Dr. Yolonda Youngs presenting in “A Second Look: Exploring Repeat Photography Across the American Landscape” on Friday 4/13/18. Photo by the author.

Last week, I found may way to an excellent session on Repeat Photography-as-Geographic Method organized by Dr. Bill Wyckoff from Montana State University. It inspired me to adopt the term “repeat photography” over “re-photography,” mostly because the former has seen an increase of use in academic texts, but also because it simply sounds better. Hyphenated words create all sorts of awkward syntax situations. Hopefully nobody minds if I keep the “Re-Photography” category for now (I don’t know how easy it would be to go back through and change all of my prior entries).

One post here from 2014 described talking my way up onto a balcony at the corner of Royal St. and St. Ann in the French Quarter to recreate one of my favorite postcards from the Ben Irving collection (if you don’t know who that is, stop, read this, then come back here. I’ll wait). I revisited the site several times on this trip, only once on purpose (a dinner with the Music Geography group on Tuesday night). The Pere Antoine restaurant had not changed at all, but the intersection had a giant divot. One of the structures diagonally across Royal Street had been torn out, apparently. I snapped a photo of the lot, and we moved on.

After getting back to Knoxville, I did some light research. Apparently, the building in question wasn’t torn out; it collapsed from years of neglect a few months after I took that picture. Though the French Quarter is one of the most photographed neighborhoods in North America, this building came off as fairly unremarkable. I doubt I would have thought much about it had it not been for its position within that postcard’s frame. I’m sure some photographs of it exist that were taken after mine (July 2014), but there’s no way to know for sure, outside of scoping Google Street View:

Oh, what’s that? Google sent their gaudy Streetview mobile through the Quarter in January 2014 (when the yellow house was still up) and then again in January 2017 (after it had collapsed)?

Looks like I have the last photo taken of that house EVER. If you see this and have a more recent photo, please comment or email it to me. I will be too ecstatic that people are actually reading this blog to feel bad about being proven wrong.

I didn’t speak with the Pere Antoine management and ask whether anyone was still there from 2014, but turnover in the restaurant industry being what it is, I would have been surprised. By the way, this mini-paragraph is foreshadowing.

Let’s roll the tape. Today’s entry will be divided into two distinct subsets of repeat photography: image recreation (the Ben Irving postcards) and personal photo recreation (re-staging my own photos from my first trip to New Orleans in April 1998). On this trip, my personal photo recreation were much more successful, for a variety of reasons that mostly narrow down to timing, luck, and people not wanting a stranger to go onto their (Federally owned) roof.

THE POSTCARDS

The Roosevelt Hotel (1937 / 2018)

Postcard depicting The Roosevelt Hotel mailed by Ben Irving in February 1937.

The Roosevelt Hotel, New Orleans, April 2018. Photo by the Author.

This one was hardly a success story. The artistic interpretations on the postcards take some liberties in “inventing” impossible perspectives on these buildings. Baronne Street, no longer the home to the wide-berth streetcar lines from 1937, is almost uncomfortably narrow, at least for my purposes. I took my picture (right) of the Roosevelt, standing in front of Cajun Mike’s Pub n’ Grub, which sits next door to the incredible Crescent City Books, which opened in 1992.

The following message appears on the postcard (February 1937):

This picture shows the Roosevelt Hotel, the largest and finest hotel in the South. It has been designed to meet the demand for the highest type of hotel service and accommodations. The Roosevelt, and the Bienville Hotel — facing Lee Circle, (under Roosevelt management) — together provide more than 1200 strictly first class rooms, each with a bath. The First Hotel in the South with more than a hundred Air Conditioned Guest Rooms. Come to the Roosevelt.

As with previous hotel postcards I’ve shared, air conditioning was a major selling luxurious selling point at that time. Being a Waldorf Astoria hotel, restored to its former glory in 2009, didn’t remove it from the luxury conversation either. I felt out of place breathing the air in that concourse. I paused to check out the Sazerac Lounge on my walk through to the other side, where I took these pictures:

I’m still of two minds about this zoom-out/ concave feature on my newer phone, but you have to give credit where credit’s due: you can see a LOT of this gigantic building.

Lafayette Square (1941 / 2018)

The back image from a souvenir packet mailed in 1941.

Lafayette Square, April 2018. Meh. At least I got both of those statues in the frame.

Anna J schemes with me to get any kind of superior angle to the Square. April 2018.

The souvenir packet contained a handful of beautiful vistas of City Park and Metairie Cemetery, neither of which I found a window of time to explore on this trip. I would have loved to, in either case. I’ve never been to City Park, and I haven’t been to Metairie Cemetery since 2008. OH DRAG ANOTHER EXCUSE TO GO BACK TO NEW ORLEANS I WAS HOPING I WOULDN’T WIND UP WITH ANY OF THOSE.

