French Quarter

The author, a native of New Orleans, displays his passion for the "French Quarter" of the city in 106 color photographs highlighting Old World architecture, style, and history that has made this section of the city famous throughout the world.

Beautiful, poignant, tragic, and comic, this collection of works by preeminent writers--John Biguenet, Poppy Z. Brite, Robert Olen Butler, Tennessee Williams, and others--explores the mysterious heart of New Orleans.

Alan Flattmann's French Quarter Impressions includes a foreword by E. John Bullard, the Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of the New Orleans Museum of Art, as well as more than 120 color images portraying everything from the French Market to St. Louis Cathedral. The author provides an in-depth look at Alan Flattmann�s work, artistic career, and his interpretation of the world around him through art. It also includes an introduction describing the French Quarter, from the people and architecture to the unique mood, as well as an historical essay on the famous New Orleans neighborhood.

"�highly recommended for architecture, photography, and history collections everywhere." --Library Journal "McCaffety knows how to capture the fleeting beauty of a moment." --Times Picayune For many, the French Quarter is New Orleans, yet how much do they really know about the Vieux Carr�? Truman Capote wrote, "Of all secret cities, New Orleans . . . is the most secretive. . . . [Its] architecture deliberately concocted to camouflage, to mask, as at a Mardi Gras Ball, the lives of those born to live among these protective edifices." Through striking photographs and polished prose, The Majesty of the French Quarter opens the locked door and invites readers to discover a multitude of hidden marvels. Among the discovered gems is the 1828 Bourbon Street mansion of Lindy Boggs, U. S. ambassador to the Vatican and former congresswoman. Pictured are many such homes' secret, overgrown gardens where, noted Capote, "mimosa and camellias contrast color, and lazing lizards, flicking their forked tongues, race along palm fronds." Also featured are rare glimpses of the antique-filled and artfully decorated interiors of some of the Quarter's most majestic homes, including that of New Orleans novelist Julie Smith. While this series has examined New Orleans as a whole and the city's Garden District in particular, the French Quarter has quietly kept her secrets to herself-until now.

"Home to the notorious "Blue Book," which indexed the names and addresses of every prostitute living in the city, New Orleans' infamous red light district gained a reputation as one of the most raucous in the world. But New Orleans' underworld consisted of much more than the local bordellos. It was also well known as the early gambling capital of the U.S., and sported one of the most violent records of street crime in the country. In The French Quarter, Herbert Asbury details the immense underbelly of "The Big Easy," from the murderous exploits of Mary Jane "Bricktop" Jackson and Bridget Fury, two notorious prostitutes whose fits of violent rage were legendary, to the revolutionary "filibusters;" soldiers-of-fortune, who, backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars of public support, (but without governmental approval) undertook military missions to take over the bordering Spanish regions in Texas."--BOOK JACKET.

A romance between Celina Payne, a former Miss Louisiana and Jack Charbonnet, owner of a riverboat casino. They collaborate to run Dreams, a charity which funds the wishes of dying children. A dangerous business as someone is trying to scuttle it, having already murdered the charity's founder.

In the years following World War I, the New Orleans French Quarter attracted artists and writers with its low rents, faded charm, and colorful street life. By the 1920s Jackson Square had become the center of a vibrant if short-lived bohemia. A young William Faulkner and his roommate William Spratling, an artist who taught at Tulane University, resided among the "artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter." In Dixie Bohemia John Shelton Reed introduces Faulkner's circle of friends -- ranging from the distinguished Sherwood Anderson to a gender-bending Mardi Gras costume designer -- and brings to life the people and places of New Orleans in the Jazz Age. Reed begins with Faulkner and Spratling's self-published homage to their fellow bohemians, "Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles." The book contained 43 sketches of New Orleans artists, by Spratling, with captions and a short introduction by Faulkner. The title served as a rather obscure joke: Sherwood was not a Creole and neither were most of the people featured. But with Reed's commentary, these profiles serve as an entry into the world of artists and writers that dined on Decatur Street, attended masked balls, and blatantly ignored the Prohibition Act. These men and women also helped to establish New Orleans institutions such as the Double Dealer literary magazine, the Arts and Crafts Club, and Le Petit Theatre. But unlike most bohemias, the one in New Orleans existed as a whites-only affair. Though some of the bohemians were relatively progressive, and many employed African American material in their own work, few of them knew or cared about what was going on across town among the city's black intellectuals and artists. The positive developments from this French Quarter renaissance, however, attracted attention and visitors, inspiring the historic preservation and commercial revitalization that turned the area into a tourist destination. Predictably, this gentrification drove out many of the working artists and writers who had helped revive the area. As Reed points out, one resident who identified herself as an "artist" on the 1920 federal census gave her occupation in 1930 as "saleslady, real estate," reflecting the decline of an active artistic class. A charming and insightful glimpse into an era, Dixie Bohemia describes the writers, artists, poseurs, and hangers-on in the New Orleans art scene of the 1920s and illuminates how this dazzling world faded as quickly as it began.