Having just finished one of the books we bought at Jazz Fest, In Search of Buddy Bolden by tireless researcher Donald Marquis, Big Man and I took it upon ourselves to check a few spots associated with the famed cornetist (NOT trumpeter!) who is thought by many to be the "inventor" of jazz. Since we were headed out to City Park, to do one of our long walks, we decided to drive down Carrollton Avenue along the way and see if we could find the sites of what used to be two outdoor parks or picnic grounds on the edge of the black neighborhood of Gert Town where Buddy Bolden and his band used to play on weekends for enthusiastic crowds of mostly, if not entirely, black folks.
One was called Lincoln Park and the other, Johnson Park. I believe but do not know for sure that the two parks, which were primarily for black folks, had been named after Presidents Lincoln and Andrew Johnson (Lincoln's vice-president), who would have been associated in the minds of African-Americans with emancipation and freedom. They were located across Carrollton Avenue from each other, Lincoln on the Uptown side and Johnson on the Downtown side, bounded by what is now Oleander and Forshey Streets. According to Marquis, Lincoln Park was the more developed, with, in addition to trees and picnic tables and open bandstands (which both had), a Ferris wheel and other amusement rides, a covered skating rink and an indoor theater. Lincoln also had more events and special promotions, including the regular ascent of a hot-air balloon with a dare-devil balloonist who used to do aerial stunts.
Marquis reports that whenever Buddy Bolden and his band played at one park, a rival band would be at the other, and it was Buddy's practice to try to outplay and outdo the other band, so that the crowds would leave that band and cross the street to come to where Buddy was. Buddy named this, "Calling his children home" and he would do something similar in town as well, often blowing his horn out the window of the hall to entice revelers at another hall to come to him.
We found the blocks in question, one block on the lakeside of the Carrollton and Earhart intersection. Lincoln Park's former block had various buildings facing onto Carrollton, looking like they were built no earlier than the 1930s (which was when Lincoln Park was sold and developed), but as we went down Forshey, we noticed an auto-repair place on the back corner of the lot that was shaped long and narrow, made of tin, with an arched-over roof of the same material. According to Marquis' map, this would have been the spot at Lincoln Park where the skating rink would have been. The skating rink I patronized as a kid in the Lower Ninth Ward had been shaped and constructed in a similar fashion. We wondered -- could this be the *actual* skating rink building, now re-purposed?
We made the turn at the end of the block on Dublin and strained to see inside the block, behind the houses and businesses that now made up the block. At a used car lot that faces on Dublin, we got a glimpse in the back of what looked like a rather large open shed-like structure, in the approximate location of where the open bandstand would have been in Marquis' layout of Lincoln Park. (I wish I could direct you to a spot on the Internet that would show you the plan of Lincoln Park, but unfortunately it's nowhere on the Web, and can only be found in Marquis' book.) My heart actually beat a little faster -- what if that was all that was left of the actual pavillion where Buddy Bolden stood up and blew his cornet to call his children home?
Big Man was in favor of getting out of the car and going into the used car lot, to try to see more of that open structure, but for whatever reason I didn't want to do that, so we contented ourselves with driving around the block. As we made the turn onto Oleander, there was a building on the corner, newly painted and stuccoed, that had a sign in front advertising it as rental hall for large group events. It was hard to tell the date of the structure, it was so heavily altered, but could this hall be all that was left of the theater that had been in this general location in Lincoln Park? (Buddy did not play in the theater, only in the outdoor bandstand; the theater was for musicals and vaudeville and plays.) In any case, it gave me a funny feeling.
Like Bolden's fans, we crossed over Carrollton to the site of Johnson Park and found that while the Carrollton side was developed, the back part of the block toward Short Street was empty, a fenced lot. We surmised that there had been something there, at one time, pre-Katrina perhaps, but had been torn down -- we did not think it has been vacant all that time since the early 1900s. According to Marquis, Johnson had been a less developed park to begin with, and now there was nothing at all on this side to give you a glimpse of anything associated with Buddy Bolden.
As we continued to City Park, I felt a strange exhilaration, as though we had had a glimpse, not of Buddy Bolden himself, of course, but at least of something connected with him.
Our walk through City Park was fun but relatively uneventful (see previous post about the tree that wouldn't die), and my mind was stuck on Buddy. I suggested that we look for Holt Cemetery, where Buddy was buried in an unmarked grave, after his death at the Jackson State Institution for the Insane. In the early 21st century, pre-K, a group of jazz lovers gathered donations from around the world and with the help of Delgado College (which borders the cemetery), a monument was erected for him and a big jazz funeral was held. I was living in the Philadelphia area at the time, and one of my sisters had sent me the newspaper coverage of the event, but I had never been there.
We found poor little truncated "Buddy Bolden Place" just off City Park Avenue, behind Delgado. (Don't let anyone tell you that the City of New Orleans named a "street" after Buddy -- all they did was designate a lonely, naked, one-block stretch of Toulouse Street leading to Holt Cemetery as Buddy's "Place." Huh! They said they did it that way so nobody living on it would have to go to the trouble of changing all their IDs, but it's a poor excuse of a tribute, if you ask me.)
Holt Cemetery was established in 1879, which would have been the beginning of the post-Reconstruction, Jim-Crow era, as basically a potter's field for black people. Today, no plots are available for purchase, but families with loved ones buried there are allowed to make new burials in the same plot, successively on top. What happened with Buddy Bolden is that over time with no family to keep it up, his original plot was dug up, what was left of his bones buried deeper, and then more burials were made above him. All we can know now is the general area where his plot was located.
It was easy to find Buddy's monument; it is located right off one of the few driveways through the cemetery (please don't picture something paved, we're just talking tracks where brave vehicles could navigate if it was dry). To be helpful, someone -- perhaps somebody from the Funeral Services Education department at Delgado, which has kind of taken on the cemetery as their project, albeit without any funding -- has made a crude map of the place, posted on the wall of the little caretaker house near the entrance, marking where it can be found, as well as other sites of interest. Buddy's monument ("Blowingest man since Gabriel," Jelly Roll Morton) needed a weed-whacker and I was sorry we had not brought anything. We promised to come back on All Saints Day (Boy, that list keeps growing!).
We walked around and marveled at the graves and monuments and the old, unused single crematoria on the grounds. Holt is an strange and interesting place, both gay and sad at the same time, historic and current. (You can see photographs of the place online. There are thousands and thousands of websites devoted to it; apparently it has quite a following.) Holt features graves marked with home-made, folk art-style grave markers, graves decorated profusely with artificial flowers, graves holding the favorite items of the dead (most poignant are graves of children with their toys), graves destroyed by Katrina's flood waters (you can tell by the way the wooden grave frame has floated up and landed askew from its original place). We stayed for quite a while, making our way painfully around the higgledy-piggledy graves and the rutted, almost gullied cemetery. It gave us strangely mixed feelings.
We were leaving Holt Cemetery when a young white couple in a new looking white PT Cruiser with Louisiana plates pulled up and began taking pictures out the windows of the car. I walked over and asked if they were there to see Buddy Bolden's grave, figuring I could be helpful and direct them to it. Turns out they weren't, in particular, just had heard about it and wanted to see it.
The young woman got out of the car, looked around a bit, and turned to me in wonder. "They're buried in the ground," she breathed out, in tones of amazement and even disbelief. "Yes, it's a poor people burial ground," I said, "They couldn't afford vaults." (Big Man shook his head and laughed about that all the way home, how only in New Orleans could an adult person be surprised at in-ground burial.)
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