Baseball had got its start in the East in the 1840s. New Orleans amateur teams started playing in the 1850s. The first local games in which the press showed an interest were played in July, 1859, on a cleared field on the Delachaise estate near today’s Louisiana Avenue by teams of a league which called itself the Louisiana Base Ball Club. By 1870, New Orleans had three baseball ,parks (one with a grandstand that could accommodate 1,200 persons) and half a dozen amateur teams. In April of that year, New Orleans saw its first professional games when the Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first entirely professional ball club, then on a national tour, played a series of five games with local amateurs including the Pelicans. The results were predictable, in favor of Cincinnati. By 1901 Abner Powell was so dissatisfied with the performance of his now professional team that he journeyed to North Carolina, bought a new one for $12,000, brought it back to New Orleans, and fired his old team. The newcomers greatly improved the Pelican’s standing. After Powell, three other remarkable Pelican managers-Charley Frank (three pennants), Johnny Dobbs (two pennants), and Larry~Gilbert (five pennants )-bossed the New Orleans teams through 1938 (with the exception of two years). These years were  the brightest, the great days of New Orleans baseball-the days of Dixie Walker, Joe Martina, and Cotton Knaupp.

Larry Gilbert (1891-1965), named manager in 1922. A New Orleans boy who had grown up in the ball park, Gilbert had a” meteoric rise to fame after playing with teams in Victoria, Texas, and Michigan (Battle Creek) before making the majors where he played with Milwaukee. After that he was with the Braves, a team that won the World Series in 1914. Gilbert was the first New Orleanian to play in the major leagues and the first to play in a world series. Eventually returning to his hometown and the Pelicans, Gilbert managed the team until 1938 (with the exception of 1932). When Gilbert left New Orleans, the glorious days of the Pelicans were ended. From 1939 to 1959, when the team disbanded, there were no  fewer than thirteen managers and several affiliations with various major league teams and changes of ownership, but with the exception of two years when they came closer to first place, the Pelicans never won another pennant. The old magic was gone.

“Shoeless” Joe Jackson, a rough-and-ready player, played in the Carolinas in his bare feet. He complained that the rough field made the ball “wingy,” but didn’t open his mouth to complain about his feet. Jackson played for the Pelicans and later for the Chicago White Sox. He is number 12 in the picture.

Alexander Julius Heinemann (1876-1930), “Heine” to the fans, was largely responsible for the development of the Pelican franchise into one at the most valuable minor league properties in the country, Heine was not a ballplayer-he started in baseball by vending soft drinks in the stands, but by 1914 he was the Pelicans’s general manager, and from that time on his team began to win games and make money. It was he who moved the Pelican stadium from Carrollton and Banks to a site on Tulane and Carrollton where it bore his name until 1938. It was in Heinemann Park at one of the climactic games in the 1927 series that with 15,411 fans in the stands, a crowd of 2,000 broke down the gates and rushed in to see the game. Despite his financial success, Heine was not a favorite with the fans. He roamed the stands during a game, habitually wearing an old straw hat, and this never failed to bring calls of “cheapskate.” Plagued by financial reverses in the 1929 crash, Heinemann ended his own life in 1930.

The pennant-winning Pelican team, 1923. This photograph was the proud possession of Cotton Knaupp, who played more than fifteen hundred games in the Southern Association and who, on August 8, 1916, made the only unassisted triple play,on record in Southern Association history.

Melvin Thomas Ott from Gretna (on the west bank of New Orleans) was born in 1909. He was the greatest baseball player to come out of the New Orleans area. He began a twenty-two-year career with the New York Giants in 1926. During that span, he hit 511 home runs to set a National League record. He played in 2,730 major league games, went to bat 9,456 times, scored 1,859 runs, including 488 doubles, 72 triples, and the 511 homers. He batted in 1,860 runs and retired with a lifetime batting average of .304.

All that was left of Pelican Stadium was the mural of it painted on the wall in the Rock N Bowl facing the site where the stadium once stood. The Rock N Bowl  has now changed locations. It is located at 3016 S Carrollton Ave. Not only has the Rock N Bowl carried the history of Pelican Stadium but it carries the history of the old bowling allies from the 40′s and 50′s.For more information on the Rock N Bowl New Orleans read the Hotel Monteleone review!

Its checks bore vignettes of the steamer John Randolph and the pelican and her brood, the state emblem.

During earlier days, around 1780, there was a shortage of specie (coinage), which was being quickly gobbled up by traders and speculators. Paper currency of various kinds was used in its place, but since this often became worn and illegible through frequent handling, use was sometimes made of cards-even playing cards, which, as the backs were usually plain, could quickly be converted into legal tender by writing in the amounts over an official signature. The illustration depicts a curious example of the use of playing cards as merchandise “scrip,” rather than ordinary currency. The cards are numbered, and bear on their backs an inscription entitling the bearer to receive (presumably from a bakery or storehouse) a stated quantity of bread of a given value. Most of them were  signed “Bichot” and were good for two loaves of bread each worth one escalin (i.e., one “bit” or 12 1/2 sous).

