It’s just a map, when you get down to it, right?
There are lines of longitude. There are lines of latitude. There is the orderly network of colorful threads following the contours of the Mississippi River with deceiving grace in representation of the city’s pothole-pocked streets, boulevards and avenues. But maps have stories to tell if you look closely enough, and New Orleans maps are no exception. How, for example, did the Black Pearl become the Black Pearl? Who is Gert and why do they get a neighborhood – “Gert Town” – named after them? And what in the world is a “Bywater”? The answers to each are firmly rooted in the city’s past. In that regard, a map of New Orleans isn’t really just a map. It is, in its own way, a history of the city. On one level, of course, neighborhood names are practical things, a shorthand to help people navigate the city – and to help answer that most common of New Orleans questions, “Where y’at?” But once you know the stories behind them, they become something else, something more dynamic, something alive. So, come along, neighbor. Let’s explore the city.
The birth of the Bywater
This one’s easy. It’s by the water – so “Bywater,” right? In truth, this shotgun-rich neighborhood just downriver from Faubourg Marigny went by a number of names before ever earning that particular appellation. Located on the site of what was a plantation early in the city’s history, Bywater – or “the” Bywater, as some refer to it for reasons unclear – started out as Faubourg Washington. It was originally settled by free people of color, working-class Creoles and newly arrived European immigrants, according to the city’s Historic District Landmarks Commission. By the mid-19th century, it had earned the nickname “Little Saxony,” a reference to the influx of German newcomers to the area at the time. Later, it became known as simply part of the 9th Ward. Then, in the mid-20th century, “Bywater” came into being. Why, you ask? There are three theories. The most prominent is that it came from the telephone exchange assigned to the neighborhood back in the rotary-dialing days, making “BY” the first two digits of phone numbers there. (Later, it would be changed to “WH,” for Whitehall.) Alternate theories suggest “Bywater” came from the name of a local post office or a contest among schoolchildren. Which came first in this particular chicken-and-egg scenario is unclear – but the name stuck, and it’s been known as Bywater ever since.
Out of Africa
Algiers, the French Quarter’s across-the-river neighbor, started life as a plantation with origins dating to 1719, just a year after New Orleans was founded. Back then, though, Algiers was a whole separate place, not becoming part of the city proper until shortly after the Civil War. In those years, it seems, nobody thought to record exactly how the place got its name. Consequently, we’re left with mere speculation. We can safely assume it is borrowed from the capital of the North African country of Algeria. The question is: Why, exactly? Some point to the fact that Algeria was an epicenter of sub-Saharan Africa’s slave trade and that New Orleans’ Algiers was, early in its history, a holding place for slaves newly arrived in the New World. Others suggest the name was imported from Spanish soldiers who fought in Algeria before being dispatched to New Orleans while it was under the rule of Spain starting in 1763. In truth, nobody really knows. But we do know this: Our Algiers is today one heck of a place to watch a sunset.
Gert Town
Turns out, you’ve been pronouncing “Gert Town” wrong all these years. Don’t feel bad, though. So has the rest of the city. Located in the Carrollton area near the geographical center of modern-day New Orleans, Gert Town wasn’t named after someone named Gert. It was named after Alfred Gehrke, the son of Polish immigrants who in 1893 bought a general store at the corner of South Carrollton Avenue and Colapissa Street. Business was good, and Gehrke purchased an adjacent property, then another and another. Soon, his little street corner became as much a gathering place as a retail outlet. Over the years, “Gehrke town” would evolve into “Gert Town,” and New Orleans would gain a new neighborhood.
