Garden Legacy

Garden Legacy accords the French-American tradition of landscape design and horticultural study its rightful place in transatlantic cultural history. French settlers in New Orleans adapted garden prototypes from the era of Louis XIV to the more abundant plant life yet smaller-scale gardens of colonial Louisiana. This sumptuously illustrated survey showcases period maps and prints from The Historic New Orleans Collection and other North American and European institutions; the remarkable nineteenth-century plan-book collection of the New Orleans Notarial Archives; and contemporary memoirs of early Louisiana explorers and naturalists. Three wondrous centuries of New Orleans garden design are captured here, chronicled for the first time in the context of the city's Frenchness.

Profiles of nearly eighty individual properties—from the French Quarter to the old Creole neighborhoods downriver, from back-of-town and Bayou St. John to the newer upriver faubourgs—reveal both continuities and compelling differences in cultural ambitions and garden aesthetics. A foreword by S. Frederick Starr, owner of the city's only surviving antebellum riverfront plantation house, places the book and its authors within a vital line of New Orleans preservation efforts.

Between 1897 and 1917, a legal red-light district thrived at the edge of the French Quarter, helping establish the notorious reputation that adheres to New Orleans today. Though many scholars have written about Storyville, no thorough contemporary study of the blue books—directories of the neighborhood's prostitutes, featuring advertisements for liquor, brothels, and venereal disease cures—has been available until now.

Pamela D. Arceneaux's examination of these rare guides invites readers into a version of Storyville created by its own entrepreneurs. A foreword by the historian Emily Epstein Landau places the blue books in the context of their time, concurrent with the rise of American consumer culture and modern advertising. Illustrated with hundreds of facsimile pages from the blue books in The Historic New Orleans Collection's holdings, Guidebooks to Sin illuminates the intersection of race, commerce, and sex in this essential chapter of New Orleans history.