Halfway House
One of the few important jazz age dance halls still standing in New Orleans is "The Halfway House" at City Park Avenue/Metaire Road and the Pontchartrain Expressway. Still standing, yes, but in sad looking shape.
The name came from the location at the halfway point on the streetcar line out to Lake Pontchartrain along the New Basin Canal.
The house band for about a decade in the 1910s and 1920s was led by cornetist Abbie Brunies, and was known as the Halfway House Orchestra. They made a number of recordings in the mid/late 1920s.
Other notable recording bands that played here included Piron's New Orleans Orchestra and the New Orleans Owls. Notables who played here but unfortunately didn't leave us recordings include Emile "Stalebread" Lacombe, now a rather obscure figure, but to many of his contemporaries he was among the handful of musicians (including Buddy Bolden) credited as the originators of what became known as jazz.
After the dance hall closed down in the Great Depression, the location was an ice cream parlor for a good number of years, then in the late 20th century housed the offices of "Orkin" exterminators. After they vacated the building about 2000 the building was damaged by fire, and has been vacant and unrepaired since. Like most buildings dating from before 1900, it was built at a sufficent elevation to escape the great flood when the Federal levees failed during Hurricane Katrina.
A group of jazz fans has been trying to buy or lease the building to fix it up for years. A couple years ago newspaper stories sounded like this was going to happen, but now the owners want to tear it down.
Thursday a local preservationist and musician friend phoned me, asking if I could come to a City Planning Commission meeting the following morning where the state of the building would be discussed. I did, and talked about some of the music history connections of the building.
There seems to be a good amount of politics and procedures involved, that I can't pretend to follow. The commission voted to study that the building might be of significance, which will preclude demolition for the moment, but can be appealled before the City Council. If I understand correctly the building got to this point years ago, then the property owners got it overturned.
At the hearing the property owners had a report arguing the building needed to be demolished, while "The New Orleans Jazz Restoration Society" had an engineer's report saying it was structurally stable and could be restored.
There were a number of curious exchanges, but certainly the most bizzare statement was the property owners saying that from their "research" the building wasn't the famous Halfway House at all. Until they brought up that claim, that was about as much a matter of "dispute" as the question of whether or not that big church shaped building on the Chartres Street side of Jackson Square is St. Louis Cathedral. Someone in the audience muttered about the property owners "lying through their teeth". Giving them the benifit of a doubt for motive, its certainly one of the lousiest excuses of supposed historic research I've encountered. There's a wealth of period print doccumentation. There are tapes and transcripts of oral histories of musicians who played there at Tulane's jazz archives. 20 years ago old-timers who remembered it first hand were still common, and even today I know there's at least one nonogenarian who can still recall going there regularly.
What's going to happen to the building? Heck if I know. Looks to me like its going to be a political decision. So yet another aspect of New Orleans seems to be returning to pre-Katrina normality: demolishing our history and landmarks because someone finds them inconvenient in the short term.
Times-Picayune Halfway House photos
Gambit Weekly "New Orleans Know-It-All" on the Halfway House: Feb 2007, May 2007.
Preservation Resource Center article
The name came from the location at the halfway point on the streetcar line out to Lake Pontchartrain along the New Basin Canal.
The house band for about a decade in the 1910s and 1920s was led by cornetist Abbie Brunies, and was known as the Halfway House Orchestra. They made a number of recordings in the mid/late 1920s.
Other notable recording bands that played here included Piron's New Orleans Orchestra and the New Orleans Owls. Notables who played here but unfortunately didn't leave us recordings include Emile "Stalebread" Lacombe, now a rather obscure figure, but to many of his contemporaries he was among the handful of musicians (including Buddy Bolden) credited as the originators of what became known as jazz.
After the dance hall closed down in the Great Depression, the location was an ice cream parlor for a good number of years, then in the late 20th century housed the offices of "Orkin" exterminators. After they vacated the building about 2000 the building was damaged by fire, and has been vacant and unrepaired since. Like most buildings dating from before 1900, it was built at a sufficent elevation to escape the great flood when the Federal levees failed during Hurricane Katrina.
A group of jazz fans has been trying to buy or lease the building to fix it up for years. A couple years ago newspaper stories sounded like this was going to happen, but now the owners want to tear it down.
Thursday a local preservationist and musician friend phoned me, asking if I could come to a City Planning Commission meeting the following morning where the state of the building would be discussed. I did, and talked about some of the music history connections of the building.
There seems to be a good amount of politics and procedures involved, that I can't pretend to follow. The commission voted to study that the building might be of significance, which will preclude demolition for the moment, but can be appealled before the City Council. If I understand correctly the building got to this point years ago, then the property owners got it overturned.
At the hearing the property owners had a report arguing the building needed to be demolished, while "The New Orleans Jazz Restoration Society" had an engineer's report saying it was structurally stable and could be restored.
There were a number of curious exchanges, but certainly the most bizzare statement was the property owners saying that from their "research" the building wasn't the famous Halfway House at all. Until they brought up that claim, that was about as much a matter of "dispute" as the question of whether or not that big church shaped building on the Chartres Street side of Jackson Square is St. Louis Cathedral. Someone in the audience muttered about the property owners "lying through their teeth". Giving them the benifit of a doubt for motive, its certainly one of the lousiest excuses of supposed historic research I've encountered. There's a wealth of period print doccumentation. There are tapes and transcripts of oral histories of musicians who played there at Tulane's jazz archives. 20 years ago old-timers who remembered it first hand were still common, and even today I know there's at least one nonogenarian who can still recall going there regularly.
What's going to happen to the building? Heck if I know. Looks to me like its going to be a political decision. So yet another aspect of New Orleans seems to be returning to pre-Katrina normality: demolishing our history and landmarks because someone finds them inconvenient in the short term.
Times-Picayune Halfway House photos
Gambit Weekly "New Orleans Know-It-All" on the Halfway House: Feb 2007, May 2007.
Preservation Resource Center article