Download Free Legendary Locals Of Metairie Louisiana Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Legendary Locals Of Metairie Louisiana and write the review.

Metairie is often considered the dull stepchild of New Orleans--a concrete "Anywhere, USA" lined with shopping malls frequented by fast-food eating, drive-up-daiquiri-drinking, cultureless suburbanites. Despite stereotypical misconceptions, sons and daughters of New Orleans who call Metairie home are every bit as colorful, talented, devious, and gracious as their relatives in the city. Johnny Wiggs kept New Orleans jazz alive. Verne Tripp invented "perma-press" and pioneered use of the electron microscope. On Atherton Drive, David Ferrie plotted a Cuban coup. Peter Gennaro left his father's bar to become a Broadway star. Shirley Ann Grau raised her children here while writing novels. Al Scramuzza built a crawfish empire and coached Metairie children. Ellen Degeneres found national fame, while Becky Allen won our hearts at home. Those who may not be widely known but have impacted lives in the community and afar are also included in this book, which is a tribute to the people of Metairie.
Since its founding in 1718 by the LeMoyne brothers, New Orleans has cemented its status as one of the busiest ports on the continent. Producing many unique and fascinating individuals, Colonial New Orleans was a true gumbo of personalities. The city lays claim to many nationalities, including Spaniards Baron Carondelet, Don Andres Almonester, and French sailors and privateers Jean Lafitte and Dominique Youx. Businessmen like Daniel Henry Holmes and Isidore Newman contributed to local flavor, as did musicians Buddy Bolden, Joe "King" Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Louis Prima. War heroes include P.G.T. Beauregard and Andrew Jackson Higgins. Avery Alexander, A.P. Tureaud, and Ernest Morial paved the way for African Americans to lead the city. Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, Ellen DeGeneres, Mel Ott, Archie Manning, and Drew Brees have kept the world entertained, while chefs and restaurateurs like Leah Chase and the Brennans sharpened the city's culinary chops. Legendary Locals of New Orleans pays homage to the notables that put spice in that gumbo.
“He struck a match to look at his watch. In the flare of the light they saw a young woman just at Pitot’s elbow—a young woman dressed all in black, with pale gold hair, and a baby sleeping on her shoulder. She glided to the edge of the bridge and stepped noiselessly off into the black waters.”—from Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans Ghosts are said to wander along the rooftops above New Orleans’ Royal Street, the dead allegedly sing sacred songs in St. Louis Cathedral, and the graveyard tomb of a wealthy madam reportedly glows bright red at night. Local lore about such supernatural sightings, as curated by Jeanne deLavigne in her classic Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans, finds the phantoms of bitter lovers, vengeful slaves, and menacing gypsies haunting nearly every corner of the city, from the streets of the French Quarter to Garden District mansions. Originally printed in 1944, all forty ghost stories and the macabre etchings of New Orleans artist Charles Richards appear in this new edition. Drawing largely on popular legend dating back to the 1800s, deLavigne provides vivid details of old New Orleans with a cast of spirits that represent the ethnic mélange of the city set amid period homes, historic neighborhoods, and forgotten taverns. Combining folklore, newspaper accounts, and deLavigne’s own voice, these phantasmal tales range from the tragic—brothers, lost at sea as children, haunt a chapel on Thomas Street in search of their mother—to graphic depictions of torture, mutilation, and death. Folklorist and foreword contributor Frank A. de Caro places the writer and her work in context for modern readers. He uncovers new information about deLavigne’s life and describes her book’s pervasive lingering influence on the Crescent City’s culture today.
From ancient bayous to beloved old businesses, Metairie has changed dramatically over generations. Many of those landmarks are lost to time; the lake, railroads and a beach resort were popular features in the early days. A streetcar ran through the short-lived City of Metairie Ridge, where gambling houses and dog tracks contributed more tax dollars than did the few residents. Old Bucktown was famous for its seafood. Fat City, once notorious for its nightlife, has seen better days. Author Catherine Campanella takes a look back at the schools, shops, bars, restaurants, alligator farms, bowling alleys, drive-ins and movie theaters from a bygone era.
Metairie was the first suburb of New Orleans; an outgrowth to the west by young families seeking larger lots, open air, and affordable new housing. Those suburbanites shared much in common with previous generations of New Orleanians who had migrated westward from the original town (now the French Quarter) to high land along the Mississippi River and the Metairie Ridge. When Jefferson Parish was established in 1825, it included all New Orleans faubourgs west of Felicity Street--what we now know as Uptown New Orleans. These would become the first cities in Jefferson Parish: Carrolton, Jefferson, and Lafayette. By the early 1900s, the westward expansion continued into what we now call Old Metairie and Bucktown. During the mid-20th century, Metairie boomed and is now one of the largest communities in Louisiana. While many residents consider themselves New Orleanians, even those born generations after their families moved to the suburb, Metairie has its own unique history.
