Keeping Cool in the Big Easy
By Jacob Williams
Ice wagon outside the Napoleon House (Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection via Library of Congress website)
As seasons change from spring to summer in New Orleans, residents kick on the air conditioning, venture to the local pool, and head to the neighborhood sno-ball stand. The arrival of summer means high temperatures, dense humidity, and a shift from enjoying the weather to finding ways to combat it. Since the founding of the city, residents and visitors have battled the summer weather and soaring temperatures. “Some days were unbearable—like the desert heat of Africa, as I imagine it. July especially moved along as though escorted by Sirius with his flaming breath,”[1] reads a vivid 1803 account from Pierre Clément de Laussat, French colonial prefect, with whose sentiments today’s residents and visitors would certainly agree. Technological advances brought relief, though, as the Louisiana Ice Company introduced locally produced ice to New Orleans in 1868; this reduced both the price and wait time and made ice available to a wider public. Commercial air conditioning followed as a cooling mechanism in the early twentieth century.
In the eighteenth century, ice was a harvested product that only the wealthiest of people in the South could afford. Residents of colder regions of the country were able to harvest ice each winter for the preservation of meats. After harvest, this ice could be stored in icehouses, insulated with straw or sawdust, and used throughout the year. In New Orleans and other Southern cities, this was impossible due to the region’s subtropical climate. The first shipment of harvested ice arrived in the port of New Orleans in 1826 by way of merchant Frederic Tudor from New England, and demand immediately skyrocketed.[2] As expected, shipments of ice were wildly expensive, allowing only New Orleans’s wealthiest citizens the luxury of purchasing and receiving ice. Following Tudor’s success and seeing great potential, other Northern merchants started to sell harvested ice, and by the mid-nineteenth century, the family icebox was well established. At the turn of the twentieth century, nearly every home, grocery store, and bar had an icebox, making the ice industry one of the most powerful in the country. Representative of this development, a cypress icebox can be found just outside the kitchen at the Gallier House[ST1] . [ST2] These iceboxes, lined with tin, would have allowed for temporary storage of ice used to keep meats and produce fresh, as well as for iced cakes, wildly popular at the time. The demand for ice was great enough that icehouses developed in communities. These icehouses resold ice purchased from larger harvesting establishments. [ST3]
Whether shipped by train or boat, ice was costly cargo due to the waste caused by melting, making New Orleans and the South a difficult destination from the Northeast. Entrepreneurs began to think of mechanical means of ice production, liberating them from the constant reliance on harvested ice. Luckily for New Orleans, this would allow for ice to be made independently of weather conditions. Patents were developed for machines, and in 1868, the first commercial mechanical ice facility in New Orleans—the Louisiana Ice Manufacturing Company—was established.[3] Located on Delachaise Street in Uptown New Orleans and operated by steam, the operation was the largest ice facility in the United States. Pelican Ice, whose bags of ice can be found at local grocery stores and gas stations today, claims to be the oldest continuously operating ice company in North America, beginning as the New Orleans Ice Company in 1870.[4]
1891 Letterhead of the Municipal Ice Company, New Orleans (Louisiana Research Collection at Tulane University)
Though year to year the date may change, as soon as the end of spring nears, you can hear the constant whirling sound of external air conditioning units in neighborhoods throughout New Orleans. In nineteenth-century New Orleans, however, citizens were not so fortunate. In order to enjoy the benefits of moving air, people would need to open doors and windows, exposing themselves and their home to insects, dirt, and rain. As with ice, the advent of air conditioning transformed life for residents of the city. The first air conditioning unit as we know it was not invented until 1902, and homes and businesses in New Orleans were not outfitted with this technology until 1927. The Strand Theatre in Shreveport, the flagship of what would become the Saenger chain of theaters in the South, opened on July 3, 1925. Billed as the “Million Dollar Theater,” it had a 2,500-seat capacity and was air-conditioned. New Orleans’ historic Saenger Theatre on Canal Street, completed February 4, 1927, is reputed to have been the first air-conditioned theater in the Crescent City.[5] The technology blew its way into banks, schools, hospitals, government offices, and into nearly every aspect of Southern life. As late as 1960, only 18.2 percent of Southern homes were air-conditioned, but by 1990 the figure had risen to more than 90 percent.[6] Our own Hermann-Grima House, built in 1831 with features such as high ceilings, low floors, transoms, and floor-to-ceiling windows, was upgraded with the technology in the 1970s as it transitioned from a boarding house to a public museum[KB4] . Air conditioning changed the way of life for people in the South and in New Orleans, and as one Southern gardener confessed in 1961, “We [still] enjoy gardening, but even more we enjoy being able to sit indoors comfortably and look out at our garden.”[7]
Throughout the history of New Orleans and the region, its inhabitants have dealt with challenges from the environment. Heat has brought many dangers and inconveniences, yet technological advances have allowed the residents of the city to combat these mightily. Ice and air conditioning are two examples of these advances, radically altering the health, convenience, comfort, and overall quality of life for those who call New Orleans home.
Horse-drawn ice wagon in the French Quarter, 1923 (Library of Congress)
References:
[1] Pierre Clément de Laussat, Memoirs of My Life, trans. Agnés-Joséphine Pastwa, ed. Robert D. Bush (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 41.
[2] Elizabeth M. Williams and Chris McMillian, Lift Your Spirits: A Celebratory History of Cocktail Culture in New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 43.
[3] Williams and McMillian, Lift Your Spirits, 44.
[4] Williams and McMillian, Lift Your Spirits, 44.
[5] Raymond Arsenault, “Suddenly Less Summer,” 64 Parishes, August 29, 2018, https://64parishes.org/suddenly-less-summer-how-air-conditioning-transformed-the-south.
[6] Arsenault, “Suddenly Less Summer.”
[7] Arsenault, “Suddenly Less Summer.”