Today the building is called “Latrobe’s on Royal” and it is used as an events venue. To learn more about  Latrobe’s on Royal read the Hotel Monteleone review.

Ron Centanni, of Ponchatoula LA, provided these pictures of Delta Shipbuilding Co.'s work during World War II. His father, Rosario (Roy) J. Centanni, worked at the shipyard and is shown here (second row, second from left with plaid shirt) with fellow workers in December 1944. Ron is unable to identify any other men in the photo.

World War II broke out in New Orleans during Maestri’s administration. New Orleans’s shipyards were quickly expanded-the Delta Shipyards turned out the first 1o,500-ton ship, the Wm. C. C. Claiborne, less than four months after Pearl Harbor-and by May, 1942, Andrew Jackson Higgins ha gathered a force of more than forty thousand workers to turn out PT boats and landing craft for the Navy. Meanwhile, the realities of the conflict were vividly brought home to New Orleanians: thirteen ships-some of them from New Orleans-were sunk in -the Gulf of Mexico by the end of May, and German submarines lurked not far off the mouth of the Mississippi. Rationing of meat and other foods, rationing of gasoline, scrap drives, practice blackouts, recapped tires, air-raid-wardens’ meetings, and women streetcar operators soon became the order of the day. Mardi Gras festivities were canceled for the duration, and New Orleanians set about the grim business of producing more, shipping more, and doing with less. A brand new streamlined Panama Limited,  crack Chicago-New Orleans train of the Illinois CentraI Railroad began operations during this time.

The surrender of Germany came on May 7, 1945, and New Orleanians celebrated, “though not as noisily as in 1918,” remarked the Times-Picayune. Business came to a standstill, and streetcars were routed off Canal Street. Whistles and horns were blown, “people yelled, sang and cried in happiness,” and some five thousand marchers carrying Japanese lanterns paraded that night. The casualties for this “quiet” celebration were reported by the police as about a hundred arrests for drunkenness, nine shot, thirteen stabbed, five fractured skulls, and one person dead.

The surrender of the Japanese on September 2, 1945, brought only a mild reaction from the people -except the-members of the Bourbon Street -Chinese colony, who celebrated noisily I by setting off $500 worth of firecrackers by special permission of the police, and by burning a’ effigy of Tojo.

To learn more about how significant New Orleans was in World War II you must visit the The National World War II Museum in the warehouse district. It is an amazing time capsula to our American History during this time period. They have recently added a 4D theater to help bring alive this magnificant history. I recommend reading the Hotel Monteleone’s review of The National World War II Museum in New Orleans for more information.

In the 1830s the growing wealth and culture of New Orleans attracted a number of painters, mostly portraitists. One of the best known was the well trained Frenchman Jean Joseph Vaudechamp, who painted in the style of Ingres. Vaudechamp painted the leading citizens and their wives, and many of his portraits are in the Louisiana State Museum’ and in private collections. Two visiting Frenchmen painted memorable New Orleans pictures. One was Hippolyte Sebron, who painted the-best-known steamboat picture, Giant Steamboats at New Orleans and the famed impressionist Edgar Degas, whose Cotton Market of New Orleans is one of the prized possessions of the Museum of Pau, France.

In the 1880s there was an art revival in New Orleans. The Southern Art Association was formed in 1883 and soon had a membership of five hundred. In 1887, Ellsworth Woodward, himself a painter of no mean ability, founded the art department of Newcomb College. The Newcomb Art School flourished, and in 1897 Ellsworth and his brother William added and in 1897 EIlsworth and his brother William added a pottery department, which in the next two decades the Arts and Crafts School, 712 Royal Street, was founded, and for a number of years trained many artists. Courtesy French National Archives

The Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, opened in 1911, became the repository of several New Orleans collections-the Hyams Barbizon and Salon paintings, the Morgan Whitney jades, and the Howard collection of Greek pottery. WPA workers are seen here at the museum during the 1930s. Courtesy New Orleans Public Library

A handsome Greek Revival building locate in City Park, the museum for years was a kind of art mausoleum, and it was not until the arrival of its first professional director, Alonzo Lansford in 1948, that the institution took on new life. He and Arthur Feitel, the president of the Delgado board, secured thirty two Italian Renaissance paintings of the Kress collection, and paintings of modern schools began to appear on its (1958-1961), and its present director, James B. Byrnes, who came in 1962 under a completely reorganized Isaac Delgado Museum of Art Association, have done wonders in scheduling shows and in the acquisition of important works of art through purchase or gifts. In 1970, three large wings were started to more than double the size of the museum and provide a much-needed auditorium. This is how the expanded Isaac Delgado Museum of Art will look. Courtesy Isaac Delgado Museum of Art

One of the most fascinating objects in the collection of the Louisiana State Museum at the Cabildo is the death mask of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. It Was made by Francisco Antommarchi, who had attended the emperor in St. Helena when he died. Courtesy Louisiana State Museum

The University of New Orleans Ogden Museum of Southern Art is currently home to the largest and most comprehensive collection of Southern art in the world. Located in the Warehouse District today next door to the WWII Museum. To learn more about the Ogden Museum of Southern Art read the Hotel Monteleone’s review.