Yes, You Can Get There From Here-Part 3

Yes, You Can Get There From Here-Part 3, New Orleans

Before Reading The New Post

A Quick Note: Starting September 23, 2019, I will be doing new entries on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Magic Mondays, Wildcat Wednesdays (with Baron the Vampire Cat) and Famous Friday which will be character driven. Look for the fun changes!

Lilly’s Angel, Book 1 of the Fangs & Halos series takes place entirely in New Orleans. The first 3 chapters are in Storyville, Mahogany Hall brothel in 1900, which I have talked about in another post. The rest of the book is set in New Orleans starting with the night after Katrina. As I did with Houston and San Antonio, I used places that I could go to and that I knew. The map to the right has the places marked and I’ve numbered each entry to correspond to it.

Hurricane Katrina blew into New Orleans on Monday, August 29, 2005. By the time it left, the city was 80% under water, some of it was 15 ft, mainly in the Lower 9^th Ward. The wider map is where 9^th Ward is in contrast to the map with numbers.

The timeline for the 2005 portion of Lilly’s Angel is:

Hurricane landfall—Monday Aug 29 (3^rd quarter moon)
Angel’s report Tuesday Aug 30
Sullivan attacked Wednesday Aug 31 almost midnight
Sullivan turned Thursday Sept 1
Boys return Friday Sept 2—attacked by Baron
Sullivan and Lilly leave early on the Saturday the 3^rd at daybreak
Southern Decadence Parade 2005—Sunday September 4

This is the map of where I’ve put the story. The smaller map has the big one marked. The smaller is the Lower 9th Ward where the worst of the flooding was. I cover numbers 2-6 in this and the next blog post.

Key:

The closest 1-foot or higher flooding to the French Quarter. This was at Clayborne and Canal Streets.
St. Louis 1 Cemetery. They had about 3 inches in the cemetery itself.
Harrah’s Casino.
Riverwalk Mall
Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
Arianna’s Home

In 1900, Lilly is laid to rest in the oldest and most famous of New Orleans cemeteries, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. Opened in 1789, it replaced the city’s older St. Peter Cemetery (no longer in existence) as the main cemetery for the small town.

When I was working on the descriptions of St. Louis 1 Cemetery and where things would be places, I chanced upon a graduate program website from the University of Pennsylvania called “Dead Space” which laid out a conservation and management plan for St. Louis 1. This was very helpful and I was able to locate the graves where things in the book would happen. The cemetery is located at 425 Basin St.

During the first of the 2005 story, the gang members are looking for bones to steal to sell for passage out of New Orleans. They find a voodoo altar on top of one of the flat graves. It has a crude cross on it and it wasn’t hard to imagine the other things. When Bruce and I visited St. Louis 1 in the mid-1990s, we stumbled on a similar voodoo altar on the step of a crypt. We evidently interrupted the ritual and the one doing it probably hid elsewhere as they heard us come up. I based this scene on that visit. , I chose Chapmae crypt, dated to 1807, #82 in UPenn map after browsing the photos. It is a step tomb in the northeast area of cemetery. Made of brick and concrete, it parallel’s St. Louis Street.

For Lilly’s, crypt I picked the McCall-Jones tomb #286 is in Alley #9 in the northwest corner of the cemetery. This is what she calls her “little house”. The crypt is 9.7ft high and 7.0ft wide, and 7.5ft long. These types of crypts usually have two levels. The new coffin is slid into the top of the crypt and then, when they need to add someone, the previous coffin and remains, which are usually pretty broken, is pushed into the bottom. Lilly halved the upper level platform by taking out the second plank and used it as her bed. Her living area was under and in the other side. She finds Marcus the Skull in the remains in the bottom when she was cleaning it out. The bottom marble door on the right was dropped in 1900 when they laid her to rest and broke off a bottom corner, which allowed Baron to run inside chasing the rat. I also took out the fencing around the tomb for the story. The “bed” is just long enough for Sullivan and would have been very close quarters for Lilly and him to be on together when she turned him.

The last tomb in the story is the one Sullivan climbed on to take Lilly out of the cemetery. Tomb climbed on to get over the wall. The Degruy et Al crypt, #18 was dated with remains from 1838-1856. Situated directly behind the caretaker’s house and gate, parallel to Basin St. Made of brick with marble on front, it is in very bad condition. Sully and Lilly would have to be very careful, climb up front with the first step, walk on solid side, not on top, then jump over the wall.

The caretaker’s house is in the last part of the book, when Arianne takes Lilly out to stay at her mansion. That is the one at the gate of St. Louis Cemetery. The corner of the house is in the Degruy et Al Crypt photo above.

