands of jesuit priests and then eventually back into the hands of private individuals and one of those guys was the one who decided to partition it to subdivide it in 1788 and usually when that happens and a lot of the time those owners would put their own name on the neighborhood so we have on the river side of the french whether on the lake side of the french quarter a neighborhood called foeborg treme which is named for claude truman who owns the land and then on the down river side of the french quarter we have fauborg marine named for bernard de marini its owner you can see the street name up ahead this is gravier street and that was the name of the owner this was not called faux board gravier for any length of time we say gravier gravier is how you'd say it so pretty quickly after the whole thing got underway uh mr gravier's wife died and she actually was the one who had owned the land she got it from her first husband and then mr graffia got it from her and they married so her name was marie so foburg sun marie named after the saint who she was named after was woodstock but gravier got to be the name of the street and of a park that we'll see a little later on which does not bear that name anymore a lot of different industries got set up in here over time so we're passing by the stone building back there was built for a bank you had lots and lots and lots of cotton and sugar factors in the neighborhood this little street is called picayune place named after the daily picayune an old new orleans newspaper they had their offices right around the corner here on camp street but really the the big money here was in shipping and the kind of middleman businesses of cotton and sugar the big cash crops in louisiana then and largely now rice and coffee were important too coffee coming in from elsewhere rice also being grown in louisiana [Music] but you know everywhere needs a newspaper so they operated out of right over there we got some of today's surviving monsters of design on this block too international house hotel occupying a couple of these the others not having a big company name attached to them but they're pretty again trust me illegally do as i say not as i do well if i was to give you one example of a neighborhood industrialist who really just wraps the whole thing up in a bow it would be somebody who was in a pretty different industry from the ones that i've mentioned so far this guy was named james caldwell we're gonna come around to where his facility was located and he was a theater guy he actually was born in england and then came over to the united states worked on the east coast for a bit got a feeder company going and he was the company's manager so he really was the decider and his whole company of performers was contractually obligated to go wherever he decided they were going to perform and it's really telling in terms of how people thought of new orleans at the time that he didn't tell his company that they were going to be going to new orleans until they were halfway here so definitely a place of opportunity but a place of let's call it terror as well but he came here and he established one of the first really major forces for theater in new orleans and this is y'all one of my favorite new orleans stories i don't get to tell it on in-person tours pretty much ever because there's just not a lot of demand for exploring this neighborhood with a guide so this is a happy day for me so james caldwell first sets up shop with his company in a theater in the french quarter called the orleans theatre and it's where uh the bourbon orleans hotel is today and he shared that building with the first opera company in the united states and he besides being the company's manager was also its lead actor so by day he managed the company and then by night he played like hamlet and everybody else six nights a week and they tended to rotate shows every few days so the memorization pace just the pace of work in general was pretty mind-blowing and hard to imagine today but kept up that pace somehow still had time for a hobby which was gas lighting quick pause this is the old corporate headquarters of united fruit this would be if i picked one other industrialist to tell you about from a little later this would be the guy as it is tell you his story on a walk along saint charles avenue sometime only go by his house so james caldwell was a big fan of gaslighting technology and after working in the theater here for a little bit he established the first vast lit theater in the country in this neighborhood and this is 1822 1823 got luked over here it's about for an oyster happy hour so we're talking like this is when this neighborhood was somewhere you were likelier to go to hunt than to work and certainly than to get entertained in any kind of high-end classy way so this was the first major building like not a warehouse not a home in the neighborhood and it was also the first gas-lit theater in the country before a couple years before anyone in new york pulled that off and to get to it from the french quarter where almost everybody lived you had to walk along planks laid across the mud it was not a glamorous arrival but people did it and they did it in droves and it was kind of a cross-section of everybody it was local society it was free people of color enslaved people got passes to go to the theater sometimes it was the the boatmen the americans and they came in enough numbers that he had the money to gaslight the street on the way to the theater so get out of here yeah you were walking along planks but the planks had street lights and after doing this for a little while for some years in the 1830s he had a problem which was that a sixth of the population of new orleans had died from cholera not a lot of tickets being sold so he got out of the business retired from theater and he ended up going full time into his gaslighting hobby and during that time he basically founded the first municipal gas lighting system in the country for new orleans and at the end of that time it turned out that he had in fact gaslit the entire city because he hadn't really retired from theater don't do a gaslighting trip was coming in there somewhere ah he went back into theater a year later and he built the