One man's perspective of more than 100 years of change.
It’s the week before Holy Week. Mark Malouse parks himself contentedly in an upholstered armchair in front of his large bay window. He wears Army PT gear which is damp from training, eyeglasses, and a woolly mustache. He shows me an injury from his run. A dog bite which seems to be sprawling by the second.
“It slowed me down but it didn’t break the skin.”
In another life, I may have been sitting across from a scrappy tabby cat. One that invited himself in the door and circled a time or two on the seat cushion of that same chair. Mark is as wry as the Cheshire Cat and as a native as a Bywater feral.
His family’s tenure in Bywater goes back well before it was called Bywater. The chain of title on his family home begins and (currently) ends with family. His great grandparents bought the place new.
That house still sits on Marais Street. A location which served as bait for schoolyard bullies. To some Marais didn’t qualify as Bywater. Mark notes with a sideways grin that the current HDLC maps show otherwise. Besides many of those same childhood critics left with their families for Chalmette before any of them became men. He takes pride in the fact that his family didn’t join the flock when so many white families took flight to the suburbs.
Mark currently resides on the wrong side of Plessy Way (formerly Press St) to qualify for Bywater residency. His current large, lavender, 2-story home graces Dauphine street like wisteria on a trellis. Ironically Mark’s only beef with his new address is it’s “two blocks too far from Bywater.”
This is Mark’s story….
Home Sweet Home
Mark’s vocabulary drips with sayings the way an old live oak drips moss. I call them Mark-isms. The term colloquialism would suggest they weren’t either direct or literal. Mark is both. One of my favorite Mark-isms has to be, “they’re gonna have to have to wake me in this house.”
The house he’s referring to is the one on Dauphine Street. As we begin our chat we are entertained by loud thuds and the metallic noise of power tools which produce an electronic opera of sorts. It eventually turns to white noise. Mark’s having the plumbing connecting the apartment upstairs corrected and that means restoring the kitchen ceiling. He waits until his tenants are on vacation to do so which means tolerating a hole in the ceiling for more than two handfuls of days.
Perhaps that’s why, in the 30 years that Mark has resided at this address, he’s only had four tenants and as many vacant months. His current guests own and operate the Marigny Opera House (a performance venue that houses the New Orleans Ballet Company) which Mark can view clearly from his rear double galleries. It’s a view he’s cherished since the late 1980's from a home he describes as his “first and only.”
Mark’s first, last, and everything
“Actually, it’s been since late 1989. First home I’ve owned. First and only. Last. This is the fifth home I’ve lived in. Fourth, if you don’t count when I lived upstairs.”
It makes sense. The architecture is enviable. A grand key lot on a grand block. But it wasn’t always so. In 1989 when the home was listed the landlord was itching to get “the hell out of the neighborhood and up to Mandeville.” More on that later.
1989 was a different time for real estate. It was difficult to qualify for a home loan. Redlining (the process of discriminating the approval of mortgage loans based on neighborhoods and/or entire zip codes) was commonplace. 20% cash down payments created a major barrier for entry for most prospective buyers.
A loan in Bywater/Marigny was so unexpected, that the seller was more shocked than relieved when Mark qualified. This resulted in the seller becoming Mark’s first real tenant.
“There’s something to that adage ‘buy as much as you can afford,’ I barely did that.”
But what about the place where Mark was born and raised, just a short walk downriver from the Dauphine house?
Growing up Bywater
Mark was born into the home on Marais Street not too long after Fats Domino’s rendition of “Blueberry Hill” took the charts by storm. His side of the double shotgun housed Mark, three siblings, and his two parents and shared its barrel-wall with his grandmother. Today he struggles to remember how they all fit in one place.
Mark describes Sundays as big family days. Mass at St. Vincent De Paul was followed up by hanging out with friends and family. His mother would cook up something special like fried chicken.
On weekends and evenings after school at Holy Cross, he’d play with friends on the street until it was time to come home for dinner. Some of these friends also grew up to be homeowners in Bywater and Marigny.
“All good memories from then. Okeanos used to parade down St. Claude during Mardi Gras. I’d grown to hate the parade circuit uptown. My parents had burnt me out. But as a kid, it was great to walk out the front door and have that right there.”
He now prefers the Krewe du Vieux and Chewbacchus parades.
Short Term Memory
I had never conceived of a St Claude with anything bigger than the walking parades I’d witnessed. This was my first detailed description of 1960-something Bywater. I was curious about what else I had wrong. I asked him what he wished more people knew today about the neighborhood 50+ years ago?
According to Mark, it might just be our short-term memory of our current surroundings.
“I mean I guess it’s all the bitchin' and moanin' about gentrification… “
Mark detests the notion that the newest residents of the neighborhood are somehow responsible for displacing the working class residents that once called Marigny/Bywater home.
“the people gentrification refers to weren’t original to the neighborhood, to begin with. They moved in after the immigrants moved to the suburbs…”
I ask if he knew any of these originals, I wondered what their life looked like. Turns out the answer is yes. He’s a descendant of them.
Deeper than blood sausage
“The thing you've got to remember is the rich Americans, the type who came through Ellis Island, you know Yankees from up North, all lived uptown from Canal Street. Meanwhile, the working class lived downriver. That’s who lived here.”
Mark holds no disdain for the term “working class,” just the opposite. Working class is “Mark’s people.” Mark’s father’s people were of French and Acadian descent. His Grandmother, Stella Barbarot, passed when Mark was a teenager but left quite an impression.
“As a [little] kid I just thought she was strange and talked funny and all that… it wasn’t too many years before it I found out about the Cajun culture... and I realized she was French Cajun.”
