Revitalization efforts of NOLa’s once ‘Hub of Black community’ starts with ‘The Restore 1421 Project’

8th February 2021   ·   0 Comments

By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer

As part of an overall effort to restore and redevelop a historic neighborhood in Central City, a local community organization is raising funds to rehabilitate a 154-year-old building on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard that has been owned for a century by the oldest African-American Masonic Lodge in the country.

The Restore 1421 Project aims to turn 1421 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd., located at the intersection with Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, into a multi-use community center and museum and a base of operations for the charitable efforts of St. Andrew Grand Lodge and the Electa Grand Chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star.

But while the immediate goal of the organization is the recovery and enhancement of the property at 1421, officials with the effort say the overall goal is to revive and remake a traditionally multi-cultural neighborhood that decades ago was one of the city’s most commercially and culturally vibrant areas.

“We’re just not planning to rebuild our building,” said project director Velma Latham Jacques, “we’re restoring faith, family and community to New Orleans.”

Monchiere Jones, a representative of Mojo Marketing PR, which is helping Restore 1421 publicize the project, said those involved with the effort hope to revive the Masonic lodge’s traditions of community outreach and uplift, including the lodge’s history of programming aimed at educating and caring for local youth.

Jones said the three-story building is already chocked full of artifacts, memorabilia and other historic treasures that will become part of the museum being planned for the site. She said volunteers recently found the key to the original door of the structure, for example.

“There are a lot of artifacts,” she said. “They have so much that it makes you say, ‘What? These should be in a museum!’”

Jones said the group’s leaders hope to raise $700,000 to advance the restoration. In addition to soliciting donations from the public, the organization is also hoping for funding help from various governmental bodies, charitable foundations and other benefactors.

Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard was originally called Dryades Street, which served as a bustling hub of activity in the local Black community. Currently, the first eight blocks are now named after Haley, a late civil rights leader in New Orleans in the 1950s and ‘60s. Haley passed away in 1987 at the age of 48, and the street was renamed in recognition of her impact and achievements two years later.

The Dryades neighborhood was home to an ethnically diverse population that, in addition to African Americans, included Jewish, German and Italian immigrants and their families, who often operated their own thriving businesses. The multicultural setting provided a model for commercial and culture diversity in a city that for decades was racked by segregation.

“By the 1930s the street was an entertainment and shopping alternative to Canal Street,” stated a 2017 article about the neighborhood by the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans. “Merchants on the strip did not harbor the hostile racial attitudes of some of the Canal Street businesses. Additionally, Dryades Street merchants were diverse – Jews, African-Americans, Italians and others operated side by side. At its height in the 1940s and 1950s, there were more than 200 commercial establishments in business, including the Dryades Street Market which flourished with meat, fish and fruit stalls.”

An example of the Dryades neighborhood’s importance to the community and the recognition it was receiving across the city came in 1925, when the New Orleans States newspaper lauded the sector.

“The Dryades street business section has constantly striven to foster the confidence of Orleanians in the ever-widening scope of merchandising done within its area,” the paper stated. “That it has succeeded is evidenced by the fact that more and more reputable firms fostered by keen business men are establishing themselves in this hustling community.”

The article cited one business located at the 1421 building – the Famous Electric Company, which the paper said was “[o]utstanding among the more recent firms to become prominently identified” and described the store as “a model of attractiveness.”

The company was owned by Jewish-German businessman Emile Weil, reflecting the multicultural flavor of the neighborhood. The States reported that Weil “has been prominently identified in the electric fixture field for a number of years and his progressiveness and business ability are the bulwarks upon which is being founded a firm that is rapidly gaining the confidence and patronage of an ever-growing clientele.”

Other important buildings in the neighborhood at the time included the Page Hotel and the storied Dew Drop Inn, a hopping nightclub at which local music legends like Professor Longhair performed, according to an article on the Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard Merchants and Business Association website.