saint charles theater which was right here and it was the biggest theater in new orleans or in the country it seated 4 100 people which is more than any theater in new orleans seats today and you got a picture at this spot this massive like greek temple and once you went inside there were like a main show and then five other acts happening all in the same evening and this massive two-ton chandelier hanging over the middle of the space and to just make a point about the scale of that the population of new orleans back then was like 100 000 people rapidly growing but like way way smaller than it is today so to see as many as 4 100 people a night with a population that size albeit swelled by pastors through that is still you know we still have travelers that's a big part of the city today you'd have to be doing local theater for an audience of like 50 000 which you'd have to do in say the superdome which is a little ways down there so you can imagine this place never sold out never made much money but it really impressed a lot of people which was basically the formula and then uh one day there was a construction yard right next door they were accounts from the time suggest busily and poetically building coffins and a fire lit over there spread into the theater right before a show happened somehow nobody died but the fire became the show and james caldwell had a front row seat he stood right outside watching as his two-ton chandelier came crashing to the ground and witnesses from the time say as he watched he said what magnificence what splendor self-aware for a minute but uh never quite got over it became a pretty awful guy to work with got driven out of the business and uh became a politician and died wealthy this is formerly one shell square now the hancock whitney building i'd go all the way up but you get the idea um tallest building in the state when it was built back in 70s when most of the skyscrapers went up and you know same story over here they built two other st charles theaters on the site of the old one each one smaller than the last and uh one of the performers who played at the second saint charles theater john wilkes booth famously an actor famously assassinated president abraham lincoln and famously did so in a theater all that happened naturally before so speaking of presidential assassins with three names well come back to that we're on poydras right now this is the kind of heart of the business corridor we've got the superdome down there various office towers the namesake here is a big philanthropist julian poitras who was one of the people who encouraged beltran gravier to subdivide his plantation and bought the very first lot right back there where the theater used to be and uh got the street name for him as a result if you watched our magazine street video you know that uh that neighborhood markets are a big part of the development of the city and there was one here as well sort of a french market style space a little ways back behind me lots of heart along the strip today in this case uh someone disapproves of art being explained alarm going on inside y'all [Music] say me stopping and helping would probably be too many spoons in the pot big fan y'all of these old painted ads this one for zadaran's one of the classic local seasoning brands buy diy jambalaya out of a box from them okay i said presidential assassins with three names and maybe you figured out who i met the harvey oswald used to be a big part of the new orleans story this building over here lock that in your head this is the hail boggs federal building so earlier when we were walking along canal street passed by a spot canal in st charles where lee harvey oswald was arrested he was from new orleans didn't spend a lot of time here but a little bit as an adult shortly before the kennedy assassination and he was in front of a store over there handing out pro-castro literature and the owner of the store was cuban and wasn't a fan of castro came outside and they got into a scuffle and everybody involved was arrested for disturbing the peace but if you had taken one of his leaflets the address you would have been referred to if you were interested in the pro castro cause was a building that stood right here a different one but same spot and he didn't actually have office space there he was referring to a place where he didn't have any actual space to receive anything or anybody but a possible coincidence possible connection popped up later which was that after the kennedy assassination the the local d.a jim garrison ended up accusing a private investigator who worked in that building and some of his associates of being co-conspirators in the assassination and the fact that all parties involved were located in that building where lee harvey oswald claimed to have office space well major coincidence if it's a coincidence and certainly fodder for the idea that the lone assassin explanation was insufficient so for the folks who are followers of that story that piece of geography back there i'll be it again different building today is a bit of a pilgrimage site working our way along toy dress past this little stand out not a lot of buildings like this on poydras anymore it's been too high at demand for the older buildings to survive but this one is mothers which is a very popular famously famous po boy destination the line tends to be very long so that and the american sector location of ruby slipper both i can say you know weigh your options okay great view right now of the soon to be four seasons and great view momentarily of one of my favorite things in the neighborhood okay so got a picture that right here at the spot there's a row of similar buildings to what we've seen stuff like on the next block blocking our view there's not a parking lot here so we're just gonna look this way and pretend we're on an ordinary street well this neighborhood was doing pretty badly in the 70s we've had the same kind of problems that a lot of historic downtowns did which was post world war ii white flight a lot of industries moving out to the suburbs and consequently empty buildings low occupancy relatively high crime in neighborhoods like this and so little revitalization measures were a popular thing to do and one of them