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The Old Newcomb Chapel
The chapel held a particular spot in Mrs. Newcomb's heart, as she saw it as symbolic of her daughter, Sophie. Mrs. Newcomb ordered Tiffany windows for this building, as well as a specially built organ…
Josephine Louise House
Mrs. Newcomb bought this house across from the Washington Avenue campus for a residence hall for the growing school in 1894. The original Josephine Louise House was managed by Alice Bowman, who was…
The Newcomb Art and Pottery Buildings
Under the guidance of Ellsworth Woodward, the Newcomb pottery program began flourishing in the mid-1890s. In 1896, the first public display of the pottery produced by the students was presented, to…
Morris Building: The Household Economy Building
Purchased in 1901 by the Tulane Educational Fund for Newcomb College, the Morris Building became home to the School of Household Arts in 1909.
Warren House (Washington Campus)
Built soon after the end of the Civil War, Warren House was later named after Mrs. Newcomb's deceased husband, Warren Newcomb. The building was secured by the Tulane Educational Fund for Newcomb…
The Old Newcomb Gym
Newcomb administrators and faculty members were rather unique in their ideas about the physical education of women, especially when compared to other schools at the time. Dixon hired Clara Baer to…
The Gables
In 1897, Newcomb College was becoming cramped, and President Dixon found himself writing to the President of Tulane. He expressed the need for another dorm to house all the girls and accommodate the…
Pontchartrain Causeway Assoc. vs. Watson-Williams & Co.
Two bids were placed to construct the bridge across Lak Pontchartrain. From late 1924 until a decision was made in February 1925, The Times-Picayune reported frequently on construction proposals…
Carrollton's First Ferry
Earliest ferry service from Carrollton across the Mississippi River to the West Bank area known as Nine Mile Point was operating by 1845. Rowers powered these skiff ferries. In the mid- and late…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…