Back in the day before the early-morning milkman left bottles of milk at your doorstep or now when you trot off to the local grocery to buy a carton of milk, horse-drawn milk carts bearing large metal dispensers, as seen here in this 1903 photograph, roamed the city delivering milk to waiting homes and restaurants. Here’s how it worked. To get your daily milk supply, you stepped outside with your own container where the cart driver then filled it from a spigot located at the bottom of the large urn. Ice cooled some urns but not others.
In the early 20th century, large and small dairies could be found throughout St. Bernard and Jefferson parishes, on the Northshore, and in the city itself. Perhaps the best known were Cloverland Dairy, founded in 1898 and the first to pasteurize milk in New Orleans, and Brown’s Velvet Dairy, dating back to 1905 and the earliest to use glass milk bottles. As late as 1941, Orleans Parish still had 113 small dairies of less than two acres.
The milk cart seen here delivering milk to the Hotel et Restaurant de la Louisiane on Iberville St., belonged to Adam Schoendorf (1847-1933) who owned Hunter’s Dairy, located on Havana and Ne Plus Ultra streets in Gentilly. In Nov. 1911, the city changed the name of Ne Plus Ultra St., meaning “nothing further beyond” and a phrase on old Spanish coins, to Lafreniere St., named for a French New Orleanian executed in 1769 after rebelling against Spanish rule in Louisiana. According to an online post by a Schoendorf descendant, the horse pulling the cart was known as Billy. The boy’s name remains unknown.
As to the Restaurant de la Louisiane, it once ranked among the city’s finest dining establishments. Here’s what the 1938 WPA New Orleans City Guide had to say about it:
“La Restaurant de la Louisiane, established in 1881 by Louis Bézaudin, has been the scene of many brilliant social affairs,” the guide stated. “The restaurant occupies one of the most interesting and beautiful buildings of New Orleans, the former mansion of the merchant prince Zacharie. It is a three-story structure, with white facade and green shutters; balconies, edged with handsome ironwork, jut over the arched entrance and windows beneath. Inside, there is a succession of spacious rooms, with mirrored walls, crystal chandeliers, brocade draperies, and softly carpeted floors. Under the management of Fernand Alciatore, the French cuisine was brought to a rare perfection that attracted guests from far and near. La Louisiane’s guest-books are full of the names of people famous in the early years of the 20th century.”
Over the years, however, the restaurant had its ups and downs. So stated Peggy Scott Laborde and Tom Fitzmorris in their 2011 book, “Lost Restaurants of New Orleans.” “No major restaurant in New Orleans has had as checkered a history as La Louisiane,” they wrote. “Its high points were very high indeed. But times came when its customers wondered how such a beautiful, historic establishment could be allowed to become so mediocre.” After surviving a long list of owners, including the self-dubbed “Diamond Jim” Moran, La Louisiane closed in the late 1990s.