here was the idea that we should take a little spot to honor our italian heritage and it was designed to be like i don't know if you've been to rome but when you walk around rome you just pop into a piazza out of nowhere it comes up as a surprise well the notion here was right as you got to the end of this block past all buildings voila that would hit you out of nowhere so this is the piazza d'italia it is our foremost and i i want to say only real monument to the very large italian presence in the city and even though they weren't really rome italian the way this kind of implies it doesn't really imply any one place because it is so very of its time so this is again late 1970s creation it borrows from uh the classical styles as many things here do it borrows them and then the classical styles do not want them back afterwards let's see how good of you we can get used to be open all the time nowadays locked more often than not but you really got to see it at night to get the full effect you can see the chrome around the column capitals and maybe you can make out there are bands of neon so it lights up neon intentionally very very 70s and the whole fountain in the middle you can get a bit of a view of that is in the shape of italy and there are jets of water they're supposed to come from the columns as well to imply the sort of uh graceful curves of classic monument capitals but in motion so if you ever were to find it open it would be from right over here so this monument it made a splash as it were when it was first built people called it the ugliest monument in new orleans and it was pretty quickly so the whole notion besides honoring the italian presence was to stimulate some more activity here and it needed that because of this whole kind of depression that the neighborhood was in but following this is so this thing gets done in 1978 and then in the 1980s we have a huge oil bust for the last century or so new orleanses and all of louisiana's well-being has been very much tied to the up and down cycle of the price of gas and oil so it's really hard to get anybody to build anything down here the notion was that this monument people would just want to be next to this monument all the time and it would spur a lot of building in the area didn't happen so the place gets abandoned pretty fast and one thing people like to call it is the world's first post-modern ruin which is a really fun phrase to say i i wonder if there's a an abandoned theme park somewhere that might fit the bill even better but either way fell into disrepair it is not in such disrepair today you're not looking at it and in post-modern ruin form it got restored in the 2000s spruced up a little bit more in just the last couple years but still is not full-time really doing anything we will see what the future has in store for the piazza d'italia anyway as we come through here we're on little old lafayette street this is one that favors pedestrians over cars barely room for a car in here you can imagine given this was a neighborhood built in 1788 hey how much it had to be modified to fit cars you can see right here at constance in lafayette they did a nice job excellent choices all around so this is kind of the scale of streets if you go far enough back in time i can see merrell right there at the end that's one of emeril lagasse's three restaurants so you can imagine how much things had to be changed for cars to fit many many many streets were widened and a lot of buildings were torn down to make that possible ha passing by one of the neighborhood escape rooms escape my room and it's you know do we be looking no i'm talking about me not about their design they look great i'm in the way got my backpack on the front and everything how embarrassing anyway the other thing you can maybe imagine is what a terrible idea it is to try and park in this neighborhood if you don't have to so highly recommended avoid that if you can it's not uh it's not super super pedestrian by habit but by design it's not bad and given this is right next to the french border and given that it is where i'd say the majority of our visitors stay it was way easier to slot hotels into this neighborhood than into the french quarter itself like the stuff is all right outside your door might as well all right we are by another monument of the federal government this is today called the john miner wisdom building it's been a few things it was built believe it or not as a post office early 20th century i think i remember my dates right briefly served as a public school in there because of damage through other schools after hurricane betsy and then became the home of the fifth circuit court of appeals and it is named after one of its members john minor wisdom honest to god name of this guy lived in the garden district became a judge of course because what else do you do with a name like that and he uh was on the court at the time when local or regional cases the fifth circuit was a little bigger than it was bigger back then than it is today uh he was on the court when it had to decide cases related to brown v board of education so precedent from that came down beginning in 1954 and he was part of implementing school desegregation in this part of the country other civil rights decisions too so i'm going to get y'all just such a view over here so other thing the neighborhood is known for is contemporary art have big sculptures like this all over the place and i just think this is about the most representative view you can get contemporary art in the foreground a little bit overwhelming the scene right now but there's benjamin franklin across the street super super american can make out some greek revival facade across the way and the looming capital one office tower and entergy office tower in the background it's all of the things that comprise this neighborhood in one place so we have reached this neighborhood's equivalent of jackson square here we are at what once would have been called gravier square place caviar but now it's called lafayette square because the revolutionary war hero the marquis de lafayette paid the u.s to visit in the 1820s toured the country and got things named after him everywhere he went this is not him this is benjamin franklin who