January 2024

In the early 1970s, a fearless editor for a feisty French Quarter newspaper defends the historic neighborhood, taking inspiration from past preservation battles - both won and lost.

-by Bethany Ewald Bultman

“The French Quarter has no gates,” Bill Ruston often told his staff.

In the 1970s, Bill was managing editor of the Vieux Carré Courier and wrote a column called “Cityscape,” covering architecture and development in New Orleans. He believed the time had come to man the battlements in the historic neighborhood because barbarian developers were once again thundering through the city, wreaking havoc. The Quarter was especially vulnerable.

Initially, to our Courier readers and those who worked with him – like me, a cub reporter at the time – Bill’s concerns seemed like hyperbole. To help illuminate me and some of our Courier colleagues, Bill would sometimes take us to the International Trade Mart (ITM), the thirty-three-story building at the foot of Canal Street (now the Four Seasons Hotel).  We’d sit in the revolving cocktail lounge at the Top of the Mart, sipping our Pimm’s Cups. The city below spun slowly by as Bill waxed poetic about past preservation battles. 

It took exactly one hour for the 360 cocktail lounge to make a full rotation. Each time we’d visit, we’d look down at the recently widened Poydras Street with its current aspirations of becoming the “Park Avenue of the New South.” On one end there was the Port of New Orleans. At the other, the embattled Superdome construction (1971-1975). In between, the landscape was under siege. 

From our perch, Bill became a young general, surveying a landscape he understood had become a battlefield again.  He pointed out the insinuation of mid-20th-century modernism on Canal Street and the Central Business District.  On the other side of Canal, the historic fabric of Vieux Carré looked comparatively small and fragile. Bill had encyclopedic knowledge of both the new city rising up and the historic city that was dissipating before our eyes.

While the 1960s had brought sweeping social justice victories, they were juxtaposed with “community improvement” measures which often were fueled by greed and displaced those in the community they claimed to benefit.  Meanwhile, the city had lost tens of thousands of citizens since the post-World War II industrial spurt.

But oil was booming in a big way. New Orleans’ politicians aspired to transform the city into a clone of Atlanta or Houston, which would presumably attract white-collar workers to relocate. Local politicians and developers were tripping over themselves to court oil industry giants. New modern flagship buildings were offered to entice these companies away from 19th-century buildings elsewhere in the Central Business District. 

Poydras Street towers were being built directly across from the new Superdome. Two of the companies, Amoco and Mobil, would occupy Poydras Plaza.  That complex abutted the Dome and included the Hyatt Regency Hotel and headquarters for Entergy. To Bill, these were deplorable, characterless architectural blunders that would mar the city’s skyline for generations to come.

On the other side of Canal, lay the diminutive vista of the historic French Quarter. Once Bill had moved from his student apartment near Tulane University to sleep, work and play in the French Quarter, fighting to help preserve it became his obsession.

***

For the previous fifty years, the French Quarter – due in part to benign neglect and poverty –  had been home to both immigrants and Bohemians, dive bars and bookstores. Le Petit Theatre had become the center for artists, writers and musicians in 1919. 

The Double Dealer literary magazine was created soon after, publishing the works of Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson and even a bit of William Faulkner.  Even in the late 1960s and ‘70s, affordable rents made it possible for artists, musicians and service workers to live in the neighborhood. Inexpensive Creole and Italian restaurants abounded, as did cafés where residents could spend hours over a cup of coffee, conversing or debating with friends. 

Nicholas Lemann is a New Orleans native who worked at the Courier offices in his youth. As with others who worked there, he went on to a distinguished literary career - authoring several award-winning books, becoming a staff writer for the New Yorker and serving as dean of Columbia University’s Journalism School.  In this 1988 piece, he writes of that earlier French Quarter  - and of Bill Rushton: 

“My grandmother claimed to have known Faulkner in the twenties, as a bothersome drunk at parties. This was hardly incredible, because for fifty years her mother and sister had lived in the Upper Pontalba Building on Jackson Square, considered the oldest apartment building in America. It was right around the corner from the building where Faulkner lived, on Pirates Alley. The managing editor of the Courier, a man so bohemian that he used to give nude dinner parties, lived on Pirates Alley, and was named William Faulkner Rushton.”

