The Creole City

Bernard de Marigny

Marigny introduces the game of Craps

Any discussion of Creole culture in New Orleans needs to start with how ambiguous the word “Creole” is. Early on, the term might refer to slaves born in the New World, to gens de couleur libres (free people of color), or to people of mixed racial heritage. Especially after Louisiana transferred to American control in 1803, the white descendents of the French and Spanish who lived in New Orleans increasingly adopted the term “Creole” for themselves to distinguish themselves from the influx of Americans whom they disdained.

The Creoles were never Cajuns, also a French-speaking people but coming to Louisiana via Canada and living in rural areas. The Creoles saw themselves as urban and sophisticated. A refined style of European living was their aspiration, and their love of gastronomic pleasures gave birth to the cocktail and created their celebrated cuisine of Louisiana ingredients richly prepared with Old World flair.

The integration of Creole New Orleans into America didn’t happen seamlessly. The first administrators were hampered by the fact they didn’t even share a common language with their new city’s citizens. Opportunity-seeking Americans arrived in New Orleans and settled in the Faubourg St. Marie (to be called “St. Mary’s”) on the uptown side of Canal St. This neighborhood became known as the American Quarter in opposition to the French Quarter where the Creoles lived. Political, social, and economic tensions arose between the two neighborhoods, and no-man’s-land was Canal Street’s wide “neutral ground,” a term that is still used for any New Orleans street median.

The Creoles loved the opera, masked balls, and café life and saw the Americans as pushy and pointlessly ambitious and greedy. One notable Creole was Bernard de Marigny who inherited a fortune at the age of fifteen, a fortune which he heedlessly squandered over his long life. He loved to gamble and is credited with popularizing craps, a Creole dice game. Although American businessmen offered to help him develop his plantation downriver from the French Quarter into a thriving commercial area, Marigny instead sold lots to other Creoles. The locale became a district of charming cottages that white Creoles used to house their mixed-race mistresses and inevitable second families. An eclectic mix of free people of color, artisans, and immigrants also lived there. Today, the neighborhood called the Faubourg Marigny is the funky, colorful heart of New Orleans bohemia while hotel skyscrapers and office buildings fill the American Quarter, now dryly called the Central Business District.

While Creole French is no longer spoken in New Orleans, the Creole accent lives on in New Orleans’ food, architecture, and joie de vivre. In fact, one could easily make the case that without the heritage of both black and white Creole culture, New Orleans wouldn’t be New Orleans.