you will often see with mardi gras beats only way you'd know that you're in new orleans and not up in the northeast somewhere [Music] so uh marquis de lafayette was a bigger deal than beltran graffia ever was and so naming something after him in place of mr gravier was a pretty easy call this one who we're sneaking up on is henry clay of three-fifths compromise fame he gets the central spot yes excellent form on that wheel i think i'm not the best judge and uh the brick building on the left y'all that one used to be a business college called soulay college and it relocated to a building you may know if anyone saw american horror story coven the mansion that makes up the school in that show actually was a school so this school moved from here up to there and i want to say 1920 something so a little bit of a horror television connection all right this gallier hall so i've kind of alluded to the rivalry between americans and the creole population and it scaled up enough i mean americans were coming in and kind of building redundant versions of everything and grabbing on to whatever power they could that they really viewed the creels viewed them as obnoxious upstarts and major threats to their way of life and americans in turn viewed creoles as stubborn backwards you know backwater ignoramuses and so they did what they could to centralize power up here and that included splitting the city into three different cities for a while so as much as canal street is a dividing line kind of socially and functionally today it actually was a political boundary at one time between what was called the first municipality the french quarter the second municipality which was all of this and the third municipality which was the marine that was 1836 by 1852 they merged back together during that time in the 1840s the first municipality decided to build its own city hall and this was it and james gallier senior who it's named for is one of the big deal architects in new orleans and thereabouts this didn't get done until after the municipalities merged together again in 1853 but by that time power had consolidated up here enough that this became the city hall and it was up through the 1950s when you got moving out to you can't actually see it from here but off in the distance those buildings that you see over there they're pretty close to the new one which is just so much more of a mid 20th century building than a mid-19th century building so not a uh not a highlight destination of its own this is still the ceremonial city hall so various events go on here and when mardi gras parades roll along st charles which they do going from this direction to this direction not only are stands set up where viewers it's pretty much the only spot where you pay to view the parade well there's balconies along the way where you play but the main place and the mayor watches from right over here and parade floats will pause to propose a toast so kind of a key spot and often one where the cameras on parades are set up over here one more monument or partial lack thereof so mentioned the whole monument situation here over the last few years and i'm going to be talking about that a little more so if this is a subject that grinds your gears feel free to fast forward a couple minutes this one was of a fellow named john mcdonough and while there were four that were removed by the city by decision of the city council and the pretty popular support in town this one was removed during protests in 2020 by just people with a rope and the monument wasn't destroyed it was knocked down it was nearby and the city recovered it and has not placed it back yet i don't know what the plans are this happened to a few monuments around during that time and you know during the city-sponsored changes that have happened it's always centered around the civil war mention the battle of liberty place as one of the contexts for that uh there and then there were three other civil war leaders who were removed following that too you got a pretty large wave of street name changes from civil war leadership to various other people oftentimes civil rights leaders but various categories but that guy is one example of where there are some pretty polarizing figures here who are not civil war related in and of themselves so this guy john mcdonough lived out his whole life before the civil war died in i think 1850 but he was a huge property holder holder and slaveholder here from baltimore originally so par for the course came down from the northeast well northeast of us anyway and uh when he got here he at first was a a he was in trade worked through all kinds of stuff but eventually became a real estate guy and the way he in part created his real estate empire see some stuff that was built during wpa year right here some very art deco the glamour of work kind of reliefs so he had a strategy which was he would buy a piece of property somewhere rent it to become a brothel and then of course the sensitives hit the sensitivities of the time being what they were a lot of people nearby would move out and of course their buildings would then go on the market and the brothel being present would depress their value and so he'd just buy up all of these buildings in the same area and he'd kick out the brothel and start renting out to the sort of high rent uh respectable crowd who the quality of the buildings and the location absent the brothel originally appealed to so he became kind of a massive city-wide slumlord in this way and for people who look at him in a sort of leaderly way there's two big things that give him credit one of them is that in his will he left a lot of money for public schools and that included schools that were integrated up to a certain point and this is again pre-civil war so you're talking about free children of color who are fairly small in number but were a presence here and then you get from him also this strategy of carefully wrapped monuments we want to surprise y'all were present when you get here what could it be the shape will tell um he had a thing where he would uh he'd acquire an enslaved person and then give them sort of a 15-year process at the end of which they would get emancipated and in the course of which time there was some literacy