The high class brothels employed pianists to entertain punters while they were introduced to the girls. Most famous among them was Jelly Roll Morten…composer, self-proclaimed ‘inventor of jazz’, hustler, ladies man and professional pool shark. Much of what we know about the music scene in Storyville comes from the memoirs of Morten who, despite his infamous arrogance, describes many other musicians with admiration, including the lesser know and never recorded Tony Jackson another piano ‘professor’ who worked the high class mansions of the District .

Pianists were the top of the musical pile in Storyville, finding the best jobs in the most exclusive brothels where they could earn $20 or more a night in tips. Band musicians were relegated to the bars and cabarets, although they too could make a very good living by the standards of the day. Names like Freddie Keppard, Bunk Johnson, Clarence Williams, Manuel Manetta, Jo ‘King’ Oliver and Sidney Bechet all played in Storyville during its 20 year existence.

Storyville was bounded by Basin Street, Custom House Street (now called Iberville Street), St Louis Street and Robertson Street. St Louis Cemetery No.1 Stood on one corner of the district. The streets, saloons, high-class mansions and the names of their proprietors are now the stuff of jazz legend. Mansions like Mahogany Hall and the Arlington, madams like Lulu White, Gypsy Shafer and Emma Johnson and saloons like the Tuxedo and Pete Lala’s will be well known to fans of early jazz.

Most of the high-class mansions were along Basin Street, with much of the rest of the district filled with ‘cribs’—single rooms fronting on to the street where a woman could be had for 25 cents. This was the reality of Storyville. It was not glamorous, but a dirty, dangerous and morally corrupt area where virgins were auctioned to the highest bidders, murder was commonplace and only the hardest survived.

Nonetheless, Storyville contained prostitution and related crime in a small, manageable area of the city. The ordinance that established The District was tabled by the respectable and morally robust Alderman Story (hence coining of the name Storyville by tabloids of the day) who saw the establishment of a District outside of which ‘lewd women’ could not ply their trade as the best way to control rampant prostitution throughout the city.

Storyville and all of its mansions were entirely demolished in the 1940s to make way for a huge housing project. Ironically, the area that was Storyville is today a high-crime no-go area, avoided by locals. The city of New Orleans seems to have been so embarrassed by its history that most of the records relating to the area were destroyed, as were photo archives held by local newspapers. Of the few images that exist today, the most haunting are those of Ernest Bellocq, an industrial photographer who spent his spare time taking pictures of the prostitutes of Storyville. Just 89 of his images still exist and many of those were vandalised, the faces scratched from the glass photographic plates.

That the huge mansions of Basin Street can have been destroyed seems like criminal damage today. In the late 1940s, one of the last Storyville buildings to go was the famous Mahogany Hall (immortalised in the well known tune Mahogany Hall Stomp). Calls to turn the building into a jazz museum were ignored and the glorious mansion was stripped and demolished in 1949. It is next to the site of Mahogany Hall that the single remaining structure of Storyville still remains. Lulu White’s saloon stood next door to her famous brothel. The top floors of the building were torn away by a Hurricane in the 1980s and visitors to St Louis Cemetery No 1 hardly notice what remains…a nondescript corner store a couple of blocks up the street that bears no mention of its sordid past.


Recommended reading:

Storyville New Orleans, Al Rose; Published by The University of Alabama Press. (Beautifully written and fascinating history of Storyville)