Storyville, New Orleans, Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District

A fascinating book, one of the best on the subject. The author has obviously done a phenomenal amount of research. This book contains information and photographs that are hard to find anywhere else. However, there is a lot of text, and it is quite dense, and not particularly well organised. This makes this book a bit heavy going to read. It's not overly dry and scholarly, yet it feels like it needed an editor to add more headings to break the text up, reorganise the text a bit, generally add a bit of readability, even browsability. The author explains proudly at the beginning of the book that he resisted such offers. Never mind, the content is still excellent, informative and poignant. If you are interested in this specialist subject you must have this book.

superb, need to go to New Orleans

This is a paperback reprint of a fairly useful but wide-ranging study of the notorious red-light district of New Orleans that has passed into American history in a romanticised, often mythologised fashion.The district flourished from 1898 to 1917 when it was eventually closed down by the US Navy authorities, overriding local, civilian government. The notoriety of Storyville stems from its position as an inadvertent social experiment at a time and place when the United States was very much an uptight and straightlaced society – so the establishment of an area for legalised prostitution in a major American city was a bold and progressive (or outrageous) development according to contemporary points of view.The legends surrounding Storyville have grown principally through literature, cinema, jazz history and the photographic legacy of E. J. Bellocq.Al Rose`s book is a patchwork reference covering all aspects of the place and period, from legal documents and business operations to the characters and “entertainments” the district provided. The scope of information and historical documentation is huge and although it is organised into focussed chapters, it still sprawls to a certain extent.Rose was able to collect a great number of interviews from people who remembered Storyville and it`s colourful inhabitants, though some accounts probably weren`t as reliable as he thought; since the book was first published a great deal more research has been done – the history isn`t as obscure and thinly charted as it was in the 1970s.Where this book falls down is in the quality of the reprint; the hardback edition was far better printed, with clear reproductions of the photographs and the many facsimile editions of newspapers and gossip sheets had better clarity than this edition.It also suffers from its over-inclusiveness; I initially sought this out in the 1980s for research on Bellocq, but aside from a fair number of his photographs it offered little of substance on his life; I eventually purchased this edition while researching the history of early jazz, but there is really only one chapter on this and much of it is out of date, some of it is unreliable.As a history of the establishments and the business of prostitution, however, it remains a good and valuable source of first-hand accounts which don`t pull any punches or sanitise the realities of some of the conditions or practices of the area.Certainly an interesting book; not so useful for the specific topics I have already mentioned, but providing a good reference to the “trade” the area famously offered.3 ½ stars for this paperback edition.