CHAPTER 41

The Metropolis of the South

THE approaches to New Orleans were familiar; general aspects were

unchanged. When one goes flying through London along a railway propped

in the air on tall arches, he may inspect miles of upper bedrooms

through the open windows, but the lower half of the houses is under

his level and out of sight. Similarly, in high-river stage, in the New

Orleans region, the water is up to the top of the enclosing levee-rim,

the flat country behind it lies low--representing the bottom of a

dish--and as the boat swims along, high on the flood, one looks down

upon the houses and into the upper windows. There is nothing but that

frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction.

The old brick salt-warehouses clustered at the upper end of the city

looked as they had always looked; warehouses which had had a kind of

Aladdin's lamp experience, however, since I had seen them; for when the

war broke out the proprietor went to bed one night leaving them packed

with thousands of sacks of vulgar salt, worth a couple of dollars a

sack, and got up in the morning and found his mountain of salt turned

into a mountain of gold, so to speak, so suddenly and to so dizzy a

height had the war news sent up the price of the article.

The vast reach of plank wharves remained unchanged, and there were as

many ships as ever: but the long array of steamboats had vanished; not

altogether, of course, but not much of it was left.

The city itself had not changed--to the eye. It had greatly increased

in spread and population, but the look of the town was not altered. The

dust, waste-paper-littered, was still deep in the streets; the deep,

trough-like gutters alongside the curbstones were still half full of

reposeful water with a dusty surface; the sidewalks were still--in the

sugar and bacon region--encumbered by casks and barrels and hogsheads;

the great blocks of austerely plain commercial houses were as

dusty-looking as ever.

Canal Street was finer, and more attractive and stirring than formerly,

with its drifting crowds of people, its several processions of hurrying

street-cars, and--toward evening--its broad second-story verandas

crowded with gentlemen and ladies clothed according to the latest mode.

Not that there is any 'architecture' in Canal Street: to speak in broad,

general terms, there is no architecture in New Orleans, except in the

cemeteries. It seems a strange thing to say of a wealthy, far-seeing,

and energetic city of a quarter of a million inhabitants, but it is

true. There is a huge granite U.S. Custom-house--costly enough, genuine

enough, but as a decoration it is inferior to a gasometer. It looks like

a state prison. But it was built before the war. Architecture in America

may be said to have been born since the war. New Orleans, I believe,

has had the good luck--and in a sense the bad luck--to have had no great

fire in late years. It must be so. If the opposite had been the case,

I think one would be able to tell the 'burnt district' by the radical

improvement in its architecture over the old forms. One can do this

in Boston and Chicago. The 'burnt district' of Boston was commonplace

before the fire; but now there is no commercial district in any city

in the world that can surpass it--or perhaps even rival it--in beauty,

elegance, and tastefulness.

However, New Orleans has begun--just this moment, as one may say. When

completed, the new Cotton Exchange will be a stately and beautiful

building; massive, substantial, full of architectural graces; no shams

or false pretenses or uglinesses about it anywhere. To the city, it will

be worth many times its cost, for it will breed its species. What has

been lacking hitherto, was a model to build toward; something to educate

eye and taste; a _suggester_, so to speak.

The city is well outfitted with progressive men--thinking, sagacious,

long-headed men. The contrast between the spirit of the city and the

city's architecture is like the contrast between waking and sleep.

Apparently there is a 'boom' in everything but that one dead feature.

The water in the gutters used to be stagnant and slimy, and a potent

disease-breeder; but the gutters are flushed now, two or three times

a day, by powerful machinery; in many of the gutters the water never

stands still, but has a steady current. Other sanitary improvements have

been made; and with such effect that New Orleans claims to be (during

the long intervals between the occasional yellow-fever assaults) one

of the healthiest cities in the Union. There's plenty of ice now for

everybody, manufactured in the town. It is a driving place commercially,

and has a great river, ocean, and railway business. At the date of our

visit, it was the best lighted city in the Union, electrically speaking.

The New Orleans electric lights were more numerous than those of New

York, and very much better. One had this modified noonday not only in

Canal and some neighboring chief streets, but all along a stretch

of five miles of river frontage. There are good clubs in the city

now--several of them but recently organized--and inviting modern-style

pleasure resorts at West End and Spanish Fort. The telephone is

everywhere. One of the most notable advances is in journalism. The

newspapers, as I remember them, were not a striking feature. Now they

are. Money is spent upon them with a free hand. They get the news,

let it cost what it may. The editorial work is not hack-grinding, but

literature. As an example of New Orleans journalistic achievement, it

may be mentioned that the 'Times-Democrat' of August 26, 1882, contained

a report of the year's business of the towns of the Mississippi Valley,

from New Orleans all the way to St. Paul--two thousand miles. That issue

of the paper consisted of forty pages; seven columns to the page; two

hundred and eighty columns in all; fifteen hundred words to the column;

an aggregate of four hundred and twenty thousand words. That is to say,

not much short of three times as many words as there are in this book.

One may with sorrow contrast this with the architecture of New Orleans.

I have been speaking of public architecture only. The domestic article

in New Orleans is reproachless, notwithstanding it remains as it always

was. All the dwellings are of wood--in the American part of the town, I

mean--and all have a comfortable look. Those in the wealthy quarter are

spacious; painted snow-white usually, and generally have wide verandas,

or double-verandas, supported by ornamental columns. These mansions

stand in the center of large grounds, and rise, garlanded with roses,

out of the midst of swelling masses of shining green foliage and

many-colored blossoms. No houses could well be in better harmony with

their surroundings, or more pleasing to the eye, or more home-like and

comfortable-looking.

One even becomes reconciled to the cistern presently; this is a mighty

cask, painted green, and sometimes a couple of stories high, which

is propped against the house-corner on stilts. There is a

mansion-and-brewery suggestion about the combination which seems very

incongruous at first. But the people cannot have wells, and so they

take rain-water. Neither can they conveniently have cellars, or

graves,{footnote [The Israelites are buried in graves--by permission, I

take it, not requirement; but none else, except the destitute, who are

buried at public expense. The graves are but three or four feet deep.]}

the town being built upon 'made' ground; so they do without both, and

few of the living complain, and none of the others.