“
Basin Street offers readers an account of several aspects of ‘underground’ New Orleans that is both highly entertaining and provocatively informative. A kind of oral history of what the author calls New Orleans’ ‘Pink Past,’ by which he means ‘the field of harlotry’ in all its many guises,
Basin Street offers a detailed and humorously erudite narrative which includes the recruitment of participants, relocation in response to city growth, the involvement of local authorities (i.e., the local police force), and, of course, music traditions long associated with the legalized prostitution district known far and wide well into the twenty-first century as Storyville.”
—from the foreword by Roger Hahn
In this spicy text, author André Cajun captures the scandalous past of New Orleans’ infamous Basin Street and the area widely known as Storyville. This reprint of the second edition published in 1957 includes the charming pen and ink drawings of Zamb. Roger Hahn provides an insightful foreword that provides a cultural context for Cajun’s lurid depictions.
About the Author
André Cajun (1893-1957), born Andrew Jackson Navard in Lake Charles, published several tourist booklets that he hawked, along with his entertaining stories, as a lecturer on the steamer The President. He is also the author of Stories of New Orleans published by Pelican with a new foreword by John T. Magill, Curator/Historian for The Historic New Orleans Collection.
About the Foreword Writer
Roger Hahn is an accomplished, versatile, and respected New Orleans journalist. For more than four decades he has contributed to such venues as NPR Jazz Online, Louisiana Cultural Vistas magazine, OffBeat magazine, Songlines:The World Music Magazine (UK), Rhythms: Australia’s Roots Music Magazine, and KnowLA: Online Encyclopedia of Louisiana Culture.
About the Illustrator
Wiley S. Churchill (1900-1987), who produced art under the pseudonym Zamb, was a prominent artist and frequent exhibitor with the New Orleans Art League. He illustrated several books about New Orleans. His paintings and pen and ink drawings were widely collected in the mid-twentieth century and are still prized today for their depiction of the New Orleans region.
BASIN STREET
By André Cajun
Illustrated by Zamb
Foreword by Roger Hahn
HISTORY / Social History
HISTORY / United States / State & Local / South
80 pp. 19 illus. 1 map
ISBN: 9781455618392