New Orleans: 1935

This is the back-of-town Treme section.

No wonder this is so hard to recognize for those of us who weren't around in 1935, as the area was soon after radically altered, with the old Carondelet Canal filled in and a good section of the area-- I suspect including where the photo was taken-- demolished to construct the Lafitte and Iberville housing projects (the Lafitte in turn was demolished last year).

I can't place the exact street, but St. Ann is certainly no more than a few blocks away. This would have to be somewhere in the 6 blocks between St. Philip Street and Conti Street. The cupola of the Cabildo is seen straight down the street, and the tower of the Jax Brewery is in the far distance just to the right of the rightmost telephone pole.

The final clues to a better location are probably the steeples of the 2 churches at left (is the closer one St. Peter Claver or Our Lady of Guadelupe-- or did there used to be another steeple near by in 1935 no longer existant?) and the wall at the right (wall around St. Louis Cemetery 1, St. Louis 2, or did there used to be a similar wall beside the old Canal?).

That two-story building is Fump & Manny's Bar, an Uptown New Orleans institution. The wall on the right separates the river, dockhouses and railroad tracks from this historic shipping supply road. It looks exactly the same today with more trees.

This couldn't be St. Ann, which has houses on both sides. That wall -- maybe North Peters Street. The only thing I can think of that still looks like that, with a wall where the tracks would be on the other side, would be in Bywater. Homes of that scale are right near the tracks.

If that is St. Louis Cathedral, then this, being the "northwestern" (upper in N.O. parlance) side, would be St. Peter Street. St. Peter Street extended far beyond North Rampart until the Treme neighborhood was raped in the construction of Armstrong Park in the early 70s, cutting the street for several blocks. The fenced off area to the right is the Carondelet (or Old Basin) Canal, which was no longer navigable by 1935 and filled in in 1938.

If you look at a map of the French Quarter and draw a line behind St. Louis Cathedral, you get St. Ann Street.

Eddie, you may be right. I was thinking it looked like Tchoup, near the Garden District, where all the old docks and warehouses are.

Fence on right would be for the Southern RR and for the GM&O Railroads. Street would be Toulouse, maybe. Those houses were still there at the time of the storm in 2005.

Looks like the St. Louis Cathedral in the distance.