All Stories: 561
Stories
Sort by:
Gambling Club Owner “Birthday” Cakes
Al Kleindienst explained that he met a Dakin Street club owner because the owner would frequent the Kleindienst bakery. Al asked the man why he was always buying so many birthday cakes, and the owner…
Gambling in the "Free State of Jefferson"
Oral history interview with Buddy Adams about gambling in Jefferson.
"Tolerating" Gambling
The state of illicit gambling in New Orleans was summed up well in the 1938 WPA New Orleans City Guide, "although gambling is, strictly speaking, illegal, these places are usually open for business…
Maps of Historic Gaming Dens
Clubs often changed owners, locations and names, but the general area and primary circle of families involved with the clubs remained largely consistent. While the gaming activity was illegal, it was…
Oak Street & Jefferson Gambling
Hank Staples of the Maple Leaf Bar discusses illicit gambling that took place along Oak Street prior to the 1960s.
Arbor Day at McDonogh No. 23
From the late 1800s through to the mid-1900s, the old Carrrollton Courthouse served as the site of McDonogh 23 public school. On February 10, 1889, McDonogh 23 became the first school in Louisiana to…
Benjamin Franklin Senior High School: Student Life
The school opened in September 1957 with 103 students at the Sophomore level. Junior and Senior levels were added in subsequent years. The high school was created to provide college preparatory…
Benjamin Franklin Senior High School: Dedication Ceremony
Benjamin Franklin Senior High School was dedicated on November 10, 1957. The dedication was sponsored by the Orleans Parish School Board, and it included the formal presentation of the building by a…
The Great Poor Boy Debate
Cartoonist and artist Bunny Matthews, radio personality and food writer Tom Fitzmorris, and Vance Vaucresson of Vaucresson's Sausage Company engage in a lively debate regarding the proper way to order…
McDonogh No. 23
Several years after New Orleans annexed the Town of Carrollton in 1874, the former Carrollton Courthouse began to be used as a public school. The city was able to make the purchase because of the…
Waldo Burton Memorial Home
The Waldo Burton Memorial Home was a boy's home operated by the Society for the Relief of Destitute Orphan Boys (a Presbyterian organization dating to 1824). The building itself was built and donated…
Election Intimidation in Carrollton 1858
Was an election for Mayor of Carrollton upheld even though voters were threatened and intimidated from voting? Yes, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled in 1858, reversing District Judge Victor…
Basement Bookshop and Library
In the 1930s and 1940s, the center of New Orleans literary life resided at 7221 Zimple Street, the Basement Bookshop and Library. Tess Crager opened the store in a little yellow wood-frame building…
Maple Street Bookshop
In 1965, sisters Rhoda Norman and Mary Kellogg opened the Maple Street Bookshop, the first in New Orleans to specialize in paperback books. As Tess Crager's Basement Bookshop had been in the 1930s and…
More Fun Comics: An Animated History
University of New Orleans 2010 History MA graduate Laurel Dorrance created a cartoon-style history of Oak Street's Comic Book Shop for the 2009 Po-Boy Fest History Center. The following is her…
Poet Everette Maddox
The ashes of poet Everette Maddox are buried on the patio at the Maple Leaf Bar, which, in the last years of his life, he made his home. It was here that he founded the readings series, now known as…
Poet Everette Maddox's "American Waste"
After a long dry spell beginning in the early 1980s, poet Everette Maddox began writing again in 1988. The poems began to pour out of him, seeming to bubble up after the seven years in which he did…
Maple Leaf Reading Series
The Maple Leaf reading series is the longest-running poetry reading series in New Orleans as well as the South. In 1979, famed local poet Everette Maddox began the series with sculptor Franz Heldner…
Nix Methadone Clinic
The Carrollton neighborhood suffered through a heroin epidemic in the 1970s. Heroin use would decline throughout the U.S. in the 1980s as cocaine and crack use increased.
An addiction treatment…
Origins of Maple Leaf Bar
The Maple Leaf Bar, one of the city's longest operating music clubs, is a haven for local music and has been drawing crowds from New Orleans and throughout the world since the venue opened in…
Creation of the Eclipse Course: Horse Racing comes to New Orleans
As late as the 1830’s, the former French and Spanish colony of Louisiana still lagged far behind in the British sport of thoroughbred racing, which had been flourishing on the East Coast for the last…
Dryades Streetcar Maims Child in the 1920s
In an era when urban planners tout streetcars as engines of urban redevelopment, it is good to remember how dangerous these urban railroads could be.
In the oral history below, the late journalist…
Club My-O-My: New Orleans Vintage Drag
Club My-O-My was a female impersonator club that originated and ended in the French Quarter. It flourished after first being kicked out of an informal, after-hours home in a fur warehouse in the Vieux…
Nix Library
Throughout the 1920s, Carrollton residents and New Orleans Public (NOPL) Library officials lobbied the city to build a facility in the Carrollton neighborhood. In 1928, the Council appropriated…