Time to complete this section with my only real success of the week:

CANAL STREET AND RAMPART AT NIGHT, 1937/2018

Canal Street at Night (Postcard Mailed Feb. 1937)

Canal Street at Night (Photo by Tyler Sonnichsen, April 2018)

If I had to make a list of my ten favorite cards in the Ben Irving collection, this one would most certainly be on it. The message on the back runs provides a 5-cent history of Canal Street, and makes you dig for the rest:

Canal Street, so named because in the olden days a big drainage Canal ran down its center, recently rebuilt at a cost of $3,500,000 [$51,078,304 in 2018 by USDL inflation metrics], is 170 feet wide, one of the widest central business thoroughfares in the world, has sidewalks of terrazzo marble and neutral grounds. It marks the upper limits of the old city.

This street scene fascinates me for a few reasons. First, the city apparently altered or tore out that traffic island in the center of the postcard (or just played a trick of perspective and that “island” is where those light poles are standing to the right of my photo). Second, it seems presumptuous of the postcard artist to include those puffy clouds in the background, considering how much light pollution emanates from Canal Street anytime that the sky is as dark as it appears there. That being said, the buildings were much shorter back then. Third, while the Saenger Theater (on the respective left sides) is still operating in its full glory the Loew’s theater, shown on the right side of the 1937 postcard in its full glory, currently sits in state, having closed due to fire code violations(?) in 2007. Learning from that Cinema Treasures page that the owners are planning to tear it down and build a hotel on the site (can never have too many of those) makes me want to get on a plane back and break into it while I still can. The whole building is boarded up, even the street-level businesses. I guess the property is still generating some revenue with those two billboards:

The State Palace Theater, April 2018. Photo by the author.

RECREATING MY 1998 PHOTOS

As I’ve mentioned, my first trip to New Orleans took place over the French Quarter Festival almost exactly two decades ago. My incredibly talented sister played in the Connecticut Youth Jazz Workshop, whose director managed to book various combos on stages throughout the French Quarter over that week. I was a Freshman in high school and taking a crack at amateur filmmaking and photography. I have no idea if I’ll ever digitize the videos I filmed of the shows, but the band(s) performed on the Natchez Steamboat, the Marriott Hotel, and once the Festival kicked off, the Bourbon Street Stage (with a looming storm overhead). I also filmed the Second Line parade that opened the Festival that Thursday*. It’s remarkable that the Youth Jazz workshop got booked, considering how fast the FQF was growing and the height it’s grown to, based on what I saw the other week.

This year, I was chairing a paper session during the opening day parade (Thursday at 10 AM), so I couldn’t retrace my 20-year-old steps and film it. It would have been fun to find my 1998 vantage point and compose some video that juxtaposed the two, especially if I had landed any footage of Mitch Landrieu (I have a few seconds of Marc Morial walking through the frame in 1998). The last time I was in the same room with Landrieu (at the US Convention of Mayors in 2010; more on that soon), he shook all of our hands and introduced himself as Mitch. Class. Act. Also, he delivered one of the greatest speeches of the twenty-first century last year.

Coincidentally, the NOLA Virgin Megastore opened that week in a style best described as “Richard Branson.” My father and I went down to 620 Decatur, where a large crowd had gathered that included Branson, some city authorities, and a performance by Aaron Neville. At the time, his only song that I knew was “Everybody Plays the Fool.” Either way, I loved the spectacle, and I bought my first Pavement CD that day (Brighten the Corners), along with Beck’s Odelay and the Richard D. James Album by Aphex Twin. I still listen to all three regularly, and I’ve written extensively about the former’s influence on my love of music and approaches to teaching musical geography. I still have a poster of a young B.B. King they gave out as souvenirs that day. I wonder why they put King on there rather than an artist properly from New Orleans, but it looked cool and still does. The poster and the CDs have both outlived the store itself^, which shuttered around the time of Katrina and became one of the first casualties in a wave that claimed all of Branson’s stores in 2007.

I enjoyed revisiting some of the pictures I took on that trip, considering how many tangential elements of the French Quarter’s landscape had changed since then. I took photos of my pictures for reference (scanned in here for consistency) and stopped by a few locations before AAG kicked into high gear. Here are some of the results.

The LaBranche House (700 Royal St.)

The LaBranche House at 700 Royal Street in April 1998.

The LaBranche House, 700 Royal Street, NOLA, April 2018

In my 1998 photo album, I labeled this building as “highly photographed building in the French Quarter,” forgetting what it was called. The LaBranche House has gone through a few iterations, including the Royal Cafe (the possible setting of one of my favorite American Music Club songs) and all within the vice grip of the tourist gaze. Today, the street level contains the Forever New Orleans gift shop, home to the dumbest catalog of tacky souvenirs I’ve ever laid eyes on and probably the most profitable business to ever occupy that space.

The 400 Block of Royal Street, Looking East

The 700 Block of Royal Street, April 1998.

