Funding for They Swung their Picks was made possible in part by the Government of Ireland through the Emigrant Support programme, commemorating Ireland's link to New Orleans.

And through the generosity of the Gail and Tom Benson Charitable Foundation committed to funding educational causes.

So as much as we call New Orleans a French city or a Spanish, it could rightly call itself an Irish city as well.

If you were Irish, that was always part of the discussion.

That's the dish that the Irish dug.

Like so many of these 19th century infrastructure projects, they live on in the landscape.

Gone, but not forgotten is a marvel of 19th century engineering in New Orleans.

The New Basin Canal.

A legacy of the city's Irish.

[Music].

A popular seeing of the 1800s expressed the importance of Irish laborers on Canal excavation projects: to dig a canal, at least four things are necessary: a shovel, a pick, a wheelbarrow and an Irishman.

In the 19th century, thousands of Irish ditches supplied the muscle to build the nation's canal transportation network.

Canal building peaked in the first half of the 1800s, with 3,326 miles completed in the U.S. between 1816 and 1840.

Approximately 35,000 people worked in the industry, and the Irish made up the majority of the canal workforce.

All this was fueled by revolutions in technology and communication in finance.

New Orleans was not immune to the forces and counter forces that developed these new technologies.

The internal improvements.

It was clear that the New Orleans had advantages naturally.

It needed to augment those just as other cities had.

In 1794, Spanish Governor Carondelet began construction of a canal that extended from Rampart Street to Bayou Saint John, which in turn connected to Lake Pontchartrain.

Later, improvements to the Carondelet or Old Basin Canal, as it became known, made the waterway navigable for small vessels that brought in goods from across Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf.

So now you have loggers and schooners coming in, bringing oysters and whatnot into the rear of the city.

1831 Creole investors spring.

This new technology just arrived down here of railroads, and they open up the Elysian Fields corridor.

The Pontchartrain Railroad, nicknamed Smokey Mary, created New Lake Access in April 1831.

The rail link to Lake Pontchartrain was built with Irish labor.

Later that year, Irish diggers began work on the most ambitious infrastructure project of the era, the New Basin Canal, a navigational outlet to Lake Pontchartrain that eventually replace the Carondelet Canal.

That's one of the underlying stories of the new Basin Canal that it emerged in this era when there was two growing factions in the city with all sorts of complex alliances.

On the lower side of town was a predominantly Francophone population, some of them foreign born from France or the Caribbean.

Most of them locally born and they were known as Creoles.

It's all about shipping.

So navigating up through the mouth of the Mississippi River, even nowadays, is considered a relatively difficult maritime task.

There are shifting shoals hidden underneath the water at the mouth of the Mississippi.

Ships would run aground all over the place.

Eventually, France got tired of losing their ships and so they wanted to find another way to get goods into the Mississippi River without having to navigate the mouth of the river.

The Americans decided they were going to dig their own shipping canal that went about six miles down toward the Mississippi River.

It was completed in 1838.

In 1839, they decided to put up a lighthouse to mark this as as the shipping canal.

In 1831, the Louisiana state legislature granted a charter to the New Orleans Canal and banking company to build a new commercial waterway.

This new waterway would allow goods to be transported from the Lake Pontchartrain Basin and Gulf Coast directly into the second municipality on the uptown side of Canal Street.

The decade during which the new Basin Canal was excavated, the 1830s saw more than a doubling of the city's population.

It enters 1830 at just under 50,000.

And by 1840, it's over 100,000 and the third largest city in the nation.

And by far the largest in the south.

New Orleans became the nation's second largest immigration port in 1837 and maintained that status until the Civil War.

There were Irish coming in routinely into the city of New Orleans from the 1830s and early 1840s.

A significant number of Irish come here.

There was a time to be here.

A lot of people made a lot of money and there were Irish people at the front of that.

Well, Thomas Fitzwilliam is the the brother of my third great grandfather, and he got here ahead of everybody else in about 1820 or 1821, which is only several years after the Battle of New Orleans.

So it was pretty a wide open environment for entrepreneurs.

New Orleans was a natural attraction because Catholicism was was a dominant religion here.

There was no English rule, so there wasn't any bias against the Irish or at that time any way or the other religion.

So it was a natural port.

The early Irish worshiped at Saint Louis Cathedral, where Mass was conducted in French in 1835.

Land on Camp Street was purchased for the purpose of establishing an English speaking church in the parish honoring Saint Patrick.

Irish immigrant James Gautier, senior, one of the city's most influential architects, completed the Gothic Revival Church in 1840.

So already we have in the 1830s at the same time the new bays and canals being built.

We have a community that wants its own church and that is St. Patrick's distinctly Irish.

Thomas Fitzwilliam sold the land for St Patrick's Church to the congregation in 1835.

The Act of Sale states that he got it from a man named Charles Byrne, who was a wealthy entrepreneur in New Orleans during the 1820s and 1830s.

If I remember correctly, he acquired it for about $6,600, which is a much larger sum in today's money.

And he sold it to the congregation for $24,000 and change in 1835.

It's not far from the port.

So you see canal workers and after that job's done, they've got to go to the next job and some of them will be become part of those different teams working in other canals.

Others will say, I can also just walk to the port and at the age of sail on the age of the steamboat, that is the economic hub of New Orleans.

