As the metropolitan area grew in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the city of New Orleans developed distinct suburbs. In 1778, Bertrand Gravier and Charles Trudeau laid out the plan for what would become New Orleans’s first suburb on part of the land Gravier owned just upriver from the city. This land on the other side of the commons (Canal Street) became Faubourg St. Marie. In 1796, Trudeau expanded it back from Nayades (St. Charles Avenue) to Phillipa St. (Dryades). This part of Faubourg St. Marie is what is today the Central Business District. After Bertrand Gravier died in 1797, his brother Jean expanded the survey back to Circus Street (now Rampart). Americans began moving into the suburb as soon as it was developed and came in droves after the Louisiana Purchase. There were around a thousand residents of Faubourg St. Marie in 1805, most of them Anglo-Americans.70
Less than two years after the Louisiana Purchase, Bernard Marigny subdivided his plantation to create New Orleans’s first suburb downriver from the Vieux Carré, the Faubourg Marigny. At twenty years of age, Marigny was a minor according to Louisiana law and thus had to first get permission from the government. In April 1805, the territorial legislature authorized Marigny “jointly with Solomon Prevost, his guardian, … to lay out his said plantation into such lots, streets, and squares as they with the consent of the city council of the city of New Orleans may deem proper.” It further authorized Marigny, “notwithstanding his minority status,” to sell or lease any of the lots so created.71 Marigny then commissioned two men who had been architects and engineers under the Spanish administration, Nicolas de Finiels and Barthelemy Lafon, to draw up plans and design the streets for the new suburb. Marigny created hundreds of lots from his former plantation. The lots varied in size, but typically they were 60 feet in width and 120 feet in depth. The price of the lots depended, in part, on whether or not they had been improved with buildings. Unimproved lots could go for as little as $450, while lots with buildings on them could go for as much as $900.
Whether it was Marigny’s intent or not, the vast majority of people who bought land in Faubourg Marigny were francophone. Contemporaries referred to Faubourg Marigny as the “Creole quarter” because few Anglo-Americans lived there.72 Dozens of free people of color purchased lots in the faubourg. Because the development and rapid expansion of Faubourg Marigny coincided with the arrival of the refugees from Cuba in 1809–10, one might assume that the suburb was populated by refugees. A comparison of the names on deeds to lots in the Marigny with the names of known refugees, however, produced few matches, suggesting that the refugees were not themselves an important group of early purchasers of property in the Faubourg Marigny.73 Nevertheless, the presence of dozens of “Creole cottages” represent a West Indian influence on the architecture in the quarter. These small houses with high slate rooftops built close to the banquettes (sidewalks) resemble houses built in the cities of the French West Indies. Perhaps some of the builders in Faubourg Marigny were refugees even if few of the purchasers were. In any event, a rivalry developed between the Anglo-American quarter located upriver in Faubourg St. Marie and the French “Creole” quarter located downriver in Faubourg Marigny. The antagonism between the sections lasted for several decades and got so heated that in 1831 the legislature amended the city charter to divide the city into three municipalities, the Vieux Carré, St. Marie, and Marigny.74
While Faubourgs St. Marie and Marigny developed on high ground along the river, other suburbs emerged in the territorial period as a result of New Orleans’s relationship with Lake Ponchartrain. For decades, hundreds of people, mostly slaves working the land, had lived along Bayou St. Jean leading into the lake. In 1785, there were 91 whites, 14 free people of color, and 573 slaves living either along the road leading from the Vieux Carré to the bayou or along the bayou itself. After the Louisiana Purchase, however, this plantation land was slowly but surely subdivided and urbanized. In 1804 and 1805, Daniel Clark bought plantation land that bordered Bayou St. Jean and hired Barthelemy Lafon to draw up a plan for Faubourg St. Jean. The suburb had a fanlike formation with a focus at Place Bretonne (where today Bayou Road meets Dorgenois Street, just below Broad) resulting in thirty-five irregularly shaped blocks. Then, in 1810, the city purchased the plantation of Claude Tremé, partly out of the necessity to provide housing for refugee immigrants. The plantation was subdivided by Jacques Tanesse with a plan similar to that of the Vieux Carré. Faubourg Tremé bordered both the back of the Vieux Carré and, on its upriver side, the newly formed Faubourg St. Jean. It also bordered, on its downriver side, the Carondolet Canal, providing water access to the bayou, Lake Pontchartrain, and, eventually, the Gulf of Mexico.75 While St. Jean and Tremé did not develop as early or as rapidly as St. Marie or Marigny, they did, within a few years, provide an irregularly shaped but continuous urban area connecting the river to the lake.
New Orleans in the Age of Revolution was a very cosmopolitan and active city. In the daytime, the levee was “lined with its forests of masts and sooty cylinders, - the products of a foreign and domestic world crawling with warehouses and shops.”76 At night, the city was teeming with activity. Whites, enslaved blacks, and free people of color gathered in homes, in taverns, and on the streets to dance, drink, and gamble. By the late 1790s, Spanish officials and some planters had become concerned about the “dens of vice” operating in the Crescent City, prompting Louisiana’s governor, the Baron de Carondolet, and Attorney General Don Pedro Dulcido Barran to shut down numerous gambling halls and taverns. By 1797, only ten out of a previous several dozen taverns were still operating, and potential tavern owners required a license from the mayordomo de proprios to operate a bar. After Carondolet left Louisiana in 1798, the number of drinking and gambling establishments began to increase again. Beginning in the 1790s, residents of New Orleans also had an opportunity to experience “high culture.” The first public ballrooms began operating in 1792, the same year New Orleans’s first theater (known as the Coliseo) was built. New Orleans was also home to the first opera house in what is now the United States, which opened its doors in 1796.77
By the time Louisiana became a state in 1812, New Orleans was home to several dance halls. Two blocks upriver from the cathedral, at the corner of Rue Conde (today Chartres Street) and Rue Dumaine, stood the Conde Street Ballroom, a “whites only” ballroom that opened in October 1792. One more block upriver and one block closer to the river, Bernard Coquet offered dances for free people of color in his home at 27 Rue St. Phillipe. The dances at “la Maison Coquet” began in 1799 and immediately attracted both whites and enslaved blacks as well as the intended patrons. The house also hosted the first quadroon ball in 1805, when August Tessier rented Coquet’s home for this purpose and renamed it La Salle de Chinoise. In 1808, Coquet opened La Salle de Spectacle, a “magnificent building of Philadelphia brick,” located several more blocks away from the river at 721 Rue St. Phillipe. This building, later renamed the Washington Ballroom, hosted free colored balls and quadroon balls throughout most of the antebellum period. The Anglo-American perceptions of all these interracial gatherings and the government’s attempts to regulate intimate relations across the color line are discussed in greater detail in chapter 4.
One block back from the Conde Street Ballroom, at the corner of Royal and Dumaine, stood a small building that operated as a courthouse in the early years of American rule. According to an early historian of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson was tried here for contempt of court in 1815.78 This may have been the building that housed the New Orleans City Court for part or all of its eight-year tenure (1806–13). The City Court was probably the most influential site at which free people of color asserted and protected their status and rights. In eight years, this court heard around 350 cases involving free colored litigants (about 10 percent of the total number of cases it heard), including the cases that begin chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6.
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