‘Empire of Sin,’ by Gary Krist (Published 2014) (2024)

When Tom Anderson’s saloon opened in 1901, at the entrance to the recently designated sin district known as Storyville on the edge of New Orleans’s French Quarter, people from all over town came to marvel at its opulence. Its cherrywood bar stretched half a block and was lit by a hundred electric lights. With Anderson’s encouragement, high-class brothels were soon flourishing down Basin Street. Josie Arlington, his business partner, had a four-story Victorian mansion with a domed cupola, mirrored parlor and Oriental statues. The exotic, mixed-race Lulu White built a brick palace that specialized in interracial sex and featured the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton at the piano. Another octoroon (the appellation given to people considered to be one-eighth black), Willie V. Piazza, passed herself off as a countess and sported both a monocle and a diamond choker. Anderson, whose civic spirit earned him the title “the Mayor of Storyville,” published a Blue Book that contained photos and descriptions of the area’s better prostitutes, annotated with symbols (“w” for white, “c” for colored, “J” for Jewish and “oct.” for octoroon). It was all a vivid expression of the city’s tolerance and diversity.

Gary Krist, a lapsed novelist who now writes nonfiction narratives, chronicles the crazy excitement of the Storyville era in this well-reported and colorful tale of jazz, sex, crime and corruption. I can attest, as a native of New Orleans, that in “Empire of Sin” he has captured the flavors and class nuances of the town. And his interwoven story lines, intentionally or not, evoke a piece of jazz, albeit one that’s Buddy Bolden raggedy in places. Some strands, like the concurrent rise of Storyville and jazz, weave together nicely, and others trail off like a wayward solo, among them the descriptions of some unsolved murders that may or may not have involved a crazy axman who may or may not have been connected to the Mafia.

The most interesting aspect of Krist’s book is the battle between upright uptown reformers, who wished to rid New Orleans of sin and corruption, and downtown denizens, who relished the town’s permissive mores. With our 21st-century sensibilities, we’re expected to be appalled by the degradation and exploitation of the women of Storyville. But by the end of the book most readers will be cheering for Anderson over what Krist calls the “highly sanctimonious” temperance advocates and “self-styled champions of virtue.”

This isn’t merely a case of rooting for the raffish. Krist’s underlying theme is the uncomfortable relationship of civic reform to class prejudice. Leaders of the uptown business establishment and social elite were opposed to the tolerance that defined Storyville. But Krist shows that their intolerance went deeper. They were repelled by racial intermingling, and some were involved in notorious lynchings of both blacks and Italians. An integral part of their moralistic crusade was support for Jim Crow laws that attempted to resegregate the city and destroy the complex social interplay among the various shadings of Creoles and whites.

The first American metropolis to build an opera house, New Orleans was, Krist writes, “the last to build a sewerage system.” By the late 19th century, the city was populated by French, Spaniards, Haitians, Brazilians, Scots, Germans, Italians, former slaves and Creoles, by white and black and in between. It wasn’t so much a melting pot as a gumbo pot: Each group blended with the others while retaining some of its own flavor. Racial mixing was not only rampant but exuberant.

Krist’s scalawag hero, Tom Anderson, was of Scotch-Irish descent, but he cultivated connections with all the town’s tribes, even occasionally the uptown elite. He and a friend created a spoof Mardi Gras ball featuring a queen and court composed of prostitutes; people from all walks of life, including a few socially prominent interlopers in masks, would attend. His big break came partly at the hands of the reformers who wanted to contain the town’s pervasive prostitution. “Recognizing that any attempt to abolish vice entirely was doomed to failure (at least in New Orleans),” Krist writes, “they hoped instead to regulate and isolate the trade.” Storyville, which was named, much to his chagrin, for Sidney Story, the alderman who devised the plan, had 230 brothels by 1905. At Mahogany Hall, Lulu White often appeared in a formal gown, a red wig and so many diamonds “she was said to rival ‘the lights of the St. Louis Exposition.’ ” According to lore, she offered customers a “discount book” of 15 tickets, each featuring “a different lewd act.” As for Willie V. Piazza, who was light enough to “passe pour blanc” but didn’t choose to, her outfits “were carefully studied by local dressmakers, allegedly to be copied for the ensembles of customers belonging to the city’s ‘better half.’ ”