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Gary Krist talks about Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans, how he researched the book, and why he chose Storyville, and this specific thirty year period in New Orleans' history to explore.
Q. What drew you to New Orleans as your subject?
A. I love the fact that New Orleans was the first major American metropolis to build an opera house but the last to build a sewer system. The city really was (and is) an original, arising from a confluence of ethnicities and traditions unlike that of any other city in the country. As a result, it developed a unique urban culture - not quite foreign, but not quite American either - that was particularly fascinating to me. Certainly the indulgent, cosmopolitan ethos of New Orleans was entirely different from the culture of the last place I wrote about - Chicago, a frenetic industrial giant representing the epitome of no-nonsense businesslike practicality. So that contrast is one of the things that drew me to New Orleans this time around - I wanted to see how the social, racial, and moral issues of the times played out in these two very different urban settings.
Q. New Orleans has a long and storied history. Why did you choose to home in on this particular thirty-year period of the early twentieth century?
A. I've made the Progressive Era something of a personal specialty in my recent books, mainly because I see it as a crucial age of transition, marking the beginning of modernity as we know it. This was the period when the U.S. was evolving from a mostly rural, mostly Anglo-Saxon Protestant society to a mostly urban, multicultural, secular society. In large cities in particular, this transition was creating a lot of what you might call productive strife, as the traditional power structure changed to accommodate these new developments. But really, with warring vice lords, the birth of jazz, the rise of the Mafia, an ax-murderer's killing spree, and the phenomenon of Storyville (the city's short-lived legalized red-light district) - I didn't need much of an excuse to focus on this chapter of New Orleans history.
Q. How did the "civil war" among NOLA's citizens come to be?
A. Sometime around 1890 or so, the city's Anglo-American elites decided that New Orleans needed to be cleaned up in order to attract Northern capital investment to rebuild its infrastructure. So they took arms against the city's various demimondes - prostitutes, black jazz musicians, ethnic criminals, etc. - thinking that by suppressing these elements of the city's culture, they'd tame its unruliness and bring it more into line with Protestant Southern norms of race, morality, and civic order. This "war" lasted some thirty years, and obviously it didn't turn out quite as the reformers had hoped. New Orleans remains untamed to this day, although the city of 2014, for all its eccentricity and irrepressible personality, is in fact a far less idiosyncratic place than it was in its nineteenth-century heyday.
Q. Does anything remain of Storyville today?
A. Unfortunately, very little. For decades after the closing of Storyville, the city's powers-that-be were embarrassed by that whole chapter of New Orleans history, so they allowed the neighborhood to deteriorate into obscurity. Finally, in the 1940s, they bulldozed the major portion of the old district - including the beautiful Basin Street Victorian mansions - to build the Iberville housing projects. All that remains now of Basin Street's Storyville years is a little one-story building on the corner of Basin and Bienville Streets. It used to be Lulu White's Saloon, standing right next door to her legendary brothel, Mahogany Hall. Last time I checked, the building was occupied by a little takeout seafood joint.
Q. Empire of Sin features politicians, prostitutes, jazzmen, moral reformers, and a serial killer, among others. Was there one figure you found particularly intriguing?
A. There were just so many fascinating characters living in New Orleans at this time, but the one who intrigued me most was Buddy Bolden, widely regarded as the first person to play the music later known as jazz. Bolden was never recorded (although a story persists about a "lost cylinder"), so there's no way to know for sure what he sounded like, and there's been so much folklore that's grown up around him that it's very difficult to separate reality from myth. But many of the oral histories recorded by jazzmen of the era identify Bolden as the man who started it all. And he was a truly complex figure, full of contradictions: a charismatic, sharp-dressing womanizer, a hopeless, sometimes violent alcoholic, and an endlessly inventive musician who actually lacked the technical prowess of many of the cornet and trumpet players who followed him. He seems to have been plagued - as many artists are - by warring creative and self-destructive impulses, and he tragically ended up spending the last decades of his life in a mental institution, forgotten by virtually everyone who adored him in his day. I'm always surprised at how little-known he is today, given his importance as the forefather of a great American art form.
Q. Tom Anderson, "The Mayor of Storyville," is one of the central figures in Empire of Sin. Can you tell us a bit about him?
A. Anderson was really a character out of Horatio Alger - a short, scrappy kid from the streets of the rough Irish Channel neighborhood who rose to become the most powerful vice lord in the city. He projected the persona of an elegant and dignified aristocrat, dressing like a wealthy boulevardier, but he never really lost the hard working-class edge of the Irish Channel. And unlike many criminal leaders, he was amazingly popular, getting his way by trading favors and making friends, rather than enemies, wherever he went. According to his associates, he was even a friend to the prostitutes who worked for him, giving them advice about their man troubles. ("Don't do nothing drastic" was his favorite dictum.) But he wielded enormous power, both in the legitimate world (he was a state legislator for twenty years) and in the New Orleans underworld, where his dominance over Storyville was so complete that the district was nicknamed "Anderson County." As with Bolden, much of what's been written about him previously is legend rather than fact, but I was able to dig up some lost details about his personal life - like the fact that he was actually married four times, not two, as most sources have it - in the transcripts of various court cases he was involved in.
Q. How do you go about researching your books?
A. Since I'm a narrative historian - with an obligation to keep general readers interested and turning pages - my goal is to tell the stories of history in as concrete a way as possible, with plenty of scenes of conflict and interpersonal drama. The idea is to make the book read like a novel, but since I try to hold myself to very strict standards of scholarship, I can't make anything up. That means I have to find those scenes in the written historical record. So I'm always on the lookout for things like memoirs, letters, court transcripts, newspaper interviews—any kind of record in which a participant in the drama tells exactly what happened when and how. Such sources, of course, can be as unreliable as any others - people often misremember their lives, or just lie outright about themselves - so I have to constantly make judgments as to their credibility. Often I'll discuss these judgments in the endnotes, which may be why a lot of people tell me that they enjoy reading the endmatter in these books as much as the main text.
Q. You've now examined Chicago and New Orleans in two works. Is there another city you would want to tackle as a future subject?
A. I've become fascinated with the Los Angeles of essentially this same period. I'd really like to write an L.A. book with a similar narrative approach, centering on the Hollywood of the Silent Era and a few other elements. But it's still very much a half-formed idea, so I can't really say much more about it.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
William Dalrymple is the author of six previous acclaimed works of history and travel, including City of Djinns, which won the Young British Writer of the Year Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; the best-selling ... (more)
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