and some job skills that were obtained and this was unusual for sure and he emancipated other people in his ownership during the time when he died as well in his will so in addition to that hunting for schools there was also that but then also you know he was a massive slave owner to begin with he was a slumlord and so many other people make the point that he was not any kind of role model for for monumenting and earlier i mentioned a uh i mentioned the brownsville board of education decision in 1954. so that year one of the very first civil rights protests in new orleans took place around that monument there used to be a tradition of school children coming out for john mcdonough day and leaving flowers all over the place and the white children all went first and the black children stood out there and waited until they were all done before they got to thank the guy and in 1954 there was a boycott among the black schools of that event and it really happened before you would have seen much else like it so important spot one way or another whatever one thinks of the monument question whatever your philosophy may be it is today a spot many people are thinking about and it has been for a long time nothing new there this is saint patrick's church it is the home of the second catholic parish in louisiana or in new orleans rather so i gave it away y'all we're doing this on sunday um mass is still held here all the time and this was the name gives it away the irish catholic church irish people were a huge presence here and they kind of represent the uh what i want to call it the crossover crowd so on the one hand they were english speakers but on the other hand they were catholic by and large not all of them um you certainly had protestants among them but they were religiously like the creoles but they were linguistically like the uh like the new arrivals so i presented a little bit of a um of a third option that was built also by an irish architect we've mentioned him already james gallier senior he built gallier hall as well and lots and lots of other things here and he was an irish protestant hired to complete a catholic church this is one of my favorite blocks just for bowling so when i said earlier kind of a northeastern creole hybrid there's some good examples of that here so the bright colors not just regional but very regional cast iron balconies and galleries this is the thing that happened in the french quarter and the fashion really transcended and we talked about the the challenge with materials so a lot of these are brick as you can see but this one slightly taller one in tan looks like it's made out of stone there's big block shapes all over it that's plaster with stone stone-like grooves scratched into it because brick was a much more available much cheaper and much over time wiser material here anyway camp street the street we're on right now is really the one i do for the walk if you're like first and foremost a building watcher speaking of interesting buildings check her out so we've got a standout spot which it's just an event venue so you wouldn't really get it just passing by that's a good explanation for why the lighthouse that this was built for an organization called lighthouse for the blind an organization all about services for blind folks and so it made a lot of sense when it was built no it's just eye-catching so if you're hosting i don't know a reception there it's really easy to say look for the building with the lighthouse on it another really great street for buildings is this one up here julia street the cross street it's also an art gallery strip so you get these huge art walks that take place here periodically modest ones on weekends throughout the year but the the big one the summer is white linen night where for the most part everybody wears white linen because it's sweltering here in summer and it breathes really well so huge crowds of people clad in white all up and down this strip hop knobbing the kind of architectural stand out here is this strip right here these are called the 13 sisters row houses 13 of them and see the very northeastern style brick facade this goes back before these places were super super greek revival that comes in a little bit later and then there's this part which we can see in the back and you can really more easily catch the identicalness of these from this back angle because these parts are more discreet for one another so you can see them in the long row there we go so we see buildings like this in the french quarter all the time and over here these are outbuildings which served as a mixture of slave quarters servant quarters kitchens and possibly carriage houses and or stables not always in great shape i don't know if you can make out a few doors down there's one that looks pretty ruinous and there's one that's outright missing so they are maybe the least likely part of the building to be preserved but they were universal and they are a little nod to the fact that courtyards are a feature of all of these slave holding was a kind of up or down question among these folks because so many of them were coming from the northeast they had domestic habits that preferred servants but they were parts industries that were very much in the slave world and some of them were slave traders themselves so not a uniform answer across the board but it was if the church holds their space yeah the structure was the same usually regardless of whether domestic servants or enslaved domestics was your taste i haven't pointed out a lot of restaurants to y'all but julia street's a great opportunity for that caramel over here is an interesting one the concept here is like equatorial cuisine obviously that spans a lot of different places and cultures but it kind of works and it especially kind of works here because definitely west african cuisine is a big influence here caribbean and latin american cuisine so you get stuff that feels very neighborly and very constituent of new orleans food not traditional but in forms traditional and it's also one of the most vegetarian vegan friendly places albeit other options too another place you all might be aware of uptown is the columns hotel this is a hotel but it's also a like most people think of it as a bar