The amount of tourists who have visited the cemetery has caused some damage. Laveau died in 1881, and is said to be buried in the tomb of her husband’s family, the Glapions. tourists who flock here in equal measure. They scribble Xs on the whitewashed mausoleum in hopes Laveau will grant their wishes. Of course, this is not a favorite of those who are trying to preserve the cemetery. The tradition of scribbling (among other things) causes damage to the tomb. In 2014, a restoration of her tomb and the city passed a law that makes writing on the grave illegal and will get the vandal a very large fine

As of March 1, 2015, the Catholic Diocese of New Orleans who owns it has restricted visits to people with family buried in the cemetery and certain tour businesses like Save Our Cemeteries. These are guided tours and you have to stay with the group. We were fortunate to be able to walk through without a group or guide.

The gang that attacked Sullivan to take his coat and rob him came out of the Iberville public housing unit that is next to St. Louis 1. Commonly referred to as the Iberville Projects, the entire complex was built on the 10 block site of Storyville in the early 1940s. In my blog about Storyville, I discussed how the building that was Mahogany Hall, where Lilly died, was demolished to make way for a housing unit. The Iberville is that unit.

The Iberville development was built on a ten block site in the early 1940s as part of the Wagner Bill. It had 858 units in 75 brick buildings with balconies that had the wrought iron trimming, a reflection of the old styles of the French Quarter.

The area has recently been redeveloped into a modernized apartment complex called the Bienville Basin Apartments. They saved 16 buildings of the original projects and demolished and built new buildings for mixed income housing.

Since the Iberville site is built next to the St. Louis 1 and 2 cemeteries, some of the oldest in the United States, the builders had to have archaeological investigations of the site prior to building. Amazingly they found caskets and human bones buried under the buildings. These had to be catalogued and, in some cases, removed before the building could continue. They also found slabs of the buildings of Storyville under the soil while working to build new slabs. Architectural items such as terracotta tiles were carefully removed from the buildings before they were demolished.

Once Sullivan and Lilly escape the cemetery, Sully takes her to one of our favorite places to hang out in the French Quarter. O’Flaherty’s Irish Channel Pub was at 514 Toulouse, an old building built in 1798. The building, the Louis Lanoix House has a lot of character with a breezeway between the two halves of the pub. There is also a courtyard behind the building. I chose this as the destination for them because I had been at O’Flaherty’s many times during our trips in the 1990s. I loved the music and the food there, authentically Irish, since Danny O’Flaherty is from Ireland.

Sadly, Danny had to close the pub after Katrina, he locked up as the storm barreled toward New Orleans and left the city as ordered, and there just wasn’t anything to come back to. The building was still there, but the soul of the city had disappeared for the next few years. The building was an oyster house after that and now it’s the home of New Orleans Creole Cookery.

The building is also haunted. Really. It’s a stop on the various ghost tours as one of the most haunted buildings in the city. The ghost story in Lilly’s Angel is the one they tell on the tour. And there’s historical information to back it up, Joseph and Mary Wheaton Baptenier really lived there and died there. So it’s not a big stretch to believe the story. I know next time we’re in New Orleans, I’m going to eat at the restaurant and look for the ghosts of my book.

When Sullivan finds Lilly in the crypt, she is still wearing the dress she was buried in 105 years previously. It was thread-bare and stained. So he takes her measurements using a piece of rope and knots then heads out to the Riverwalk Marketplace Situated at the base of Canal Street at the Mississippi River is a very long building along the wharf, over 250,000 sq ft with 75 stores that were in most U.S. malls during the late 20^th century. There’s a connection to the Hilton hotel and it’s near the New Orleans’s Morial Convention Center, Harrah’s Casino, and the Algiers ferry landing. They have recently renovated the mall again and changed the name to The Outlet Connection at Riverwalk.

During their walk around the French Quarter, Sullivan and Lilly bump into a small group of men who had planned to attend Southern Decadence, a six-day party that is sometime called “The Gay Mardi Gras”. Decadence 2005. The weekend usually draws over 100,000 over the week and was slated to be on the weekend that Katrina blew in. Most cancelled their flights, drives, and hotels, watching in horror as the city drown. But, as is usual with the people of the city, some enterprising people decided to make the best of it. The group of people who were living there staged their own little parade to celebrate the fact they lived through it.

Wow, I didn’t realize I had so much on the New Orleans 2005 portion of Lilly’s Angel. This is half, the next half will be the rest of the story, from the end of the parade to the end of the book, as well as one location from Marcus’s Vampire.

As usual, if you like the page, leave me a comment.

Thanks for reading and see you next week.

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