Black Pearl
Sometimes, neighborhood names happen organically, born on its very streets and borrowed from the mouths of those who lived there. That’s not the case with Black Pearl, the Uptown neighborhood with arguably the most poetic-sounding name on this list. Rather, it was born of bureaucracy – and, for the record, has absolutely nothing to do with Capt. Jack Sparrow. Located on a wedge of land carved out of a part of the former town of Carrollton, it is roughly bounded by the river, St. Charles Avenue, Lowerline Street and the northernmost beer cooler at Cooter Brown’s. It came into being as part of the city’s 1974 effort to name and define each of New Orleans’ neighborhoods on an “official” map. They came up with 73 in all – the boundaries of which have been debated ever since. Many of the 73 existed previously in some form or another. Black Pearl, on the other hand, was invented by city planners who borrowed “Pearl” from the name of a street that runs through it, preceded by “Black” in acknowledgment of the neighborhood historically Black population. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Bienville’s bluff
Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville could be excused for being irritated. It was summer 1699, so it would have been hot and mosquitoey as the French explorer made his way with members of his crew down the Mississippi just downriver of the spot in which he would establish the settlement that would become New Orleans some 19 years later. For months, Bienville and his men had encountered only indigenous Americans in what was then an expansive, alligator-infested frontier. Then, rounding a bend, they got a shock. Moored along the river was an English corvette, the Carolina Galley, loaded with 10 cannons and dozens of would-be settlers. Jumping into a pair of bark canoes, Bienville and five of his men – including ship’s carpenter and early chronicler André Pénicaut, who recorded the encounter in his memoirs – paddled over to the Carolina Galley with a warning: The area already had been claimed for France, which was ready to defend its new territory with well-stocked fortifications established upstream. It was total and absolute balderdash, but it worked. The Carolina Galley turned around and sailed away. From that moment, that bend in the river – some 25 leagues from its mouth – became known as “English Turn.” Near that spot some 289 years later – in 1988, to be precise – developers christened a swanky new Algiers-area suburb around a PGA-caliber golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus. They would call it English Turn, borrowing from one of the region’s first European place names – and referencing the big, fat foundational lie upon which the entire city of New Orleans was so fittingly built.
The original swamp people
Before New Orleans East became known as New Orleans East, it was a wild and swampy expanse bisected by a narrow ridge of land – a remnant of a former tributary of the Mississippi – along which Chef Menteur Highway runs today. To one side of that ridge was a vast, wild cypress swamp named after nearby Bayou Bienvenue that would become home to communities of so-called Maroons, liberated slaves who lived alongside the area’s native people well into the late 1700s. As untamed and inhospitable as it was, the area’s European settlers wanted little to do with it, which was just fine by the area’s Maroon population. In fact, it was kind of the point. To the other side of the ridge was a less-imposing expanse of scrubby trees and brush. The area’s early French inhabitants named it “Petit Bois,” which translates to “Little Woods,” the name by which the neighborhood stretching along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain – roughly from Lakefront Airport to Lincoln Beach – is known today.
Carroll who?
Now a part of the city’s Uptown section, Carrollton wasn’t just once its own town. Before being annexed into the city of New Orleans in 1874, it was the seat of Jefferson Parish. But after whom was it named? There are a couple of candidates, but the most likely was William Carroll, a future six-term governor of Tennessee who led a militia of 2,500 men in the Battle of New Orleans. Before beating up on the Brits, Carroll’s men pitched their tents at a makeshift encampment – a temporary “town,” if you will – on the old Macarty Plantation. With the New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad providing convenient access, private developers later purchased the former Macarty land and in 1833 hired Charles F. Zimpel – the guy after whom the Uptown street is named – to lay out what would become the town of Carrollton. It would officially be incorporated in 1845. Hints of the old town can still be found, most notably in the form of the Neoclassical 1855 former Carrollton Courthouse at 701 S. Carrollton Ave.– which is today an assisted living facility.
The first faubourg
It started not long after lunch, at about 1:30 p.m., in the Chartres Street home of a Spanish bureaucrat, Don Vincente Jose Nuñez. Five hours later, fed by a brisk wind, and the Good Friday Fire of 1788 had turned New Orleans into a smoldering wasteland. With some 850 of the city’s 1,100 buildings rendered uninhabitable, Spanish Gov. Esteban Miró gave the OK to transform Jackson Square into a tent city to house the hundreds of citizens rendered homeless by the blaze. They would need a more permanent place to stay, though. Enter Faubourg St. Mary, the city’s first neighborhood outside the French Quarter – and, notably, its first faubourg, period. Borrowed from the French for suburb, the word “faubourg” translates literally to “false town.” Its usage would gain traction in the New Orleans, just as it would in other French colonies, notably Montreal and Québec City. As recounted by Tulane geographer Richard Campanella in his book “Cityscapes,” after Faubourg St. Mary was added to the map, others followed suit, often borrowing their names from the plantations from which they were carved. These include Faubourg Tremé, Faubourg Marigny, Faubourg Livaudais, Faubourg Montreuil and others that have since fallen out of favor as place names.
