Urban Wandering

I write this while sitting in a boutique hotel (it has fewer than thirty rooms and doesn’t have a pool) a block and a world away from St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. I’m here to attend a music law seminar, visit with friends and clients, and get new ideas for stories. Always with the new ideas.

I resolved that on this trip I would pay a visit to what might be one the most infamous address in New Orleans, that being 126 Exchange Place ( also known as “Exchange Alley”). The street was and is one of the less fashionable areas of the French Quarter; it runs “north” (that term doesn’t mean the same thing in New Orleans as it does everywhere else) off of Canal Street between Chartres and Royal Streets. In the first third of the Twentieth Century it was notorious as a gay cruising spot, and I suspect that such activity has not entirely absented itself from the area, for reasons that I need not go into here. From the 1940s through the late 1970s or so it was what real estate agents would optimistically refer to as a “mixed use” area, with gambling dens, gin joints, and rooming houses comprising the primary industries.  It was at one of these rooming houses, located over a pool hall at the same 126 Exchange Place, where a divorced woman named Marguerite Oswald lived between 1955 and 1956 with her teenage son, a lad named Lee Harvey. There is no plaque noting Oswald’s relatively brief residency there, or anything at all that would incline one to perhaps linger somberly for a moment and reflect how badly lives can turn and then  affect so many others, incidentally changing the course of history.  The minimal signage, in fact, pointedly discourages loitering while informing any potential loiterers that the property is under twenty-four hour surveillance and that loitering is forbidden. And yes, there are exterior surveillance cameras that track one’s progress. Another sign above one of the sets of freshly painted double doors on the property indicates that there is a “resort” business of some sort within, though there is no listing that I can find online under the name given. The property is not on the real estate tax records, either. ‘Tis passing strange, as a great detective once said.

I took a picture of myself — what you young people like Jordan Dane would call a “selfie” — in front of the property and waited for a moment to see if someone would come out and ask what the fu-heck I was doing, but nothing occurred.  Maybe I will wander by again at some point on my way to and from the seminar site, just for grins and giggles. This short brush with history, however, nudged my muse.  I got two pages from it. What occurrence, event, accident, or happenstance has nudged your creativity recently, for better or worse?