- Basin Street
Basin Street is a street in
New Orleans, Louisiana . It parallelsRampart Street one block lakeside, or inland, from the boundary of theFrench Quarter , running from Canal Street down 5 blocks pastSaint Louis Cemetery . It currently then turns lakewards, flowing into Orleans Avenue.The name comes from the turning basin of the
Carondelet Canal formerly located on the street, where it now turns on to Orleans by the Municipal Auditorium.In the late 19th century and early 20th century
railroad tracks paralleled the Canal and then turned on to Basin Street, running up the "neutral ground" (as street medians are called locally) to one of the city's main railroad depots on Canal Street.At one time one of the finest residential streets in the city, it became a
red light district around 1870. From 1897 throughWorld War I , the back side of Basin Street was the front of theStoryville red light district, with a line of high end saloons andmansion s devoted toprostitution . [cite book
title=The French Quarter
last=Asbury
first=Herbert
year=1938]After Storyville's closure, Basin Street was temporarily renamed "North Saratoga". The majority of Storyville was demolished and replaced with the
Iberville Projects .Basin Street formerly continued on the other side of Canal Street to Commons Street, today known as Elk's Place, which after 2 blocks becomes Loyola Avenue on the upper side of Commons. The equivalent street paralleling Rampart one block back on the other side of Louis Armstrong Park in the
Treme neighborhood is Saint Claude.Basin Street was commemorated in the "
Basin Street Blues " published bySpencer Williams in 1926 and recorded byLouis Armstrong in 1929; the hundreds of recordings of thisjazz standard since include a version byMiles Davis in 1963.There are a series of monuments on the neutral ground of Basin Street, including statues of
Simón Bolívar ,Benito Juárez , andFrancisco Morazán , and a metal sign commemorating Storyville.References
ee also
*
Famous streets of New Orleans ample
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f4/Basin_Street_Blues.ogg Basin Street Blues] as recorded by
Jo Stafford andFrankie Laine in 1953.
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
