Finding New Orleans "in the spaces between buildings rather than the buildings themselves"

On Michael P. Smith, the Neighborhood Story Project, and ... ducks

Dancers, New Orleans Jazz Fest, 1976, photographer unknown. (Wikimedia Commons)

This week, our friend Trent Harris (creator of the Beaver Trilogy, brilliant artist and all-around swell guy) stayed with us at the Congress Street Compound. His last visit to New Orleans was in 1981, when he was filming a documentary on Mardi Gras Indians for National Geographic; his man-on-the-ground/primary source was the late Michael P. Smith, co-founder of Tipitina’s.

That’s no small legacy, but Smith’s best known as a photographer, mostly for his images of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which he shot from 1970 ‘til 2004. But, as 64 Parishes notes, he also shot thousands of images of jazz funerals, Mardi Gras parades, brass bands, social aid and pleasure clubs and spiritual churches.

Trent gifted us his copy of Spirit World: Photographs and Journal by Michael P. Smith, a collection of Smith’s more intimate photos of church services, parades, and funerals. I’ve just stared working my way through the book, but this fragment from the introduction, written by Nicholas Spitzer, then-head of the Louisiana Folklife Program, jumped out at me:

Where the old buildings are preserved row upon row, the living culture implied in the structures is often long past. This is not to say that paint and plaster and the historians’ eyes should not work their metamorphoses on the urban landscape. But when you really start thinking about buildings, you realize that it’s the poeple who build and live in them who are the carriers of the culture. The buildings are one physical manifestation of culture. Thus in New Orleans, a city of unique architectural landscapes, it is the spaces between buildings rather than the buildings themselves that intrigue me. It is life on the street that makes New Orleans unlike no other city in North America and quite a bit more like places such as Port-au-Prince, Port-of-Spain or Lima. The built environment of New Orleans taken alone is a movie set without actors.

Speaking of street life… we dropped Trent off in the French Quarter on Tuesday to do some exploring. He accidentally found himself at the former TV station that now houses The Historic New Orleans Collection, “a free history museum, publisher, and research center located in the heart of the French Quarter,” that holds the majority of Smith’s archives, including thousands of photographs as well as letters, journals and field recordings.

The museum put together a show of Smith’s work more than a decade ago; more recently, it used film excerpts from Smith’s archives for Dancing in the Streets: Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs of New Orleans. The exhibit mourned the interruption of second line parades, “a weekly physical and symbolic gathering place for Black history and expression,” during the pandemic, which meant “the longest continuous interruption in a tradition stretching back generations.”

To mark that loss (and to offset it, too), it pulled together work from more than a dozen photographers, along with objects and parade regalia collected by Sylvester Francis of the Backstreet Cultural Museum and Ronald W. Lewis of the House of Dance and Feathers. (Both men died in 2020; the exhibit was dedicated to their memory.)

It’s a little hard to find, but one of the best parts of the online version of the exhibit is a page of “Club Narratives,” collected by the Neighborhood Story Project, where members of Good Fellas, Dumaine Street Gang, Lady Buckjumpers, ? Mark, The Lower Ninth Ward Steppers, Lady Jetsetters and others tell their stories in their own words. Here’s a lovely excerpt from the interview with Angelina Sever, who founded Divine Ladies in 1999:

All the clubs, normally, they are known for coming out of barrooms—that’s what they do. My thing was, we were ladies, wearing beautiful clothes. I wanted to do something out of the box. Mr. Thomas was like, “Y’all are ladies, let’s see if we can come out the bridal shop, House of Broel, on St. Charles Avenue.” He reached out and spoke with Ms. Bonnie Broel, and for a fee, that’s where we started our parade at in February of 2000.

I had twenty ladies parading their first year, and my sister, Andrea Davis, was queen. I said, “Well, we’re going to make this a girls’ weekend.” We stayed in a hotel, like a big slumber party. We got dressed together in all white suits and white hats with the mink. We had breakfast and took limos to the House of Broel. It was a beautiful day. Gorgeous.

When we walked in the building, Mr. Dean had all the fans laid out with white feathers. Now, they always have parades to cross St. Charles. But to actually start on St. Charles? It was amazing. Ms. Sharon Frank, who was our tailor, was like, “Y’all looked like angels coming down the street.” There was no other color but white with just a touch of silver.

If you have some rabbithole time, dive into the Neighborhood History Project’s archives, too. You can find photos and stories and sounds from day-to-day life in New Orleans you won’t find anywhere else, including soundscapes from neighborhood meeting places and a mini-documentary on Holt Cemetery.

And, OK! This is going to sound like a digression, but bear with me: Trent, as you may or may not know, is a bit of a duck expert, at least when it comes to his duck, Roy, the protagonist of Today at the Duck Pond, and the subject of an epic documentation project on Facebook:

Trent’s other French Quarter stop was the Voodoo Museum. While he was waiting in the lobby, he saw a bicyclist speed by the window with a yowling cat in the basket (according to the woman at the front desk, he zips past the museum “every #*%*$# day at the same time!”) The other animal he encountered at the museum was …. er, a duck. Its name was Wrinkles, and it was visiting with its owner, who had shod it with duck boots (which are not the same thing as duck shoes).

“He was looking at the stuff on the little shelves,” Trent said. “And he had his mouth open the whole time, but he wasn’t making any noise. So maybe he was hot.”

This story just cements my opinion that New Orleans is almost like a sentient being that’ll read your mind and tip you off to the fact it can do that — just to remind you that it’ll always know you better than you’ll ever know it. Life is lived not just in buildings but in the uncanny spaces between, where you can admister the Duck Test all you want, but you might end up with a yowling cat on a bike instead.