it's a restaurant bar but it's located on central avenue one of the big impressive houses that you can patronize as a business and the guy who lived there this was his cigar factory yet another of the industries that we'd have seen having some presence in the neighborhood yeah when we talk about manufacturing spaces and warehouses we think size we're really getting over into the neighbor part of the neighborhood that speaks more to that i have new orleans glassworks and printmaking studio down the way the cool art establishments in the neighborhood auction house market we've very much gotten on the bandwagon with food halls in the last few years this is one of those and another restaurant pesh as you can guess they're making very clear in the branding seafood pretty modern seafood menu meaning creative not super of any one tradition but a lot of it sourced close to home [Music] so one place i can definitely recommend especially if you're getting weary of fried stuff another kind of cool thing about this intersection back here so this is the intersection of julia and magazine and that was where one of the was where really the first modern new orleans mardi gras parade happened really the first martyr operated all modern does not belong in there so we had a mardi gras tradition for a long time that was all about just kind of uh pleasant panic in the streets just have a lot of fun wear a costume and go crazy and to civilize things a little bit the notion was this group of anglo-americans the pickwick club we're in our art strip now y'all pickwick club which was similar to the boston club high society social group very selective very exclusive ended up creating the uh the mystic crew of comas and it was a mardi gras organization coined the word crew that we use k-r-e-w-e for mardi gras organizations today and also established the pattern of naming them after figures from mythology or literature so comas being a uh minor roman mythic figure so their idea was to organize things into parade following this tradition out of mobile alabama and we can get more into that we'll do another mardi gras video sometime we had a lot of fun with that last year but the first parade started right back at that intersection and led the way to a theater not the saint charles but another of the many that was here at one time and they held a mardi gras ball which that was already highly traditional at the time among creels but it was a co-opted tradition that now is a critical culmination usually to the parade tradition another warehouse here and former home as of pretty recently of the new orleans children's museum which i know like activities to do with kids can seem like a hard thing to come by it's actually they're pretty plentiful in new orleans uh the audubon properties the zoo the aquarium and until pretty recently the insectarium was located in the u.s custom house that we passed back there it's not there anymore but it's moving into the aquarium so that's another thing you could hit up and the children's museum has relocated out to city park so that is worth a view i don't know if i can see the street name across the way choppatoulous that's how to say that it's uh it's kind of a french confusion of choctaw language so possibly meaningless possibly meaningful this first thing located along it with the letter e is emeralds the original emeralds restaurant so we've seen the two in the neighborhood at this point the third one being uptown on st charles not too far away and we saw that in our walk of lower st charles so check that video out if you want to collect all three so chapatulis um people have trouble saying it especially from looking at the word my advice is don't look at the word just think of the phrase chop a tulip like very forcefully cut a tulip and uh and just change the p at the end to an s chop a tubeless or you can just call it chop which is what an awful lot of people here do there's a an old story one of my favorite little uh little new orleans legends that there was a morning long ago when all stories like this happened and a cop was doing rounds in this neighborhood and this cop at the corner of chapatulis and common streets way behind me right next to uh right next to the canal street found a dead horse in the street and it was this guy's job to document the problem just document it not his problem to solve and so he got out his little report book to write up an incident report and he wrote dead horse found at the corner of chat tried again dead horse found at the corner of put his book away reached down grabbed a leg dragged the horse for a block got out his book again and wrote dead horse found at the corner of magazine and comment because that was the easy thing to do but don't across the street we got the dixie mill supply company still going there were a lot of uh milling companies in town meaning people who provided fixtures uh iron steel fixtures for all kinds of different businesses [Music] one such it's right up here and it's another one of the standout unusual buildings in the neighborhood in terms of the match-up of style and function this is a gothic revival office building office building is what it is today anyway this is the home of the preservation research center if you ever wonder how new orleans has so many historic buildings that are in let's see decent shape set a reasonable bar the prc is a big part of the reason why we also have across the way cochon this is an excellent cajun southern restaurant right there in the middle tallish town one and right around the corner they have their their deli called cashon butcher solid food option if you're visiting the world war ii museum although a decent number of others too so this was a mill works it's not anymore and it actually was serving that purpose back during the time of the 1874 battle of liberty place that we mentioned earlier so the battle of liberty place was largely a fight between confederate and united states veterans of the civil war and in the case of the white league the people who ended up committing major share of the violence there those were largely confederate veterans and among their supporters was the guy who ran that millworks back there so one of the things he took upon himself to do was to