But by the mid-70s, the unique family/boho neighborhood was rapidly changing and the steady decline of long-term Quarter residents and locally-owned small businesses alarmed preservationists, including Bill. Family-run corner grocery stores, eccentric button shops, and laundries (such as the infamous Dirty Dottie’s on Rampart where the proprietress prided herself in making costumes for drag queens and possessing the filthiest mouth in the French Quarter) were closing at a pace never before seen. Each loss, each closing, seemed another blow. 

While conversing over cocktails in the 360 Lounge, Bill would articulate his concerns against the impending “Creolized Disneyfication.”  Sometimes, he’d repeat a remark that Walt Disney supposedly made during a visit to New Orleans, referring to the proximity of Royal Street and Bourbon.  “Where else can you find inequity and antiquity so close together?” 

At the time, to his co-workers and my barely twenty-year-old self, our editor seemed like a lone voice in the storm called progress. Unlike Bill, we weren’t fully versed in the Quarter’s many David and Goliath battles that had previously taken place between preservationists – who fought for the gracious beauty of the neighborhood,  and developers – who argued for progress while scheming for profits. 

But Bill had a firm grasp on the nuance of how and why the soul of the Quarter should be preserved. His Tulane architecture school classmates I spoke with recently remembered that Bill had been riveted by architectural history and its social implications.  And he never forgot that the French Quarter would have been destroyed generations before had it not been for activism. 

***

Bill taught us about the first major battle for the Quarter, in 1895, when New Orleans’ City Council supported the demolition of the dilapidated Cabildo and Presbytère, two of the oldest and most historic structures in the Mississippi River Valley. 

Local judges and politicians sought modern new courtrooms and offices to aggrandize New Orleans’ status as a thriving port city. The proposition to destroy two of the remaining examples of Spanish Colonial architecture in North America drew unexpected vehement ire from citizens all over the city. Groups across the country joined forces with the Louisiana Historical Society and the Artists’ Association and the Bar Association. 

This loose coalition to restore and preserve the structures proposed a plan for adaptive reuse:  The historic structures would house a museum complex devoted to the state’s history. Thanks to their efforts the Louisiana State Museum has been headquartered on site since 1911. 

But those wishing to locate a new court in the French Quarter did not go away quietly after their failure to raze the historic structures in Jackson Square. They still demanded a modern courthouse as the first step in revamping the neighborhood. Champions of the new courthouse characterized the French Quarter as a disease-ridden, filthy immigrant slum (at this time 80% of the Quarter’s population were first or second-generation Sicilian immigrants and the neighborhood was known as “Little Palermo” ) and a blight on the reputation of New Orleans. The local Works Progress Administration (WPA) supported this with the hue and cry for health, safety, and community improvement. 

A Courthouse Commission was created by the state legislature in 1902. The commission garnered community backing as they eventually set their sights on demolishing all the structures on the densely populated block bounded by Royal Street, Chartres St, Conti Street, and St. Louis Street.  The destruction of century-old buildings on the block began in 1903.  The courthouse that replaced them opened in 1910.  

An editorial in the June 1903 Daily Picayune lauded the demolition and set the tone for similar demolition in the future. “It is the very heart of the Vieux Carré…and while still palpitant with memories of pioneer bravery and colonial splendor, it must be torn to pieces so that progress may continue its onward march.”

The Next 60 Years

Over the next six decades, several other more localized threats to the fabric of the neighborhood took place, but none galvanized preservationists like the proposed elevated expressway slated to be built between the French Quarter and the Mississippi River.  

In fact, the Vieux Carré Courier was founded in 1961 by Bill and Edith Long, both preservationists who were vehemently opposed to the massive “urban renewal” project. The Longs used the Courier to actively engage and educate people  in what would eventually be called “the Second Battle of New Orleans.” 

