Axios: New Orleans Storyville Museum now open in French Quarter
- Laura Kuhn
- Sep 23, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Dec 3, 2024
New Orleans Storyville Museum now open in French Quarter
by Chelsea Brasted
September 23, 2024
The New Orleans-born inventor of the paper coffee cup has opened a new French Quarter museum examining the city's history with prostitution, gambling and alcohol.
Why it matters: You can't make this stuff up.
The latest: The New Orleans Storyville Museum is now open, named for the infamous red light district that once sat behind the French Quarter.
The big picture: "New Orleans was the gambling capital of America, the drinking capital of America, and the prostitution capital of America," says museum creator and curator Claus Sadlier. "But the museum is really about the storied past of New Orleans told in an interesting way."
Flashback: The neighborhood was founded in 1897 as an attempt by alderman Sidney Story to shove New Orleans' grittiest vices into just one corner of the city.
If you can't beat 'em, the thinking went, at least try to manage 'em.
Some residents with a solid sense of humor borrowed Story's name as a moniker for the neighborhood, which stuck to this day.
The Storyville experiment managed to last two decades, according to New Orleans' history website A Closer Walk, while it filled with high-end brothels, rollicking nightclubs and gambling dens.
Zoom in: The new museum is a "passion project" for Sadlier, whose claim to fame and fortune is that, in the late 1990s, he invented the paper coffee cup.
At the time, he was living in San Francisco and watching the specialty coffee craze take hold as plastic foam cups fell out of favor. Sadlier realized a single-walled paper coffee cup wasn't going to cut it.
Eventually, he built a company around his invention and sold it to Dixie Cup for $170 million in 2006.
Another invention and company followed, Covermate, which he sold in 2012.
He moved home to New Orleans the next year and bought a house in the French Quarter. See inside.
"It was always a dream as a child because we spent family Sundays going to Cafe du Monde and my father would show me the architecture," Sadlier tells Axios New Orleans.
After moving there, Sadlier, knowing he was ready to start a new business, started reading more about the neighborhood's history.
"The more I got into it, the more obvious it became," he says.
Inside the room: The museum begins its story with the city's founding and winds through rooms of photographs, videos and sets, including the recreation of a saloon complete with holograms of women in period dress.
But the displays don't shy away from Storyville's often difficult reality, Sadlier says, with panels that focus on birth control and abortion attempts.
Artifacts range from 200-year-old coins and weapons used in the Battle of New Orleans to original copies of "Blue Book" brothel directories, and peep show and gambling machines.
If you go: The New Orleans Storyville Museum is located at 1010 Conti St.
Visitors must be at least 18 years old.
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