“The galleries are loaded with women in soft colors, mainly white.”
George Washington Cable, who is credited with introducing the French Quarter’s charms to the world, was born on Annunciation Square, just below Lafayette City and later grew up and spent many years in various homes in the Garden District. Cable was internationally celebrated in his day for his Creole stories. His house on Eighth Street, between Chestnut and Coliseum, still standing today, was a mecca for visiting authors. Public education had its start in Lafayette City shortly before it was started in New Orleans. However, Cable gives a delightful glimpse of the wild carefree youngsters of Lafayette in the 1830’s before the free educational institutions were established:
Mark Twain and George W. Cable posed for this picture during a lecture tour. Twain wrote of evening at Cable’s Eighth Street home.
“... The mass of educable youth—the children who played ‘oats, peas, beans’ with French, German and Irish accents, about the countless sidewalk doorsteps of a city of one and two-story cottages (it was almost such); the girls who carried their little brothers and sisters on one elbow and hip and stared in at weddings and funerals; the boys whose kite-flying and games were full of terms and outcries in mongrel French, and who abandoned everything at the wild clangor of bells and ran to fires where volunteer firemen dropped the hose and wounded and killed each other in pitched battles; the ill-kept lads who risked their lives daily five months of the year swimming in the yellow whirlpools of the Mississippi among the wharves and flat-boats, who, naked and dripping, dodged the dignified police that stalked them among the cotton bales, who robbed mocking-birds’ nests and orange and fig trees, and trapped nonpareils and cardinals, orchard-orioles and indigo-birds in the gardens of Lafayette and the suburban fields—these had not been reached and had not been sought by the educator.”
Visualize Twain, Cable and Charles Dudley Warner of Harper’s Magazine at Cable’s Eighth Street home. Add Lafcadio Hearn and Joel Chandler Harris for very good measure. You have the principals of a scene which actually took place, well documented by Cable’s children who were also present as youngsters, and described delightfully by Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi. Briefly, Twain, Warner and Hearn had come to join the host in welcoming the famous “Uncle Remus”. A literary evening ensued, but to the dismay of the children, not only was “Uncle Remus” white, but he didn’t talk the dialect of which he was the undisputed master. Harris was so very shy that Twain read the “Tar Baby” for him to assuage the feelings of the disappointed youngsters. Then the authors read from their own works; Cable played his guitar and sang his celebrated Creole songs. Twain’s amusing passage describing the scene has an equally humorous sketch showing himself reading while the others are sound asleep.
Lovely raised cottage on Eighth Street was Cable’s home, scene of many literary gatherings during late 19th century in New Orleans.
Great sports figures knew the Garden District. The Southern Athletic Club, at Washington Avenue and Prytania Street, now Behrman Gymnasium, was a center of athletic endeavor for the elite of the area, and its volunteer military units had headquarters there. Among the sports luminaries who used its facilities was the great Jake Kilrain. He trained there in 1889 for his bout with John L. Sullivan at Richburg, Miss. In 1892 “Gentleman Jim” Corbett trained there for his celebrated fight with Sullivan at the Olympic Club, and to the Southern he returned triumphant for a victory celebration. The S.A.C. had New Orleans’ first Turkish bath. In 1878, the Lawn Tennis Club had the city’s first tennis court at Jackson Avenue and Prytania.
The most discussed showplace in an area of palatial homes was the Renaissance-inspired house of James Robb on Washington Street, now Avenue. His dream house deserved all the adjectives lavished upon it. The one-story brick and plaster mansion was surrounded by gardens rivalling those of Europe’s royal estates. He brought over a German gardener to design and maintain them. Statuary by European and American masters embellished the grounds.