His mother’s people were of German descent. Brewers by trade. Folks that made their way to Milwaukee, to St Louis, and down the Mississippi.
“There used to be brewers all over the place down here,” he gestures to the space around him indicating the neighborhood. “There’s only about two weeks of good weather in parts of Germany. I guess they moved to St. Louis for better temperatures and found it got better the further they went south.”
Mark describes a stained-glass window crafted to celebrate and remember such breweries that now hangs in the house on Marais Street (where his sister now resides). It prompts me to inquire what life was like back in that day. The day where Parleaux wasn’t the only brewery this side of Elysian. What vivid stories had his grandmother passed onto him about her childhood? What customs? What foods?
“My mom’s mom told me how you used to be able to go down to St. Roch Market and buy live animals at the time… goats and calves and bring them home, slaughter them, string them up, slit their necks and catch the blood to make blood sausage and all that.
My grandmother told me about a time they cut the liver right out of a [recently slaughtered] calf and threw it on the frying pan, still quivering. She couldn’t eat it even though it was something her palate was used to.”
Vivid indeed! I wondered what else the Germans brought with them. Bakeries, Breweries, Blood sausage, noted. Were festivals on the list? I asked Mark’s thoughts on the matter.
“I don’t think they had that cohesion at the time. Sure, they did stuff in their own back yard. But they were worried about blending in.”
The grass is greener in the burbs
For better or worse we’d come a long way since the days of Mark’s great grandmother and her calves and goats. I imagine Mark had witnessed quite a bit of change. I imagine the first major change for Mark might have been in the late ’60s. A time when changing laws were supposed to change how we viewed demographics, but didn’t. I was right.
“The whole ‘white flight’ thing started to happen when I was about 10, I suppose.”
Many of the families Mark grew up with took his playmates with them when they flew out of the neighborhood for suburbs like Chalmette. Then hurricane Betsy hit. Mark was optimistic his friends would return. They didn’t. I wondered how Mark felt about losing his peers. Did his weekend playgroups get any smaller?
“You mean the people who wanted to cut and run? Good riddance.”
Mark's family stayed. Soon the homes for sale were filled with fresh faces. More African American families began to call the neighborhood home. I asked Mark what he remembers hearing about that shift as it occurred.
“You know I think a lot of people are more comfortable living around people that look and act like them. But it was sort of like ‘if you’re black and you want to be here, so be it.’ I don’t remember anyone in my family being bent out of shape about it.”
The thing is, he means it. His family had lived in the exact same place for four generations now. Change was as normal as it was constant. It would seem this might be where Mark’s resolve to root himself firmly blossomed. I wondered if as a child he either dreamt about exploring far-flung places or wanted an address in the same zip code?
“If you’re asking whether I knew I’d be here as an adult when I was a kid… you’re damn straight I did.”
A new normal
But demographics weren’t the only thing changing downtown New Orleans. In the 20 years between 1970 and 1990, Mark watched crime flood the high ground he called home. Something he describes it as “a different environment” took shape.
By 1989 the seller of the Dauphine Street house was itching to get to Mandeville and Mark and his wife were excited to move in.
"I was excited. My wife [Julie] was excited. Her parents, not so much...”
Parents concerns be damned, this was to be their home sweet home.
Within months of moving in there was a drive-by shooting on the corner of their block. This might have given Mark’s in-laws the ammunition needed to convince Mark & Julie to move back out. That didn’t happen. A neighbor and yarn store owner, Betty Bornside, (a woman who Mark describes as a firecracker) lit that ammunition and pointed it in the direction of local law enforcement instead.
“Sure enough, they caught the bad guys and nothing like that has ever happened again.”
Stories about Bywater and Marigny in the early ’80s and ’90s have had a way of conjuring pictures for me of West World style shoot outs (albeit with different casting). Not so according to Mark. The drive-by was the only one of its kind. He then points out a shooting that happened the prior week in Marrero.
“That kinds of stuff happens in the suburbs now.”
The upside to high ground
There are many perks to living in Bywater or Faubourg Marigny. Higher ground is not the least of them. For Mark, however, its proximity and not just to the river makes it appealing. He explains away the misconception that we’re somehow far removed or on the other side of the earth by being on the other side of the Quarter.
“We’ve got a greater sense of the French ‘joie de vivre’ [love of life] than our counterparts who have moved on out to the suburbs. We reverse commute. I’ve commuted as far as Gulfport. I’ve never sat in traffic baring a rare accident. We have a great culture. We can walk to the Quarter or along the river. Being by the water has its perks.”
I interrupt. I needed to know when we started calling it “The" Bywater.
“That started up just recently and it’s just as pretentious as ‘The Marigny.’ It's Faubourg Marigny. It’s Bywater and before that it was Faubourg Washington.”
Change would seem to be the theme of our talk and Mark has the stomach for it. I wondered where his tolerance for change would end. It turns out it’s short term rentals.
I ask what Mark thinks of the latest group of folks to leave for Chalmette or Mandeville while leasing their homes out to tourists by the night.
“They’re speculators and I hope they lose their ass.”
He corrects himself and states they’ll likely end up in the black and the new regulations may mean they join him as landlords to long term tenants.
The only thing constant is “vivre et laisser vivre?”
With so much change I was curious whether there was anything besides the architecture that had stayed the same?
“There’s a sense of live and live. Always has been. Try to change that and you’ll wind up packing your bags for somewhere that appreciates another way of living.”
I think back to Mark’s great grandmother and her goats. I ask Mark what one thing he wishes more people knew about the neighborhood. What misconception sticks in his craw?
“Probably that it’s not as pretentious as the rep it gets. I think there’s a lot of down to earth, salt of the earth people here and we’re easy to get along with.”
I think Mark’s not just right, he’s living proof.