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Posted by Dorian Hastings <dhastings@uno.edu> New Orleans is definitely built in a swamp! The French Quarter was the only high ground (11 feet above sea level), along with a few criss-crossing ridges following a couple of bayous. The earliest maps and records portray it thus. Cypress from the swamps "back of town" were used to build houses in town. Following the French and Indian War, France ceded Louisiana west of the Mississippi to the Spanish--and included New Orleans (which primarily lies EAST of the Mississippi) on the grounds that it was an island. (The English got everything east of the Mississippi.) Land along the lakefront (including the University of New Orleans campus) was only drained, filled in, and developed in this century, most of it in the 1920s, and following World War II. Any map or history of New Orleans mentions these facts. I use the Works Progress Administration (WPA) state guide for Louisiana [U.S. W.P.A., LOUISIANA: A GUIDE TO THE STATE (New York: 1943)] for quickie reference on such basic facts. Any number of maps show the swamp, from Adrian de Pauger's 1724 plat [see an on-line version of the plat, at http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/lsmmaps/looker.asp?page=320 ] to Charles Zimple's wonderful map of 1834 to the Zacharie plat of 1891 in the New Orleans Guide [Workers of the Writers' Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Louisiana, compilers; _Louisiana: A Guide to the State_ (New York: Hastings House, Publishers,1941), p. 44.] . I'm currently doing research on residential development along the lakefront, and September 1 annual economic reports for the city, published each year in the DAILY PICAYUNE of New Orleans usually devote several pages to real estate development. I've looked at the years from about 1899 to about 1909. A very small but helpful book on the city's geography is Peirce Lewis, NEW ORLEANS: THE MAKING OF AN URBAN LANDSCAPE (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1976). The Sept. 1 report for 1909 mentions the "impenetrable" brush and the sunning alligators that travelers on the excursion train can view on their way to the pleasure palaces along the lakefront. Dorian Hastings Ph.D. Candidate University of New Orleans
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