The 700 Block of Royal Street, 2018

As much as Google Streetview has revolutionized the way we think about cartography, place, and space, I resent it for making this whole process a bit too easy. In this situation, I stopped myself dead in my tracks and just saw this row of buildings, proud of myself for not prowling through Street View images to line this up ahead of time. I guess the NOPD was into queuing up their squad cars on the sidewalk by the station. I’m assuming that’s what the large building out of the frame(s) to the right was, since it’s unmarked on Google Maps and I can’t find a sign anywhere.

Court of the Two Sisters Restaurant, Exterior (613 Royal St.)

From what I remember, my family and a few others made reservations for one nice dinner while we were in New Orleans that week. I may have been turned away for wearing shorts and had to run back to the Sheraton to change before being allowed to sit down. I also think that at one point during our meal, my mom asked our server to bring her meal back to the kitchen, and he reacted as if he had been shot. We never were too comfortable in higher-class dining. At any rate, I took this first photo (above, left) before we walked into the restaurant. Portions of two heads are visible in the frame, and I can’t remember who they were. The only obvious difference here is that the building next door has been repainted yellow from red. The restaurant’s facade, even the positions of its green shutters (coincidence, I’m sure), have not changed in twenty years.

Court of the Two Sisters Restaurant, Interior (613 Royal St.)

I regret not taking more time to snap this one (on the right), but I didn’t feel completely welcome back there. The restaurant had just reopened for dinner service (around 4:30) and I was the first customer in there, clearly not intent on buying anything. I walked back, saw the fountain, pulled out my phone and snapped the picture. In the 1998 photo (left), I appear to have been standing right behind the fountain. I could probably also blame this discrepancy on that table right in front of me (right).

My favorite element of this photo, as beautiful as that courtyard has always been, was that cook walking through with the dolly. After I snapped the photo on the right last week, I walked out and introduced myself to the hostess. She didn’t seem terribly interested in what I was doing, but she asked a couple of older employees if anyone who worked at the restaurant in 1998 was still there. After a couple of servers and kitchen staff relayed the message, “Mr. Thomas” emerged from the courtyard. According to the hostess, Mr. Thomas had been there for 35 years, though he wouldn’t corroborate that exact number when he arrived. I showed him the original photo and asked him if he remembered who that man with the dolly was.

“Yeah, I remember him. He was a cook who used to work for us.”
“He’s not still here, is he?”
“Nope”
“Um, do you remember what his name was?”
“Nope,” said Mr. Thomas as he drifted back toward the kitchen.

And that was that. Moving on…

The Napoleon House (500 Chartres St.)

All I know about this house was that it was built for Napoleon following his (first? second?) exile, but he never lived there. Still, it has that mystique about it. The sign hanging above my vantage point in 1998 was no longer there, so I had trouble framing this. I recognize that this is a strange area in which to be a perfectionist.

 Jackson Square (Facing Chartres St.)

Dixieland band on Jackson Square, New Orleans, April 1998

A slew of characters wander across Jackson Square, New Orleans, 2018

I remember taking this picture during a stop on a walking tour that brought us through Jackson Square and at Cafe du Monde, on the Square’s Southeast corner. I also took a good photo of the Andrew Jackson statue nearby that my friend Blake ruined/enhanced by running into the frame. The other week, while my friends and I were passing through, I noticed the same rounded balcony (the French Quarter makes this really easy) and snapped the photo on the right. It wasn’t intentional, but I did capture a gentleman who we lovingly called “Steampunk Santa” walking through and eating frozen yogurt. Though the resident band wasn’t set up in that exact spot (as amazing as that would have been), there was still plenty of action less than 10 meters away:

Old man party time with a brass band in Jackson Square, April 2018. Photo by the author.

That’s all I’ve got. I love New Orleans so much. I wish I had more in the tank to write about, but it’s late, it’s the last week of classes, and I’ve already put you all through enough. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions about these photos or the stories that accompany them, or you have your own photo blog/dump from AAG this year. Have any of you caught yourself doing some repeat photography of your own? I think this is proof enough of how addictive it is. Since the AAG is now dedicating paper sessions to it, I have some hope that I’ll roll all of this insanity into something bigger.

Part III (yes, really) of my AAG 2018 retrospective coming on Friday. Don’t worry, though; I promise that it’s nothing like these first two parts.

A lagniappe: me waiting for a streetcar up Canal in December 2007. Hopefully I’ll recreate this one some day (this may have been somewhere in Mid-City). Photo by Ted Hornick.

*Whether the term “Second Line” was thrown around so much by tourists before Katrina is questionable. I also remember hearing a constant churn of Zydeco music emanating from gift shops along Decatur Street, which I cannot say is still the case twenty years on.

^ I can only assume. I still have the CD of Brighten the Corners, but the other two fell to one of a handful of downsizing rampages over the years.