At Home in Storyville: The Brothel Pictures of Ernest Bellocq

Abstract

At Home in Storyville:The Brothel Pictures of Ernest Bellocq Kristine Somerville and Speer Morgan In the late 1890s, prostitution was widespread in New Orleans. Houses of assignation were springing up everywhere, particularly in the Garden District and French Quarter. A homeowner living on a quiet, tree-lined residential street could find himself next door to a brothel overnight. Business owners, law enforcement and politicians as well as many of the women working as madams agreed that ministering to the physical desires of men was a necessary evil but that it should be conducted in a controlled manner. Alderman Sidney Story, a respectable citizen and businessman concerned about prostitution in his city, made a careful study of the problem in Europe. He prepared legislation that proposed to segregate "any prostitute or woman, notoriously abandoned to lewdness" to a thirty-eight-block area northwest of the French Quarter, where they were allowed to legally practice their trade. His legislation was passed in 1897. Basin Street, with its convenient train depot, became the hub of the new district christened Storyville in honor of its founding father. (Sidney was not pleased.) Lavish bordellos quickly proliferated. The city could be damp and dark, but the brothels were welcoming, the decor pleasing and the hostesses elegantly dressed in ball gowns. The sprawling Edwardian mansions and parlor houses had opulent dens and boudoirs decorated in rococo splendor with patterned wallpaper, ornate tapestries, voluminous draperies, oriental carpets, crystal chandeliers and gilded mirrors. Though cities from Galveston to New York City had red-light districts, New Orleans raised harlotry to the level of artistry. The surrounding night life was unrivaled. In dance halls patrons did the Grizzly Bear, Bunny Hug, Slow Drag and Belly Rub, while B-girls got a cut from the bar for every beer and whiskey they sold. Street Arabs directed guests to well-stocked saloons and honky-tonks, which offered nightly jazz sessions featuring the likes of Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and Tony Jackson. Raucous brass and jazz bands played from dusk to dawn. Jazz was not invented in Storyville, but the district was fertile ground for its development. Every madam hired a piano man, called a "professor," to play in her parlor. The musicians' repertoires were versatile: blues, jazz, ragtime, high-class opera and bawdy tunes that they composed on the spot. Storyville [End Page 90] Click for larger view View full resolution Image by E. J. Bellocq © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco [End Page 91] Click for larger view View full resolution Image by E. J. Bellocq © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco [End Page 92] provided a place where musicians were free to experiment before uncritical audiences who offered generous tips. Top performers made as much as a thousand dollars a week. About twelve thousand people made their living from the sin trade. Two thousand of them were prostitutes, who earned around seventy dollars a week. About forty-five leading bordellos also made big profits from gambling and alcohol. Combined, the houses and those who profited from their existence pulled in a quarter of a million dollars a week. Those outside Storyville also benefited from its brisk business. Buying and then renting District property was considered a wise investment. Dozens of photographers gravitated toward the Storyville scene and its close-knit community of whores, musicians, business owners and regular patrons. One of the most noteworthy was Ernest J. Bellocq, an established commercial photographer in the area from 1895 to the late 1930s. He began his professional career photographing ship engines with mechanical failure for a local shipbuilding firm, the Foundation Company. Despite the work's tediousness and travel that took him up and down the Mississippi, the discipline of photographing ships inspired a frankness in his work, as did the influence of photographers whose work he admired: Matthew Brady's pictures of the Civil War dead, Jacob Riis's images of New York's tenements and slum children and Robert Howlett's influential environmental portraiture. When Bellocq turned his attention to the "sporting palaces" of Storyville sometime in 1912, just before the onset of World War I, he wanted naturally detailed, sharply focused images of the milieu...