New Orleans Grab-Bag

THE FRENCH QUARTER--Herbert Asbury--Knopf ($3.50).

In 1721 the French Administrator Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, laid out the site of New Orleans "in the form of a parallelogram, 4,000 feet long by 1,800 feet deep" and set a crew of convicts to work building the city. The area he marked off now constitutes the Vieux Carre, the old French Quarter of New Orleans, some 165 acres of picturesque wickedness, romantic associations, narrow streets and old Spanish dwellings, bounded by the Mississippi River, and Canal, Esplanade and Rampart Streets. It has been successively favored as a home for convicts, aristocrats, thieves and prostitutes, Italian immigrants, artists and writers, and at one time had an international reputation as a red-light district without a peer. Last week Herbert Asbury (The Barbary Coast, The Gangs of New York) offered a 455-page volume in which these mutations in the life of the French Quarter were painstakingly recorded, together with a mass of miscellaneous information and legend on the city as a whole that gave The French Quarter some-thing of the air of an historical grab-bag.

Although Author Asbury devotes separate chapters to such old standbys for local colorists as the keelboatmen, voodoo, Lafitte the Pirate, riverboat gamblers, the Black Hand Society and the Mafia, most of his book is given over to the swift summaries of crimes of violence and to careful description of the histories, habits, earnings and untimely ends of the lost ladies who once crowded Basin Street and the district nearby. Typical of these case histories is that of Fanny Sweet, tall, homely, bespectacled girl who was thrown out of half-a-dozen of the toughest brothels in a tough city for bad behavior. Fleeing to San Francisco in 1849, she ran a haberdashery at enormous profit, killed a stage driver and later a member of a mob that invaded her home. Freed by a friendly Justice of the Peace she escaped another gang, returned to New Orleans, married the wealthy owner of Hinkley's California Express. She was arrested for mistreating slaves and for taking part in a voodoo orgy, later succeeded in trapping a rich widower named Stephens and persuading him to flee with her to Mexico at the outbreak of the Civil War. Stephens, who carried $65,000 in cash with him, died mysteriously in Texas and Fanny Sweet returned to New Orleans, became a Confederate spy, prospered.

Despite Author Asbury's liking for the grisly details of crimes and for recounting Frankie-&-Johnnie tragedies, enough sound historical material is incorporated in The French Quarter to suggest aspects of the old South commonly ignored by romancers. From the time of its founding, New Orleans was the headquarters for political adventurers. There Murrel planned a slave uprising in 1832, intending to loot while it was in progress. In 1819 James Long enlisted men in New Orleans and invaded Texas, elected himself President and formed a military alliance with Lafitte before the Spanish Army defeated his force. In 1850 and 1851 General Narciso Lopez raised two small armies in New Orleans and led invasions of Cuba in the hope of involving the U. S. in a war with Spain. The famed filibusterer William Walker. President of Nicaragua, used New Orleans as his base for his expedition in 1860 against Honduras, and was popularly supported in the city. Readers who study Herbert Asbury's record of New Orleans politics will have no difficulty in understanding why the city was a leader in the movement for secession from the North at a time when other areas in the South still hoped for peace.

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