From 1897 to 1917, Storyville, the district that gave American music its founding legend, operated near where you are now. Storyville was created by city ordinance in 1897 when Alderman Sidney Story proposed concentrating the city's prostitution trade into a defined district to be regulated and taxed, a pragmatic approach to vice that was common in European cities and that Story, with some embarrassment at the naming, helped establish here. The district covered roughly thirty-eight blocks and operated legally for two decades, its brothels ranging from the elegant Basin Street mansions of Lulu White and Josie Arlington to the modest cribs in the back streets.
The piano players in the brothels — called professors by the trade — were among the most accomplished musicians in the city, and the demand for live music in the district's saloons and clubs created paying work for jazz musicians at a critical moment in the music's development. Jelly Roll Morton, who grew up in the Tremé, played the Storyville brothels and clubs through the first decade of the twentieth century and later claimed to have invented jazz here, a claim that overstates his individual role but accurately captures the district's musical importance. The U.S. Navy, concerned about sailors from the naval base frequenting the district, ordered it closed in 1917.
The buildings were demolished in the 1930s for the Iberville housing project. What you see here is ordinary urban landscape on top of extraordinary American history.