provide weaponry to the white league guns a cannon at one point and it was investigation of just such a shipment of weapons that was being sent to them that in part led to those deadly events in 1874 aspirational let's call that so they underestimate alyssa you can touch alyssum and it will do just fine vibe wise i kind of like this side of the neighborhood the park closer to the river and the park further from the french quarter tend to be a little more stark i'll call it stuff that either has remained disused or has never been super super cleaned up by and large we haven't passed by these things but the newer developments in the neighborhood tend to be big condo towers with built-in gyms and restaurants and shopping and stuff food halls we saw one of those and sometimes converted warehouse buildings serving a pretty similar housing purpose so that kind of stuff is kind of all over and because of that you do get kind of a modern sleekness in among a lot of the more antique fixtures whereas here and there and mostly here you can see what the neighborhood was like at its low point and how much it has changed in pretty recent times i also got here super innocuous little urgent care but this is probably the oldest building in the neighborhood a little 18 20-ish uh creole cottage type of building that would have been common here at one time but are mostly all gone at this point i don't mean to say by mentioning the less spruced up things over here that this is not an area that has a lot going on this is definitely a part of the neighborhood worth coming to and at least parts of it are maybe the main thing that people visit the neighborhood for coming up on various museums and art spaces there's some of that good old binge so crew of red beans people behind hire a mardi gras arias this was the organization that did some group fundraising to get mardi gras professionals hired to make stuff to put on houses and they did an auction so this is just recently done i think they actually extended it i walked by the other day not knowing that this was happening here and saw this garage door open and a couple of people sit at a table and just mardi gras paraphernalia behind them galore they look bored out of their minds but i think sitting and selling anything no matter how cool it is gonna leave you feeling that way cobblestone street lining up with the vibe of the place as a whole god god made me funky here micro perfumery moving into the neighborhood who knows how much longer this will still be benchy coming up on the side of the contemporary art center there we go those old painted ads across a window some open windows probably no central air in that building this is the contemporary arts center lots of different styles of performance and visual art here and voila something that does have a fresh coat of paint on it that across the street is the ogden museum of southern art this is where you would enter the contemporary arts center so while these guys have lots of different things going on depending on time of year again pretty contemporary this side the ogden specializes in artists from the region and that can mean a lot of different things but what it often means is a solid dose at least of self-taught slash outsider slash folk art people hear it call it a lot of different things but they have a solid portion of that in their collection so that's where you'd go in if you walk by a lamppost out here you often see them covered in little stickers with an o on them which is what people do with their admission stickers afterwards this is the civil war museum this one the oldest museum in louisiana goes way back and i'd say the approach here is pretty anodyne they mostly show like uniforms and it's just kind of artifacts here's what this was there's not a lot of the higher level storytelling necessarily which with the civil war in particular anytime you get very deep it bothers somebody so i don't know if that's a reason why it takes the approach it does but it could well be and the building so the part over towards the right where you enter is newer but this side is the original part and this is in a style we call richardsonian romanesque you can get the vibe that it is borrowing from european castles and it's basically like a revival of pre-gothic european ways of building so you see these buildings on usually university campuses a lot of times they're civic buildings too big rough-hewn stone that they're made out of that is probably derived from henry hobson richardson a guy who was a pretty big deal architect in the 19th century from new orleans though he didn't actually work here in keeping with the civil war theme we also have over here the pedestal where robert e lee once stood so the statue of robert e lee here was pretty par for the course for confederate monuments a lot of the organizing around them came to be around the time of the death of the figure in question so often reconstruction and later not immediately after the civil war that was that began to be organized right after robert e lee's death and took about a decade and a half to put together so it's an 1880s landmark came down just a few years ago full story to that but another war focusing ourselves on is that of the national world war ii museum over here so this eats up a couple of blocks right here and it began with just this portion over here before it was ever called the national world war ii museum this was the d-day museum and if y'all saw our walk of st charles avenue then we'll know the reasons why this was an appropriate place to put such a thing because we were the city where the higgins boats that were used in the normandy invasion on d-day were built and designed and so putting that on display here made a lot of sense there also was a professor from uno the university of new orleans who was real dedicated to the subject and to getting the museum started and it nearly got put out by the uno campus which is a good ways away from this part of town but in the end for convenience to our visitors it ended up being situated right here close to where everybody stays so it's been expanded a lot monuments galore out here you still have that original exhibit opened back in 2000 but then others that were added gradually i think