In 1960, the neighborhood was the locus of a massive boycott of local businesses that refused to hire Black employees; the movement included dozens of African-American activists, as well as students from local colleges and universities. The boycott is viewed as a key turning point and watershed moment in the New Orleans Civil Rights Movement. “The customers were African-American but it was all white people working in the stores, except for some mop-and-broom jobs,” the late attorney Lolis Edward Elie, a leader in the boycott, told The Louisiana Weekly in 2014. “We decided to teach the merchants a lesson and started a selective buying campaign that went on for months.”

The neighborhood began falling on hard times in the 1970s, as other parts of the city underwent development that drew people’s attention and spending dollars away from the Dryades neighborhood. Much of the area lost a great deal of residents and businesses.

But by the 1990s, a redevelopment effort was launched, and over the next several decades festivals, cultural events, new businesses and remade streets and sidewalks emerged, according to the PRCNO article. The process was significantly boosted in 2006, when Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard was designated a Louisiana Main Street district as part a statewide development effort begun in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The official designation of the 24-square-block district helped garner attention, funding assistance and other methods of support from various governmental and charitable sources, such as FEMA. In 2017, the Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard Merchants and Business Association received a Great American Main Street Award from the National Main Street Center, a significant honor.

Today, the neighborhood boasts dozens of businesses, as well as community and cultural organizations like several historic churches, Cafe Reconcile and the Ashe Cultural Arts Center, which is located three blocks south of the Masonic lodge on Oretha Castle Haley. Also close by are other landmarks, attractions and community centers, such as the Dryades YMCA, located on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard six blocks south of 1421, and the Southern Food and Beverage Museum & Museum of the American Cocktail, just one block over from the Masonic lodge.

The St. Andrew lodge building is part of the Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard Cultural District, a designation received from the state Office of Cultural Development.

According to City of New Orleans records, the property is owned by the Electa Grand Chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star, which purchased it in 1997. The property’s total value is listed as $91,800, and it’s assessment for tax purposes is $11,680.

The St. Andrew Grand Lodge’s history dates back before it named the Dryades building as its headquarters. The year of 1907 was a busy one for local Black Masons; the St. Andrew Lodge was incorporated under the laws of the state in March of that year, and four months later St. Andrew awarded a chapter to another group, the Victory Lodge.

The St. Andrew lodge immediately became an influential organization locally and nationally. In March 1908, the St. Andrew chapter was recognized as the only legal grand lodge of Black Masons in the state. Eight years later, the St. Andrew Lodge hosted a gathering of Black masonic organizations from across the state in 1916.

In June 1924, the St. Andrew Grand Lodge and Electa Grand Chapter pooled together $30,000 in capital to start a local masonic building organization, and in 1950, the St. Andrew lodge hosted a golden jubilee celebration and gathering of the General Grand Masonic Congress at 1421 Dryades.

The importance of Black Masonic orders in New Orleans and beyond has been documented and described for a long while, including by scholars and journalists. Paul Lawrence Dunbar wrote in the Journal of African American Studies in 2012 that “an argument can be made that African American Freemasonry also played a significant role in creating a sense of unity and racial pride as blacks struggled to find a national identity.”

Dunbar added that after the Civil War, newly emancipated Black Americans formed and joined Masonic organizations, in addition to churches and other civic-minded organizations, as a way to develop community pride, support, racial uplift and financial success.

In 2010, Stephen Kantrowitz wrote in the The Journal of American History that early on, in the 19th century, that “[f]reemasonry provided an institutional framework, separate from state authority, where men forged political subjectivities, developed organizational expertise, fostered leadership at the community, state, and national levels, repaired schisms, and reconciled rivalries. It also encouraged them to think of those political processes as temporal means of achieving transcendent ends, depicting their lodges, bylaws, and representative bodies as part of a millennia-old project to perfect human society …”

Those involved with the 1421 restoration project are excited to breathe life back into such a storied, historically vital property.

“There are so many stories of great times there,” said Jones, who is a New Orleans native. “There’s a lot of footprints in that building.”

More information about the Restore 1421 Project and 1421 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd. Is available online at www.face-book.com/Restore1421, or by emailing restore1421@gmail.com. Donations to the project can be made online at http://bit.ly/restore1421.

This article originally published in the February 8, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.