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Gospel great Mahalia Jackson often sang at Mt. Moriah Missionary Baptist Church on Millaudon Street in an area of the city known as 'Black Pearl.'
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Hey Blake,
I was wondering where I could find information on what is referred to as the "black pearl" section of the city. How did it receive its name?
Justin Reuther
Dear Justin,
Black Pearl received its name in 1974, so dubbed by city planners. The year before, the city had started to use the term "neighborhood" for planning and gathering socioeconomic data. We now have 72 "official" neighborhoods.
Black Pearl is a rather isolated neighborhood, and its boundaries are the river, St. Charles Avenue and Lowerline Street. It was once part of a sugar plantation and then a part of the village of Carrollton. Laurent Millaudon was one of the first residents, and there is a street bearing his name.
Carrollton grew rapidly and was incorporated into a town in 1845, but it wasn't until after the Civil War that the Black Pearl area began to fill. Many of the folks who settled there were poor. Needing inexpensive housing, some came to live in newly built tenements that were located on the higher, drier ground provided by the natural levee in the area.
In Black Pearl, at 147 Millaudon St., you can visit the Mt. Moriah Missionary Baptist Church where Mahalia Jackson, the famous gospel diva, used to sing.
Hey Blake,
James Buchanan Eads (1820-1887) was an engineer who improved the navigability of the mouth of the Mississippi by having jetties built in New Orleans. We heard that there is/was an Eads Plaza near a ferry landing at Canal Street. Do you know of any sites that recognize Mr. Eads?
Jan
Dear Jan,
Take yourself down to the river, and you will find a site that used to be called Eads Plaza. Today, it is called Spanish Plaza, part of a gift from the Spanish government to the city of New Orleans. Providing one entrance to the inside part of the Riverwalk, the plaza measures about 70,00 square feet and includes as its focal point the fountain which is surrounded by the seals of the provinces of Spain.
Since the Plaza was dedicated in 1978, nobody seems to remember Mr. Eads and what he did to save this city's port.
Ships trying to get up the Mississippi River were often hampered by the silt that accumulated at the mouth. This silt build-up worsened during the Civil War, due to neglect. By 1870, the problem was so bad that some of the bigger ships got stuck on a bar for days or weeks, causing a massive traffic jam. New Orleans, the once second-place American port, dropped to 11th place.
Finally, someone offered a solution to the desperate situation. James B. Eads -- the self-taught engineer who had built ironclads for the Union during the Civil War and a bridge across the Mississippi River at St. Louis, Mo. -- came up with a plan to solve the silt problem. He wanted to build parallel dikes, or jetties, at the mouths of the passes. By constricting the channel, the stream would flow faster and prevent the silt from settling. Eads took his plan to Congress, but Army engineers opposed him. So did the locals who feared that the jetties would cause flooding.
Eads' plan included building and maintaining two jetties at the mouth of the river for $10 million. He was so confident that his plan would work that he offered an all-or-nothing deal: either it worked or he took nothing. However, because of the strong opposition, he was awarded a contract for only half that amount to build a jetty at South Pass.
Work began in 1875 with the construction of two artificial banks each 2 miles long and 700 feet apart. Four years later, the channel was 30 feet deep, and the bar had been swept into the Gulf of Mexico.
Thanks to Eads and his genius and persistence, New Orleans was able to regain its place as a significant world port. In fact, in the year after the South Pass jetties were finished, 840 ships came up the river to our port. It wasn't until 20 years later that the Army engineers themselves built a second jetty at the Southwest Pass.
