Storyville: The District the Navy Closed

In eighteen ninety-seven, the New Orleans city council passed an ordinance confining prostitution to a thirty-eight-block district near Basin Street. The legislation was authored by alderman Sidney Story, and the district was immediately and mockingly named for him. Storyville. It would operate for exactly twenty years.

The district occupies a particular place in American musical history because of who played there. Storyville was among the few commercial venues in New Orleans where mixed-race Creole musicians could find regular paid work, alongside Black musicians from the uptown neighborhoods, in a city whose social codes were otherwise rigidly enforced. Jelly Roll Morton, born Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe in eighteen ninety, played piano in Storyville establishments from his teenage years. King Oliver worked the district before moving to Chicago. The Hogan Jazz Archive's oral history collection documents a consistent picture: Storyville was not incidental to the birth of jazz but one of its primary commercial laboratories, a place where musical experimentation could happen because the venues needed something to offer besides the obvious.

Buddy Bolden, whose name appears in those oral histories as the origin point of the new music, is associated with the district, though the specific venues and dates of his Storyville performances are difficult to confirm from oral record alone. What is confirmed: no recording of Bolden exists. He was committed to the Louisiana State Insane Asylum in nineteen oh seven and died there in nineteen thirty-one. The music he made left no primary evidence beyond the memories of the people who heard it.

The Navy closed Storyville in nineteen seventeen, declaring it a public health hazard too close to wartime military installations. The closure was not the work of moral reformers, who had been trying and failing for years. It took a federal order to shut it down. The physical district was demolished in nineteen thirty-nine, replaced by the Iberville housing development. Nothing marks the original footprint except the street grid.