Sex, Jazz & Ax Murders - 1900's New Orleans

The history of Storyville, and jazz has its roots in New Orleans, and America’s struggle for virtue and racial division. Post Reconstruction New Orleans is a city of corrupt officials, poorly managed government, and the virtues and ideas of Spanish/French identities clashing with the incoming protestant elites of the Temprance Movement.

This episode goes into the era that Vampire Chronicles Louis de Pointe du Lac of the recent AMC TV series Interview with the Vampire takes place in. Louis grew up in the 1880-1890’s Post Reconstruction New Orleans and his formative teen years saw major events reshape the direction of the leadership in New Orleans. From increased racial segregation, temperance laws, and the haphazard reconstruction efforts of the post civil war era saw a New Orleans leadership battling long term corruption, the spread of sinful bordellos, high crime, corrupt cops, and the Italian Mafia.

A major shift in the city comes in the late 1800’s as the Young Men’s Democratic Association (YMDA) bands together a political opposition and armed militia to take on the Old-World establishment. What follows is the story of increased segregation laws, temperance laws, assassinations of police chiefs, and a riot and lynching that will rock a generation of Italians and blacks living within the city.

The results will create the scenario in which a city government, faced with no good choices and forced to deal with the growing anger of both the Temperance Movement and Old-World elites makes a law that will result in the creation of the famed area of New Orleans known as Storyville from which the birth of jazz traces its roots.

Though Thomas C. Anderson will become a name synonymous with crime, sex, and vice during the early 1900’s, during the 1880’s-1890’s he was a close and personal friend of famed teetotaler and chief of police David Hennesy who’s efforts to stamp out corruption and battle the Italian Mafia will result in his brazen assassination and set off the first domino that will lead to the creation of Storyville and the epic location from which Season 1 of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire takes place.

Sources Used: Empire of Sin, a Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder and the battle for Modern New Orleans

Author: Gary Krist

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