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.