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[Photograph Album Documenting a New Orleans Mardi Gras Parade.]

New Orleans, [1913]. Sm oblong 4to (11.25” x 7”), black leather covers, black cord tie at spine. 101 silver prints, approx. 6” x 3.75", captions in ink in lower margins of photographs. One photo missing. CONDITION: Album good, covers detached and worn, album leaves slightly curled; photos overall very good with rich tonality.

An evocative, humorously captioned photo album documenting a spectacular and well-attended Mardi Gras festival, with views of paraders, attendees, musicians, and others, all crowded into the thriving business district of New Orleans.

The photos in this album were taken between Canal Street and Dauphine Street, and in addition to showing parade participants, provide a sense of the city’s flourishing businesses, including the Marks-Isaacs department store (advertising “Millinery” and “Everwear Hosiery” for ladies), Kirby’s 5 and 10ç shop, Grunwald Pianos (offering the “Apollo Player Piano”), the Dwyer Piano Co., and the Orpheum theater (a premier vaudeville venue). Descriptive and often humorous captions point out the sizeable police presence, including a “police dog reporting a street fight”; the preponderance of cross-dressing (“this ‘woman’ is a man”); a group of Black men “all very spectacular in the brilliant sun”; “One of the minstrel bands”; a masked washerman, who said “men of the next generation must do the washing,” and much more.

Though undated, this album evidently captures the 1913 Carnival parade: an article in The Times Democrat, published the following day, describes many of the features and figures pictured here, including “The Street Characters of New Orleans” (the theme performed by the Jefferson City Buzzards), a costumed “female impersonator,” two children in a goat-drawn cart, several men in clown attire, and a bride and groom (both men). Neither the article nor the photographs indicate the presence of any “old-line carnival krewes,” like Komus, Proteus, etc., but in their stead, according to the article, were the Jefferson City Buzzards, The Mysterious Babes (who “turned out in full force, faces blackened and caricaturing woman’s suffrage”), the Garden District Club (who paraded in “elaborate” costumes that “aroused much admiration”), and “several other clubs'' who “exceeded all past efforts.” A photograph in the album shows a minstrel band that may have been the “‘Darktown’ band of music,” which accompanied the “‘Darktown’ wedding procession. The bride, who looked as if she might have been the heaviest telegraph operator in town, was blacked up…She clung to the arm of the bridegroom, as fat as she was, rigged out in a ragged dress suit and dilapidated silk hat.” The Times review mentions other participants not pictured in this album, including the “Dixie Trio,” who “went about on a car serenading,” as well as a young man dressed up as a “Louisiana crawfish, all red and apparently just ready to eat. The frame of the novelty was of wire, covered with red cloth, and the head of the fish was worn over the head of the masker, with the body and tail over and down the back of the curiously fitted out masquerader.”

An exuberant photographic document of a Mardi Gras procession in the “City that Care Forgot” just a year before the outbreak of the first World War.

REFERENCES: “Street Masks a Feature: Unusually Large Number Out for Day,” The Times-Democrat (New Orleans), February 5, 1913; “Mardi Gras Before the Great War,” at Paul Vargas online.

Item #9067

Price: $3,500.00

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