NOLA.com/Times-Picayune: Storyville, New Orleans' Famed Red-Light District, Gets a Fresh Look at French Quarter Site

Storyville, New Orleans' Famed Red-Light District, Gets a Fresh Look at French Quarter Site

by Dave Walker

October 31, 224

At least by neighborhood standards, the new Storyville Museum will strike some visitors as chaste, or at least chaste-adjacent, given the topic, which is New Orleans’ civic attempt at vice consolidation at the turn of the last century.

The historic footprint of the Storyville red-light district, where not-legal-but-tolerated sex work occurred in fancy mansions and grungy cribs from 1897 to 1917, is just a few steps toward the lake from the museum’s storefront.

A few steps toward the river, at least at certain hours? Much worse than you’ll see inside 1010 Conti St.

“If people are expecting a sex museum, they'll be disappointed,” said Claus Sadlier, the museum’s creator.

If, however, they’re expecting a PG-13 introduction to the city’s celebrated collection of fin de siècle brothels, the cultural and political winds that caused their assembly and then dissolution, and some of the district’s lasting legacies in popular culture, there are worse ways to spend $31.50 in the French Quarter. (That’s for the adult admission, the only kind there is. This is an ages-18-and-up joint.)

The Storyville Museum offers an immersive exhibit that includes a walking tour of the vanished New Orleans red-light district.

The story of Storyville as told here begins with a brief and colorful primer on the historic founding and earliest years of the city, introduced as the setup to how New Orleans inevitably became a continental capital of immorality.

Early commerce traffic down the Mississippi, the booming international port near the river’s termination and an apparently permanent state of moral flexibility all contributed to the demimonde boom. Storyville itself came about as a civic cure, or at least cosmetic remediation, to a citywide “plague of prostitutes,” per one of the newspapers of the day.

Past the intro, once Storyville got roaring.

Informational text describes some of the district’s finer destinations (Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall, Tom Anderson’s Arlington Annex, etc.) and the gallery concludes with a reveal that will raise a smile with fans of any of Disney’s Haunted Mansions — a face-to-face meeting with life-size apparitions of Storyville workers, posing (albeit as merchandise) in a simulated showroom parlor.

Subsequent galleries address the medical perils those workers faced, the other dissipating activities (gambling, drinking, jazz-listening) available in the district, and Storyville’s federally mandated shuttering. E.J. Bellocq’s haunting portraits of Storyville’s women appropriately get their own gallery.

New Orleans piano music was an essential part of the Storyville experience.

Among the marquee objects on view are a couple of the infamous Blue Book directories, presented next to digital interactives that allow visitors to swipe through the pages. There are several Instagram-ready tableaus throughout the museum, including one that explains why the light is red.

Storyville museum's founder is back in New Orleans.

The origin of the Storyville Museum deserves its own explainer. A Brother Martin and University of New Orleans graduate, Sadlier went from business school in Indiana to business success, a couple of times, in California. Inventing the insulated paper coffee cup was his Sutter’s Mill moment “at the right time, at the right place, the beginning of the specialty coffee industry,” he said. Yet, “My heart was really always in New Orleans.”

His fortune made, Sadlier moved back about 10 years ago and renovated a few historic homes. “So, again I was more intertwined in the history of the Quarter and reading more and more and then really getting the itch to start a business,” he said.

He toured museums throughout America and abroad and was struck by how contemporary museum exhibits had reached beyond objects in cases and wall text to better engage visitors in narrative. On one return home, he visited the National WWII Museum for the first time in many years.

“And I was just floored,” he said. “It was basically the best of everything I had seen around the world.”

Sadlier said he wrote every word on the Storyville Museum’s walls (and then some; the museum’s 58 text panels were edited down from 108) and personally oversaw the acquisition of the museum’s historical objects. The doors opened in late September. The news release called it a passion project.

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