When the French Quarter Was Italian
A skeptic finds her family’s roots in an old macaroni factory
Grey clouds threaded with lightning marked another evening of intermittent rain when I met Natasha Terrell at the French Quarter’s Le Richelieu Hotel on Chartres Street. We were on a mission: to find out just how tall her grandmother’s tales were.
Terrell grew up on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain and had always figured the older woman’s increasing dementia distorted the stories that her own grandfather, Jacob (Giacomo) Cusimano, was a wealthy leader in New Orleans’ turn-of-the-century Italian community. She doubted, too, her grandmother’s claims that Cusimano had built the nation’s largest, most modern macaroni factory in 1902. After all, family stories have a way of inflating the facts over time. How grand could the factory really have been?
In the 1960s, the building had been incorporated as part of the new Le Richelieu, where I waited for Terrell. I was in the city for a writing conference, and participants were housed at Le Richelieu, which boasted its history on its website. Obscure and unusual histories attract me as an author, and I’d found Natasha through social media to learn more before arriving. She’d assumed that whatever her great-grandfather had created had been of ordinary significance and had disappeared about a century ago. The day Terrell was to visit her grandfather’s factory for the first time, I’d asked one of the hotel clerks if any of the original factory was still visible. Without looking up, she’d said, “No. Burned down.”
“Yes, it burned December 1916,” I agreed, “but it was rebuilt.” The pasta Cusimano produced was a cheap and versatile alternative to bread in World War I America, and the Cusimanos would operate the factory until 1939, almost a decade after Jacob’s death.
A perusal of the hotel revealed obviously old brick walls, now painted white, facing the elevators. Terrell’s sharp eyes spotted a window molding cut off by a new ceiling. The pre-burn factory had three floors: production on the first, drying on the third, and packaging on the second; but the rebuild had four. Paul McCartney had stayed in one of the larger suites on the top floor; and in another Terrell found some original boards upon which her great-great-grandfather had likely walked, the only areas in the hotel where original flooring remained uncarpeted. “This is real—this is my family,” she said, as she knelt and brushed her fingertips over it.
The Family Tree Sets Sail
Earlier, we had chatted in the hotel bar about my research. I told her of the trickle of Italian immigrants, mostly Sicilian, that had increased in number to two thousand arrivals per year by the end of the 1890s, earning the French Quarter the nickname “Little Italy.” Steamships, or “lemon boats,” arrived from Sicily bursting with immigrants and citrus fruits. Lemon, citron, and blood orange groves filled “the Golden Seashell,” the nickname for Palermo’s hills and valleys, but life in Sicily after 1861 was no Garden of Eden.
Giacomo’s birth to Alberto and Rosa Cusimano in 1861 coincided with that of the Kingdom of Italy’s creation, even as America split down the seams in its own civil war. The unification of Italy’s formerly independent states had been no boon for Sicily: its economy collapsed, bringing poverty. Civil unrest led to military conscription. When Giacomo was five, Sicily revolted, and the Italian navy pounded her into submission with a bombardment. Palermo came under martial law, and the Mafia’s power increased in the chaos. A cholera epidemic only added to the list of miseries. In 1885, the Cusimanos left on a lemon boat for New Orleans.
Immigrants filled a labor gap on the area’s sugar plantations and the city’s docks, and many, such as the Cusimanos, set up fruit stands in the French Market. With the influx of immigrants, the Creoles slowly moved north of the French Quarter, which devolved into cheap tenements, residents often sharing one privy, strings of laundry stretching in courtyards where aristocrats had once lounged.
Older brother Angelo formed the Fratelli Cusimano (“the Cusimano Brothers”), which later became A. Cusimano & Co. as the brothers branched into their own businesses. One Cusimano venture was a banchista, an immigrant bank, called Banca Italiana. Immigrants didn’t trust American banks, and these institutions also functioned as travel agencies. The Cusimanos advertised as far away as New York for tickets to and from Palermo. Their fortunes grew rapidly; a priest wrote in 1893 that he remembered “the Cusimano brothers, Sicilians, wealthy fruit traders.”
