The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans: A History by Scott S. Ellis

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans: A History by Scott S. Ellis Nathalie Dessens The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans: A History. By Scott S. Ellis. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 280. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-6935-3.) In his latest book, Scott S. Ellis explores the three-hundred-year history of the Faubourg Marigny, one of New Orleans’s oldest neighborhoods. Although he covers the history of the faubourg from its eighteenth-century origins as the Marigny de Mandeville plantation, his focus is on the period after 1805, when Bernard Marigny subdivided the plantation into lots. Ellis meticulously describes the evolution of the faubourg through the Civil War and subsequent emancipation of the slaves, the Great Depression, desegregation, the hippie movement in the 1970s, the late-twentieth-century gentrification period, and the difficult post–Hurricane Katrina era. While the book is a step-by-step chronological narrative, it also offers readers specifics on the faubourg’s founder, Bernard Marigny, his family, several racial and ethnic groups that made the faubourg home in the nineteenth century (including free people of color and Irish and German immigrants), and its later revival by the gay community. Ellis also includes more focused studies, like that of the twentieth-century evolution of Frenchmen Street, the main artery of the Faubourg Marigny, which is well known today for its many jazz venues. The book provides a very thorough history of the Faubourg Marigny’s population, economic development, and architectural and social reconfigurations. It shows a neighborhood in constant evolution, due to the ebb and flow of the city’s economy, only more godforsaken than the French Quarter and its sibling neighborhoods. Historical events, migrations, wars, economic depressions, epidemics (be they yellow fever, cholera, or AIDS), and natural disasters like hurricanes have kept reconfiguring the faubourg, its main commercial artery Frenchmen Street, its population, and even its idiosyncrasies. This book is meticulously sourced. Ellis not only taps an extensive secondary literature but also mines the sacramental and notarial records, the city directories, and federal censuses and includes information gathered from locals he interviewed. He relies on these sources to denounce an “enduring legend, parroted uncritically,” about Bernard Marigny and other myths about the faubourg (p. 9). Ellis uses city directories (starting with the first 1811 directory) and censuses to track each of the minute changes the faubourg has undergone in the past two centuries. His chapter on the commercial evolution of Frenchmen Street, between the 1930s and 2016, is especially fascinating. The book’s digressions and anecdotes, which may be deemed superfluous by academics, will enchant nonacademics interested in the history of New Orleans. The narrative may sometimes appear too general and insufficiently focused on the neighborhood itself (in the passages on urban slaves, for instance), but they make the book more readable for large audiences. The early parts of the book (on the nineteenth century, in particular) are slightly uneven, with very brief chapters, extremely general presentations, and, [End Page 147] at times, a focus on certain groups without explanation (firemen, for instance), but these shortcomings do not prevent the book from being fascinating and informative. Despite a few small inaccuracies (Jean Boze, for instance, was never the overseer of a Gentilly plantation), and the methodological lack of precision (the academic reader would have needed to know more about the numerous interviews the author conducted, how the interviewees were chosen, what the conditions of the interviews were, and how they were analyzed), the book is a much-needed addition to the historiography of New Orleans, and its novel-like narrative will undoubtedly draw larger audiences. Nathalie Dessens University of Toulouse–Jean Jaurès Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association