LOUISIANA: Old Girl's New Boy

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A nation's heartbeat is in its cities. This year, on the lake fronts, at the railheads, in the mountains, on the seaboards, the cities of the U.S., prospering in the postwar boom, throbbed with civic projects, civic pride, bond issues, expanding industry and trade. In old, carefree and once corrupt New Orleans, now reformed and very businesslike, the heartbeat was firm.

Its throb could be felt along New Orleans' 11½ miles of riverfront wharves. There, one night last week, 60 ships lay in a driving rain while tooting switch engines slammed boxcars, oilcars and flatcars along the quayside.

Floodlights limned the vessels, the gangling cargo hoists and the Negro longshoremen crawling up & down the gangways. All night long, rain or shine, the work went on, as the merchandise of the Mississippi Valley flowed southward through the artery and the merchandise of the world flowed back again. New Orleans* was no longer just the "City That Care Forgot"—a tourist-bureau sobriquet which the city's businessmen now disdained.

In a long, upholstered office in City Hall sat the man who had his finger on this pulsebeat. Daily, at all hours, across the claret-colored rug streamed aides, colleagues, politicians, businessmen, repairmen, newsmen. The young man, who saw everyone, was the city's mayor: deLesseps ("Chep") Story Morrison, 35, handsome, bouncing, talkative, tough and stubborn.

Chep Morrison, symbol of the bright new day which had come to the city of charming ruins, also symbolized as well as anyone or anything the postwar energy of the nation's cities.

Babylon on the Delta. No great U.S. seaport is typical. Each has its own strange mixture of races and cultures, each possesses its own peaceful and violent story. The story of New Orleans began when LaSalle, in 1682, erected a cross on the Mississippi Delta. A century later, the site had become a New World port.

One-sixth of its trade was illicit—pirated or smuggled. It was the New World center of French culture. Its haughty aristocracy were the French and Spanish families, the Creoles. It was a Babylon where English, Spanish, French, Germans, Italians, and Yankees danced, drank and gambled while the Negro population celebrated voodoo rites in Congo Square. In 1812 the first steamboat, the Orleans, chuffed down the river and opened a new era of trade and commerce. In 1897 the city fathers legalized prostitution, confining the houses to a section northwest of the French Quarter, which thereupon became sarcastically known as Storyville, after Councilman Sidney Story, who sponsored the law.* He was Mayor Morrison's great-uncle.

It was a city steeped in tradition and superstition. Ghosts as well as whores and gamblers haunted its streets and houses. The ghosts still do. New Orleanians swear that two waxen-faced Yankee soldiers parade through the corridors of a building on Constance Street, singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Dr. Deschamps, the dentist, hanged in the 1850s for murdering a girl he was trying to hypnotize, still haunts an apartment in 714 St. Peter Street. The Devil's own head hung on a gable in a house on St. Charles Avenue until gable and house were torn down.