FEATURE: Preservation Hall and the bohemian French Quarter in the twentieth century

By Alison Fensterstock

Part 1 of 5

Preservation Hall opened in 1961, a welcome home base for the aging performers and listeners who prized their talents, experience and memories. The former art gallery drew a funky crowd: artists and beatniks, poets and travelers, rabid music fans and young musicians eager to hear New Orleans’ indigenous creation – jazz – from players who remembered its birth at the turn of the 20th century. The little building at 726 St. Peter stood nearly smack in the center of one of America’s oldest neighborhoods, full of grand old architecture and elegant restaurants. The Quarter was also home to vibrant immigrant communities, sailors in port for a few days with plenty of stories to tell, and young artists looking for community and cheap rent.

Larry Borenstein and friends at a courtyard jam session at 726 St. Peter Street.  ca. 1958

 For more than a hundred years, the French Quarter has welcomed and nourished generations of freethinkers, artistic visionaries, creative entrepreneurs and free spirits. Preservation Hall was conceived in that rich and vital climate, and has gone on to become one of its venerable institutions. Read on to learn more about the poets, independent publishers, buskers, actors, eccentrics, activists and oddities that, like the Hall, have called the Quarter home.

Like New York’s Greenwich Village, by the early ‘60s the French Quarter already had a history as a hotbed of creative activity – particularly for those artists who marched proudly out of step with the mainstream. Painters, musicians, writers and unusual thinkers were drawn to the cheap rents and the laissez-faire culture of the neighborhood, with its vibrant cafe culture and busy, colorful street life. The Quarter’s first famous wave of 20th-century bohemia came in the years immediately following World War 1, when creative sorts like authors Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, painter Alberta Kinsey and photographer “Pops” Whitesell – whose studio was located at 726 St. Peter Street, which would later become Preservation Hall – made art, published writing, mounted theater productions and flouted Prohibition together.  

Arts and Crafts Club of New Orleans

Between 1922 and 1951, the Arts and Crafts Club of New Orleans seeked to introduce contemporary artistic influences and movements to New Orleans.  The club sponsored traveling exhibitions, lectures, and classes for emerging artists.  Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection.

Dixie's Bar ca. 1953

Located at 701 Bourbon Street, Dixie's was one of the South’s few openly gay bars in the 1950s.

Pops Whitesell & Frances B. Johnston

Photographers Frances B. Johnston and Pops Whitesell, ca. 1948.  Whitesell settled in 1921 at an apartment and studio at 726 St. Peter Street behind what is now Preservation Hall and by the 1940's ranked among the top ten salon exhibitors in the world.  Photo courtesy of Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection (Library of Congress)

Alberta Kinsey with her paintings on exhibit at Pirate's Alley, In New Orleans. ca. 1940.

In the 1940s, artist Alberta Kinsey (1875-1952) exhibited her work in a French Quarter gallery.  Though born in Ohio, Kinsey spent much of her career in New Orleans.  Photo courtesy of Louisiana Historical Photographs of the State Library

Courtyard at 726 St. Peter, ca. 1920

Photo by Pops Whitesell.  Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection.

The Double Dealer literary magazine

Dixie's Bar ca. 1954

In the late 1940s, sister proprietors Miss Irma and Miss Dixie Fasnacht established a club that attracted artists, writers, entertainers, French Quarter residents, and well known popular locals, such as businessman Clay Shaw (in toga).  courtesy of the Jack Robinson Archive.

Larry Borenstein and friends in the courtyard at 726 St. Peter Street ca. 1958

Larry Borenstein and friends at a courtyard jam at Associated Artists gallery at 726 St. Peter Street.  These sessions evolved into what eventually became Preservation Hall. Photo by Dan Leyrer.  Courtesy of the Preservation Hall Archives.

That community birthed several impactful New Orleans artistic institutions, with varying lengths of endurance. From 1921 until 1925, the “Double Dealer” literary magazine published notable writers including the Quarterites Faulkner and Anderson as well as Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway and Thornton Wilder. Between 1922 and 1951, the Arts and Crafts Club taught classes, held lectures and exhibited work by Picasso, Degas, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dali and others. Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre remains at the edge of Jackson Square today, and celebrates its hundredth anniversary in 2016.

In “Dixie Bohemia,” his chronicle of the fertile ‘20s Quarter scene, author John Shelton Reed explains its eventual ebb with a familiar tale of the gentrification cycle: the artists had made the area attractive to tourists and high-society New Orleanians, who drove up real estate prices and crowded the galleries and cafes. Many members of the original creative set moved on. But the Quarter was far from tamed. As the twentieth century passed its halfway mark, America was on the cusp of seismic cultural and political change. At the dawn of the sixties in the French Quarter, art and activism intersected and were nourished in a singularly New Orleans way.