The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans

Although New Orleans' Faubourg Marigny neighborhood is one of the city's most illustrious and historic districts, Scott Ellis's study is this celebrated community is the first comprehensive analysis. Created in 1805 by Bernard Marigny, the Faubourg Marigny (or Marigny Suburb translated from French) was subsequently home to refugees from Saint-Domingue, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and also home to a large part of the city's Antebellum free people of color. Over the course of its over two-hundred year history, the Marigny has been the at the center of dramatic events in New Orleans, including repression of the city's Know-Nothing Party, Yellow Fever epidemics that left the neighborhood nearly abandoned, and a post-Civil War influx of newly freed slaves seeking affordable housing and abandoned land. In the twentieth century, the district evolved into a working-class neighborhood of creolized residents of numerous nationalities. The neighborhood changed again in the 1970s, when it experienced a wave of gentrification. Like most such enclaves, the Marigny is now "supergentrifying" with an influx of wealthy outside investors and upper-class families.

Ellis's sweeping history of the neighborhood covers colonial events; the long and complex life of Bernard Marigny, with debunking of oft-repeated fables; the creolization of immigrants; the political turmoil of New Orleans pre-and post-Civil war; the free people of color; the settled working class enclave of the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century; the influence of the French Quarter; gentrification; the issues of commercial development in residential neighborhoods; and the post-Katrina era.