Giacomo, now known as Jacob, expanded his fruit stand on St. Philip Street to a market with imported Italian goods, and then a macaroni factory. Despite the industrial nomenclature, the “factories” that sprang up around the city turned out handcrafted pasta of all types.
Jacob’s manager was Leon Tujague, the son of Gillaume, who had been a butcher in the French Market before purchasing a restaurant on Decatur Street. (Tujague’s remains a New Orleans staple 160 years later and was recently added to the National Culinary Heritage Register.) Leon later partnered with Jacob before starting his own business in 1912 and rising as a leader in the food industry.
[Recipe: Boiled Beef Brisket with Vegetable Soup from Tujague's.]
As business grew, Jacob hired architect Robert Palestine to design and build what would soon be the largest macaroni factory in America on the corner of Barracks and Chartres Street. Construction began in January 1902; and a month later, Jacob hosted a magnificent celebration during which he laid the cornerstone. Italian flags festooned the temporary platform erected in the half-finished building, and honored guests spoke to the crowd in Italian. After the ceremonies, Jacob led his guests to a hall at the rear of the building for a luncheon where “there was a profusion of all sorts of delicacies, and wine flowed freely,” according to the Times-Picayune. After lunch, they formed a joyous procession to Jacob’s home, the party continuing into the evening.
Another huge banquet held for the grand opening in August showcased cutting-edge technology: electric lights brightened each floor and a fifteen-horsepower engine mixed the dough. An elevator carried the pasta to the third-floor drying room. Thirty men turned out ten thousand pounds of pasta a day, shipped to all corners of the country. At least twelve pasta factories were operating in the Quarter by 1912, but Cusimano was the king.
Jacob helped a fellow Italian, Giuseppe Uddo, who was down on his luck in 1909. Speaking no English, Giuseppe had arrived only two years before and moved onto Chartres Street with his new bride from an arranged marriage. On Christmas Eve, he discovered his wife’s cousins, for whose produce delivery service he’d been working, were bankrupt. He was headed home down Chartres, dreading sharing the news, when he ran into Jacob, who asked what was wrong. Jacob offered to let him have goods on credit.
Giuseppe bought the cheapest merchandise, and at night he and his wife scoured off the rust from the cans with a courtyard brick, polished them with her trousseau clothes, and repasted on the labels. Then Giuseppe rose at three. He still spoke little English, but he’d bought the cousins’ horse, which was familiar with the customers’ route and knew where to stop. Giuseppe slowly built up his business, which by World War II was known by its current name: Progresso.
A Strawberry Fit for the Gods
The Cusimanos eventually held business interests in groceries, cigars, liquor—any product for sale in the city was produced, imported, or sold by the family. It was only natural that Jacob invest in the rapidly growing strawberry industry around New Orleans. Tickfaw, in Tangipahoa Parish, is now the home of the Italian Festival and was also the home of Robert L. Cloud, who grew up picking strawberries with his grandfather. Cloud experimented with propagating new breeds, and in 1898 he introduced what he called the Klondyke, named for the ongoing gold rush and because he recognized that this strawberry was gold.
By 1921, Louisiana strawberries outsold all others, and in the next year they earned $4 million ($57 million in 2016 dollars). Two years later, Jacob was president of the Louisiana Strawberry Cooperative Association. Chicago was their top market.
Terrell laughed, “Italians in New Orleans shipping to Chicago in the 1920s? Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
The gaslights on the street flickered against the walls of her grandfather’s factory as Terrell took one last look before leaving. “I finally found it,” she said with satisfaction. The square burgundy wing where Le Richelieu’s guests now sleep behind solid walls, although well disguised, is a more fitting monument to Jacob than his imposing marble tomb in Metairie and a reminder of a time when the French Quarter was Italian.
Don't miss: On January 18, 2017, there is an evening lecture from Hermann-Grima + Gallier Historic Houses, where Professor Justin Nystrom of Loyola University will talk about the influx of Sicilian immigrants to the French Quarter. Nysom shares the impact of this vibrant culture in the ethnic milieu of the Crescent City, drawing from his forthcoming book. Read more here.