New Orleans – Genoa, Marseilles, Beirut, Port-au-Prince? New Orleans has always prided itself on being unlike any other American city. Three visitors to the city, two in the 19th century and the third in the 20th century, saw it that way, too.
In the 1850’s, the Port of New Orleans ranked among the busiest in North America. Levees were crowded with cotton and sugar destined for foreign and Northeastern markets along with goods imported from the East Coast, Europe, Asia, Africa and Central and South America.
Manufactured products were not the only imports. During the two decades preceding the Civil War, thousands of immigrants arrived in New Orleans. According to census records, the city’s population grew from 116,375 residents in 1850 to 168,675 in 1860. By 1860, about 39 percent of the city’s population was foreign born. The majority of them were Irish and Germans who left behind harsh conditions in their homelands.
Most Irish remained in the New Orleans area while many Germans moved farther upriver to the Midwest. Those who did stay behind settled along with the Irish below Esplanade Avenue or in Lafayette (now part of uptown New Orleans), or along the New Basin Canal. Some also settled on small farms in the village of Carrollton above the city. Others crowded into the “Irish Channel” between Magazine Street and the river.
These down-and-out hopefuls were a sad site to a young North Carolinian visiting New Orleans in the early 1850s. Writing in his diary in June 1853, he described a shipload of Germans approaching the levee.
“I saw as I walked on the Levee to the boat,” he wrote, “a ship passing up the river from Bremen, loaded with immigrants – her decks presenting a densely packed cargo – of Germans – who were straining their leaden eyes with unusual excitement as they looked for the first time upon one of the large cities of the promised land. I could not help thinking as I saw them gazing so eagerly of the hopes and fears that must have agitated their bosoms – as they drew near to their journeys end and many of them might only find in the new country an early grave – for they have arrived here in a season … when the fevers and epidemics incident to it sets in.”
Germans and Irish were not the only immigrants to settle in New Orleans during this time. Others came from other parts of Europe, North Africa, Central and South America, Asia, Cuba and the Caribbean Islands. This ethnic gumbo made an impression on the famed American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted during his mid-1850s visit to New Orleans.
“There were,” Olmsted wrote, “not only the pure old Indian American, and the Spanish, French, English, Celtic, and African, but nearly all possible mixed varieties of these, and no doubt of some other breeds of mankind…I doubt if there is a city in the world (like New Orleans), where the resident population has been so divided in its origin, or where there is such a variety in the tastes, habits, manners, and moral codes of citizens.”
A century later, The New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling visited the city in 1960 and found an exotic New Orleans not unlike Olmsted’s 1850s New Orleans.
“New Orleans,” Liebling wrote, “resembles Genoa or Marseilles, or Beirut or the Egyptian Alexandria more than it does New York. . . Like Havana and Port-au-Prince, New Orleans is within the orbit of a Hellenistic world that never touched the North Atlantic.”
And New Orleanians celebrate that world every day.
