In Lilly’s Angel, I start off with the story of Lilly Marchantel, who is working in a brothel in Storyville, New Orleans. The actual setting is in Mahogany Hall, which was the most famous of those brothels.
But what was Storyville?
In 1897, the city council of New Orleans decided to put all their prostitutes and brothels in one 38-block area to the northwest of the French Quarter. The boundaries of the district were Iberville, Basin Street, St. Louis, and N. Robertson streets. The original idea came from Councilman Sidney Story, he wrote the rules and legislation for The District as it was supposed to be called, but the common name became Storyville. The district had everything from the 50-cent prostitutes who worked from basically a tiny room with a bed and a door all the way up to the big, fancy brothels on Basin Street that had 40 girls working.
Storyville catered to white customers, black men were prohibited from paying for services within the boundaries. There was a book called the Blue Book that could be purchased for a quarter and contained a listing for all the brothels and prostitutes. The listing of women was done in alphabetical order but there were also larger ads for the “sporting houses” like Mahogany Hall, Andersen’s Saloon, Josie Arlington’s, Willie Piazza’s, Hilma Burt’s and Minnie White’s, among others. Many of the upper end houses featured “octoroons” (1/8 black women) as their prostitutes. They also lived much better than most of the denizens of Storyville.
Storyville lasted, despite some campaigns to shut it down, until 1917. It was the First World War that finally accomplished what the city crusaders couldn’t. There was a law that said that a brothel couldn’t be closer than five miles from a base and there was a base outside of New Orleans. Secretary of War, Newton Baker, wanted Storyville closed because it was a distraction for the men being trained at a nearby base. After there were four killings of military personnel in Storyville within weeks of each other, the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels sought to get the entire district closed down as ‘bad influence.’
The city of New Orleans had been making a tidy profit from the brothels and prostitutes, money for licenses, taxes on ‘purchases’ and on the ever-present alcohol served in the richer brothels. They didn’t want that cash cow stopped but, with pushes from the federal government and the American Social Hygiene Organization, they had to finally give up and make prostitution illegal. They ordered all the prostitutes and brothels to close business and sell out to other places. Most of the working girls and madams left town but some stayed, opening up in other parts of the city, with, if not the open blessing of the city fathers, the tacit approval.
There is little left of the buildings in the Storyville boundaries, three former saloons are all that are left. The bigger survivor of that era was the advent of Jazz music. While it didn’t start there, the musicians that played in the bigger brothels, names like Tony Jackson, Jellyroll Morton, Buddy Bolden, and a young Louis Armstrong all played there. The jazz coming out of the Storyville era has influenced the music of today with people like Ellis Marsellis and his sons Bradford and Wynton as well as Harry Connick, Jr.,
Storyville isn’t truly gone, the music, stories, photos, and names are still around and authors like me have found new material for stories from that era and that 30 block area of the mystical city of New Orleans.
For More on the History of Storyville:
https://www.processhistory.org/storyville/
http://nola.savagexmedia.com/story.htm
https://countryroadsmagazine.com/art-and-culture/history/good-times-with-bad-girls/
https://www.myneworleans.com/last-days-of-storyville/
http://www.storyvilledistrictnola.com/sitemap.html (good source with a lot of information)