in their building plan of the last few years this is the last thing that they've described is going to go up anytime real soon so compared with that approach the kind of here's an artifact here's what it was at the civil war museum over here it's a much more kind of active storytelling museum where for one thing i think it's worth knowing for anybody coming here from europe or who's super familiar with the war already that this is definitely a museum of the united states role in world war ii uh and in that respect you know there is room to expand for sure and it's a pretty rah-rah approach to that subject but in that way it is in keeping with the understanding of the war from the time and it also is a pretty immersive museum and you can you can sort of choose a character and follow them around they've provided a lot of other sort of experiences they have a little mulch shop atmosphere over here they have their theater over here the solomon victory theater which you can go see the victory bells and sort of jazzy trio performance various other shows they do about pop culture from the era and moments of related history all of this is their turf so it's a really easy place to keep busy and it's still likely i don't know what their plans are for physical expansion but they are still to this day bringing in world war ii veterans to do oral histories and in that way it's you know i think a lot of the excitement about this subject both in terms of visitors and in terms of you know funding i don't know if as many people would come if this was like a national world war one museum it just has less connection with uh living people and their descendants and our kind of understanding of in the us of how we got where we are so huge destination coming here puts you near all the other things that we have seen and i mentioned one restaurant that you could hit up but a little bit down the way here is the world war zoo museum's own restaurant and it was from them that i borrowed a certain little idea that we have ripped on today c is called the american sector they didn't make up the name but them borrowing into the present was a piece of their mini-pronged excellent marketing wars have been a really big force in americanizing this place from like the war of 1812 which was the first time that creoles and americans really collaborated to the civil war which of course you know put the new orleans in the context of the south at large to world war one to world war two all of these wars brought in a lot of people moving to the city war is big business of course and so there are there's the need for people to work in various capacities and so you do get these waves of often rural people from nearby who don't necessarily share the city's distinctive identity so every one of those wars has made us a little bit more generally american but i think the world war ii played a reverse role at the same time so world war ii brought a lot of actual members of the military here which the other those other wars did in their own way but on unless of a scale anyway world war ii brings a lot of people from other parts of the country to new orleans for the first time do young men they hang out on bourbon street a very different bourbon street they hear jazz for the first time they form this nostalgia about a place that feels away from it all and and peaceful and especially in retrospect after what you went through with the war it might have become kind of a a sense of a way of going back in time and i feel like that's how still quite a lot of people think about new orleans indirectly it certainly has a lot to do with our brand today but it also was why those particular people those world war two veterans came here for ages afterwards and they made this their vacation destination of choice and that certainly uh brought us in this touristic direction that we've gone in ever since so world war ii massive impact on new orleans and forever froze us as what people might positively think of as an exception to the rules of the rest of america so we're on magazine street right now and if you were to continue this walk coming from the world war ii museum or on the way to it magazine continues right over there and we did a video of walk down magazine street and you can see how the american development of the city kind of continues in that direction over time of mid 19th to gradually early 20th century development as you go further and further and that's very much a shopping and dining corridor these days on the other side of this bridge so there's that st charles avenue tells a really similar story through more of a residential lens if you'd like to see the homes of the people who owned these businesses down here then oftentimes those are on st charles avenue so you can check out our walks along that street and uh the garden district is also a big piece of that story so french quarter of course is near all of this so pairing those things together is a perfectly natural way to explore so lots of ideas for what to do next i hope something of that that is inspiring to you and i appreciate you staying through all the way to this point and if y'all have any thoughts please share them down below and like and subscribe so we can be back in touch next time we create something new and if y'all would like to tip your guide that's how the company works we are a pay what you will company tours are free to take in the city is where we operate live apart from maybe a little reservation fee to keep things afloat and then everything else is pay what you will so if y'all like that notion it is even something you can participate in online and you will find the information of how to do that down below and enormous thanks to those of you who have done so that are lifesavers so for today signing off see you again soon

Channel: Free Tours by Foot

Views: 40,936

Rating: 4.8940396 out of 5

Keywords: canal street new orleans, central business district new orleans, warehouse district new orleans, new orleans walk, new orleans walking tour, new orleans walk 4k, central business district, free tours by foot, virtual tour, virtual video, city walk, new orleans

Id: oAUatksOXgA

Length: 82min 15sec (4935 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021