Mark Twain had definite views about New Orleans and its architecture when he visited the city in the spring of 1882 while gathering colorful stories for his nostalgic 1883 book, Life on the Mississippi. Twain was no stranger to the city. As a river pilot, he had visited the Crescent City several times between 1857 and 1861. This visit was different.
Arriving in the city by steamboat from St. Louis on April 28, Twain noted that not much had changed since his visit two decades earlier. “It had greatly increased in spread and population,” he wrote, “but the look of the town was not altered. The dust, waste-paper-littered, was still deep in the streets; the deep troughlike gutters along the curbstones were still half full of reposeful water with a dusty surface…”
With that said, Twain went on to claim New Orleans was “well outfitted with progressive men – thinking, sagacious, long-headed men” who had launched numerous sanitary improvements throughout the city. He even claimed New Orleans was the “best-lighted city in the Union” and that “electric lights were more numerous than those of New York.” He described the above-ground cemeteries, using the phrase “city of the dead,” as beautiful and “architecturally graceful.”
Twain, however, was not impressed by the city’s commercial architecture on Canal St. Not even the grand Henry Howard-designed Italianate Crescent Billiard Hall (now the Pickwick Club), seen here in about 1882 on the corner of Canal and St. Charles, earned a favorable mention.
“Canal Street,” Twain continued, “was finer and more attractive and stirring than formerly, with its drifting crowds of people, its several processions of hurrying streetcars, 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.”
According to Twain, American architecture didn’t evolve until after the Civil War. And that unlike Boston and Chicago, New Orleans had the “good luck – and in a sense the bad luck” of not having its commercial district destroyed by fire. If it had, he claimed, perhaps the city’s “burnt district” would be more like Boston, which he describes as like no other “commercial district in any city in the world.”
Though not impressed by the city’s commercial architecture, he had kinder words for residential buildings, especially in Uptown neighborhoods. “All have a comfortable look,” he wrote. “Those in the wealthy quarter are spacious; painted snow-white usually, and generally have wide verandas, or double verandas, supported by the ornamental columns. …. No houses could well be in better harmony with their surroundings, or more pleasing to the eye, or more homelike and comfortable-looking.”
Twain wrote glowingly about the “Old French part” of the city, especially the ancient “Spanish part.” As a side note, he called the Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge “a little sham castle.” But back to the French Quarter.
“The houses there,” he continued, “are massed in blocks; are austerely plain and dignified; uniform of pattern, with here and there a departure from it with pleasant effect; all are plastered on the outside, and nearly all have long, iron-railed verandas running along the several stories. Their chief beauty is the deep, warm, varicolored stain with which time and the weather have enriched the plaster. It harmonizes with all the surroundings and has natural a look of belonging there as the flush upon sunset clouds. This charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated; neither is it to be found elsewhere in America.”
Twain seemed comfortable in New Orleans, especially when visiting old friends, such as New Orleans writer George Washington Cable. Twain wrote about Mardi Gras, cockfights, old pirates, the cost of coffins, the old custom “Lagniappe,” city wharves, the late Civil War, “frail breast-work” levees, West End and Spanish Fort, the late “War” and the destructive legacy of Sir Walter Scott who “rung the people mad, a couple of generations ago, with his medieval romances.”
Completing his stay in New Orleans, Twain boarded a steamboat on May 6 to continue his Life on the Mississippi journey upriver to St. Paul, Minnesota.
