New Orleans
In the 1920s, it remained by far the wealthiest city in the South. Its Cotton Exchange was one of the three most important in the world. Its port was second only to New York. Its banks were the largest and most important in the South.
Although liquor manufactured before Prohibition could be legally consumed at home, all newly produced alcohol was illegal, and in New Orleans supplies were easy enough to come by. Foreign liquor was smuggled into the city, at first via Lake Pontchartrain and then through St. Bernard Parish, where rum-running became a way of life for many people. Hordes of New Orleanians made their own home brew, and as early as 1920 it was estimated that 10,000 of them had already broken the law. Newspaper reporters openly chilled their beer in the city morgue. Artist William Spratling bought 10 large jugs of absinthe from a bootlegger, and he and his friends drank it in great quantities. Elizabeth Anderson—wife of writer Sherwood Anderson—said of their crowd, “We all seemed to feel that Prohibition was a personal affront and that we had a moral duty to undermine it.”
In the 1920s, a bohemian scene emerged in the French Quarter that the Double Dealer magazine hailed in 1922 as “The Renaissance of the Vieux Carré.” The French Quarter evolved from a slum into a tourist destination and a fashionable residential center. Anthropologist and novelist Oliver La Farge described the French Quarter of the 1920s as “a decaying monument and a slum as rich as jambalaya or gumbo.” Most of its elegant buildings had been divided into tenements rented to the poor, notably Sicilian immigrants who made up eighty percent of the resident population in 1910. Artists and writers began to move into the area attracted by the cheap rent, faded charm, and colorful street life. The positive developments from the French Quarter renaissance of the 1920s attracted attention and visitors, inspiring the historic preservation and commercial revitalization that turned the area into a tourist destination. Predictably, this gentrification drove out many of the working artists and writers who had helped revive the area. Their dazzling world faded as quickly as it began.
The Big Easy in the Roaring 20s.
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