In 2015, the beautiful jazz funeral in New Orleans for composer Allen Toussaint coincided with a debate over removing four Confederate monuments. Mayor Mitch Landrieu led the ceremony, attended by living legends of jazz, music aficionados, politicians, and everyday people. The scene captured the history and culture of the city in microcosm--a city legendary for its noisy, complicated, tradition-rich splendor. In City of a Million Dreams, Jason Berry delivers a character-driven history of New Orleans at its tricentennial. Chronicling cycles of invention, struggle, death, and rebirth, Berry reveals the city's survival as a triumph of diversity, its map-of-the-world neighborhoods marked by resilience despite hurricanes, epidemics, fires, and floods. Berry orchestrates a parade of vibrant personalities, from the founder Bienville, a warrior emblazoned with snake tattoos; to Governor William C. C. Claiborne, General Andrew Jackson, and Pere Antoine, an influential priest and secret agent of the Inquisition; Sister Gertrude Morgan, a street evangelist and visionary artist of the 1960s; and Michael White, the famous clarinetist who remade his life after losing everything in Hurricane Katrina. The textured profiles of this extraordinary cast furnish a dramatic narrative of the beloved city, famous the world over for mysterious rituals as people dance when they bury their dead.
From the infamous pirate Jean Laffite and the storied couple Bonnie and Clyde, to less familiar bandits like train-robber Eugene Bunch and suspected murderer Leather Britches Smith, Legendary Louisiana Outlaws explores Louisiana's most fascinating fugitives. In this entertaining volume, Keagan LeJeune draws from historical accounts and current folklore to examine the specific moments and legal climate that spawned these memorable characters. He shows how Laffite embodied Louisiana's shift from an entrenched French and Spanish legal system to an American one, and relates how the notorious groups like the West and Kimbrell Clan served as community leaders and law officers but covertly preyed on Louisiana's Neutral Strip residents until citizens took the law into their own hands. Likewise, the bootlegging Dunn brothers in Vinton, he explains, demonstrate folk justice's distinction between an acceptable criminal act (operating an illegal moonshine still) and an unacceptable one (cold-blooded murder). Recounting each outlaw's life, LeJeune also considers their motives for breaking the law as well as their attempts at evading capture. Running from authorities and trying to escape imprisonment or even death, these men and women often relied on the support of ordinary citizens, sympathetic in the face of oppressive and unfair laws. Through the lens of folk life, LeJeune's engaging narrative demonstrates how a justice system functions and changes and highlights Louisiana's particular challenges in adapting a system of law and order to work for everyone.
New Orleans Cemeteries depicts the 'cities of the dead' in all their grandeur and decay, their exquisite artisanship and humble memorials, their voluminous historical accounts of the city and undefinable spiritual qualities. The definitive book on a very curious subject, New Orleans Cemeteries is as intensely visual as it is informative.
Sacred Ground is a sumptuous photographic portrait of New Orleans's legendary cemeteries. Robert S. Brantley celebrates the otherworldly landscapes, intricate ironwork, evocative memorials, and stately monuments as vibrant sites of remembrance. New Orleans history is further revealed through biographies of twenty individuals whose grave sites are among those featured, including entrepreneurs, celebrated musicians, a world-class violin maker, an ex-slave turned minister, a ship's captain, and a young soldier felled by Spanish flu while in basic training for World War I. The rich duotone photographs, organized by cemetery, are followed by an index identifying the tombs and their iconography; an introduction by S. Frederick Starr provides background on New Orleans cemetery history, culture, and burial customs. Sacred Ground provides a stunning exploration of the traditions born of New Orleans's unique religious, cultural, and ethnic diversity.
City Park's 1,300 acres cradle the largest collection of mature live oaks in the nation. Established in 1854, it is one of the country's largest urban parks (457 acres larger than New York's City's Central Park and two years older) and contains the highest earthen elevation in New Orleans. City Park has welcomed as many as 11 million visitors per year who walk among 50 species of trees, including bald cypress, southern magnolia, and pine, and the thousands of ancient southern live oaks. At one mile wide and three miles long, the park's 11 miles of lagoons (the largest in the shape of Lake Pontchartrain) are stocked with a variety of fish. Neoclassical, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Arts and Crafts, Mission, and modern architecture complete City Park. It is a precious and beloved jewel.