Somewhere that’s green
By the 1840s, old New Orleans – that is, the Vieux Carré – wasn’t the place many of its more well-heeled residents remembered. It had become crowded. Many buildings had fallen into disrepair. Waves of immigration had turned into a true polyglot city. So, they did what well-heeled people have historically done in such situations: They picked up and moved, in this case to land upriver from the Quarter, between the city’s edge and the new settlement of Carrollton. Subdivided from the Livaudais plantation in 1832, in the beginning the area would officially go by the name Faubourg Livaudais, according to the Historic District Landmarks Commission. A year later, it was renamed the city of Lafayette – in honor of the Revolutionary War hero – and was eventually incorporated into the city in 1852. By that time, however, travel writers had already bestowed upon this new neighborhood the evocative albeit unimaginative nickname “the Garden District,” owing to its grand homes situated on enormous lots surrounded by well-manicured gardens. The name took root, although the old city of Lafayette is still remembered by Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, which still rests in peace in the heart of the neighborhood – and which, for pop culture fans, is home to the fictional tomb of Anne Rice’s Mayfair witches.
Let them eat Gentilly cake
In the city’s early days, the neighborhood we now know as Gentilly was just a swampy stretch separating the Vieux Carré from the lake – and through which the city’s residents would eventually travel on the famous Smokey Mary rail line when visiting the entertainment district established on the lake’s southern shore. It was also home to the plantation of brothers Mathurin and Pierre Dreux – incidentally, the namesakes of Dreux Avenue – who, according to the Preservation Resource Center, named it after the French community from which they originated. Once ensconced in their new home, they became known for hosting elaborate soirees for the more well-connected of New Orleans society. It has also been suggested the area was named by Henri d’Orleans after the French community of Chantilly, where his family estate was located, with the name eventually being Americanized to “Gentilly.” (Supporting the former theory is the fact that we are not the only place in the hemisphere with a place named Gentilly. Quebec has one, too, formerly named Saint-Edouard-de-Gentilly. Minnesota also has a Gentilly, named after Quebec’s.) Either way, by the 20th century and the advent of technology allowing for the draining of the swampland surrounding the Dreuxs’ former estate, the area would be subdivided into such suburbs as Gentilly Terrace, Gentilly Woods and Gentilly Ridge. Perhaps most importantly, it’s also why we get Gentilly cake while the rest of the world must settle for Chantilly cake.
A streetcar named … Desiree?
Desire: It’s at once among the city’s most evocative neighborhood names and among its most ironic. The word “desire” alone does a lot of lifting, summoning ephemeral images of wants and dreams. At the same time, the Upper 9th Ward neighborhood to which it is attached – named after a street running through its heart – was from the start anything but desirous, a dead-end limbo located hard against the Industrial Canal. That would make it a convenient place to plop the city’s less fortunate, where they could eke out an existence tastefully out of sight of the city’s uppercrust. That name wasn’t a cruel joke played by a city planner on those marginalized souls who would live there, though. Rather, it was the result of a misspelling. Soon after the area’s European settlement, the land on which today’s Desire area is situated became part of the extensive land holdings of the Montreuil family, a member of which had accompanied Bienville on his initial explorations of the area. As so often was the case, the Montreuil land would be eventually subdivided and sold off, becoming Faubourg Montreuil. According to John Churchill Chase in his book “Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children … and Other Streets of New Orleans,” the property’s owner at the time, Robert François de Montreuil, decided to name two of them after his daughters, Desiree and Elmire. Because there was already another street named Elmire in the city, Montreuil’s Elmire Street was later changed to Gallier, in honor of the famed father-son architects James Gallier and James Gallier Jr. For its part, Desiree Street would become Americanized to “Desire.” Decades later, a local streetcar would carry that name. Tennessee Williams would do the rest.