Editor’s note: In the coming months, we’ll be publishing two additional stories on the origin of the Courier, the Longs, and subsequent owners and editors in addition to Bill Rushton. 

The late Richard Baumbach, Jr. and the late William Borah were young lawyers at the time and took leadership roles in efforts to squash the expressway.  As they wrote in their recently republished book ,The Second Battle of New Orleans: A History of the Vieux Carré Riverfront-Expressway Controversy, the fight “became more than just a conflict between environmentalists and downtown developers over a freeway; it was a clash of values, a clash in attitudes, a difference in priorities and perspectives about the character and personality of the city.” 

The project was designed in 1946 by urban planner Robert Moses at the behest of the state’s highway department. Mayor deLesseps Story “Chep” Morrison (mayor from 1946-1961) and pro-growth downtown leaders aggressively championed the riverfront expressway for the next two decades. While debate raged over the riverfront artery, long-planned work on the federal interstate project over Claiborne Avenue began in 1966, gutting the heart of the Tremé neighborhood. 

To combat the assertion that the elevated highway would save the Vieux Carré from traffic congestion, preservationists countered that the Quarter was the crown jewel of the city’s tourism. Their warnings were accepted by President Richard Nixon’s administration and the riverfront section of the expressway was canceled. 

Yet, Mary Meek Morrison (1911-1999), a political activist and preservationist (and the sister-in-law of Mayor Chep Morrison), worried that the victory over the Expressway may have “saved the lamb and fatted it for the ultimate slaughter.”  

She was right. What defeated the riverfront expressway in the 1960s, opened the door to encroaching hotels in the 1970s, despite a moratorium on new French Quarter hotel construction that passed in 1969 and was codified in the 1970 zoning code. 

Barely escaping a zoning infringement, a 42-story hotel popped up on the corner of Canal and Chartres. In one Courier column, Bill described the building as having gotten lost on its way to Miami Beach. As Bill pointed out at our after-work cocktail hours at the 360, modernism was making advances on edges of the Quarter.

Bill monitored Vieux Carre Commission and the City Council decisions with the vigilance that most locals follow the Saints today. At one city council meeting we attended together, we overheard frustrated developers mutter that “what the Quarter needs is another good fire.” Others proposed exceptions to the zoning prohibition for new hotels. New hotels would be built as reproductions of historic buildings, they said, festooned with lacy iron balconies and decorative gas lamps  to parody the Quarter’s authentic ambiance.

Bill was staunchly opposed to the Disneyland-makeover factions. He referred to a beloved French Quarter character once when he commented, “What do they expect? Ruthie the Duck Lady to fart unicorns?” 

To extol the funky majesty of the neighborhood, Bill steered the Courier to focus on protecting the character and characters of French Quarter from extinction.  This included advocating for the Courier’s downstairs neighbor on Decatur Street, JoAnn Clevenger’s (later proprietor of the Upperline Restaurant) right to sell flowers from her pushcart in Jackson Square without a florist license; and demanding that the New Orleans Athletic Club admit Black members.

Dr. Gene Cizek, Professor Emeritus and founding director of Preservation Studies at the Tulane School of Architecture, was a mentor and friend of Bill’s. When I spoke with him recently, he said that Bill’s articles in the Courier “introduced a new dimension to historic preservation.” 

“His knowledge and skill as a journalist served as the vital link between the passion and knowledge of the brilliant architectural historians – Sam Wilson, the noted ‘Dean of New Orleans Historic Preservation,’ and Bernard Lemann – and the new generation of activists.” 

Bill Rushton would put those extraordinary skills to work throughout the 1970s, during the administration of Mayor Moon Landrieu, who took office in 1970.  Based on Landrieu’s pro-civil rights record as a state legislator and city councilman-at-large, Bill and the Courier supported Landrieu in the election.  But as Bill reminded us, the French Quarter has no gates, and the new mayor’s plans for improvement were harbingers of another battle to come.

This piece is the first in a series by Bethany Ewald Bultman on the Vieux Carré Courier 1961 - 1978.