Maunsel White, an Irish merchant from Tipperary who arrived in New Orleans around 1800, was the chief founder of the New Improvement Bank.

He parlayed his skills as an investor, as an entrepreneur, into a massive amount of wealth, and he saw an opportunity to build this canal, which would again supplement his wealth and add to the vibrancy of the city of New Orleans, which would bring more people, more goods, more services into the city.

The thing about the canal was that there were so many small investors, people that bought $100 or $200 and added to the capital of this bank so that they could begin the process of excavating the canal.

In this era, the U.S. government wasn't big enough vis a vis the expanding nation to build infrastructure as we know it today.

It was called internal improvements at that time, and they were largely in the hands of the private sector, namely improvement banks, which were set up to make money off of infrastructure.

And so this improvement bank aimed to make money by charging vessels coming up and down the canal, but just as importantly, charging for the toll road.

The banks charter called for a 60 foot wide channel at least six feet deep.

The canals right of way would run 300 feet wide and six miles long.

The state grants them this charter a monopoly charter, so only they could use this here in exchange for an agreement that 35 years hence ownership would switch from the bank to the state of Louisiana.

And that proved very consequential.

Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania was the first contractor hired to build the new base in Canal.

During his tenure, he recruited 1200 Irish canals in Philadelphia and sent them by sea to New Orleans beginning in 1831.

He was one of the prime movers behind recruiting people in Pennsylvania.

I've actually found mentions in early 1832 newspapers where he was bringing Irish people here from Pennsylvania for the purpose of digging the canal.

One of corporate America's favorite go to resources in the 1930s for labor was Irish immigrants, so called ditches.

And we have a lot of examples of this locally.

The new Basin Canal was probably the best example here.

They were oftentimes paid around a dollar a day.

They were skilled individuals in this job that looked like was unskilled.

But think about how you go about excavating a canal that is 6 to 10 feet deep and 60 yards wide and six miles long.

You don't do it with unskilled, unexperienced labor.

You have to have someone that is knowledgeable about how to do this and how to make this happen.

And that's what the banking company did.

They sought out professionals to build this canal.

It is hard labor.

Absolutely, but it does take skill and engineering to do it.

And the canal building era really starts in the 1820s.

At the same time that we're getting a big wave of Irish immigrants who are coming to North America, who are spending years working in these projects, because these are the highways of the 19th century.

The canalers, as you know, would be working six days a week, maybe seven days.

And if we're in gangs or little pods of men, that would work with a section and a section chief.

These people would build this canal in bits and pieces.

Surprisingly, we know very little about the men and women who lived on this canal, who dug this canal.

Names of Irish diggers don't appear in the records of the Public Works project, but family genealogy has filled in some of the blanks.

My great great grandfather was Patrick William Hodgins He came over in the 1830s with his sister.

He was working on the canal as a laborer.

Eventually, he became a supervisor and then was in charge of maintaining the canal.

From the stories that I've been told was when he came in, they had massive tents where people stayed and they put the younger ones in a different tent because the older guys would drink.

They were gamble, they would fight.

My grandmother's family, the Drummond's, they actually provided carts and horses to transport the dirt that they dug up to different areas.

Fully open to navigation in 1838.

The canal began at a turning basin named mobile, landing near what is now the union passenger terminal on South Rampart Street in the Central Business District.

That's where it would begin, and that's where they first began excavating in December of 1831.

The toughest half is completed by about 1834 through the Metairie Bridge and into what is now Lakeview and the rest of it from Lakeview to what became called New Lake and is completed by about 1835, 1836.

Work continues on the two termini of the canal.

One of them is called mobile landing, and that is where Howard Avenue now meets Loyola Avenue.

And why is it called mobile?

Because you could get on a vessel there, go out the lake, go out the Wrigley's, and make it all the way to Biloxi, Mobile and Pensacola Canal is where migrant workers who moved from job to job.

Women also worked at the construction sites in the Chanty camps that sprang up along the canals.

Worker camps on canals that were pretty pretty typical what you did and it's saved on money expense and time, right.

Having to travel back and forth by foot was just time lost in a day's labor.

You would have stayed on them.

You would have created sort of like your own flat levee ground camps, and you would have women there who would be doing the cooking or laundering while performing in New Orleans in 1835.

Irish actor Tyrone Power, great grandfather of the 1930s and forties movie matinee idol by the same name, visited the excavation site.

Power wrote that the laborers were exploited by a contractor who wrings profit from their blood and were living worse than the cattle of the field in makeshift huts built of logs from the cypress swamp.

He was appalled because of the work conditions that the men endured.

It was a horrific job.

These men were hard working, hard drinking, boisterous, loud and oftentimes violent.

But he also saw in them something that was uniquely Irish, the ability to rise above their condition.

And yet at the same time be active in trying to mitigate their circumstances, using axes and shovels, workers cleared 75 acres of timber and excavated nearly 600,000 yards of muck, a wheelbarrow at a time up wooden planks out of the ditch.

The canal was completed at a cost of over $1,000,000.

Not long after arriving in New Orleans.

The canal was hired by Cameron and lodged a series of public complaints in the newspaper.

The workers claimed that they had been wrongfully sold to the canal company as a redemptorists, with their wages garnished to pay for their passage and room and board.

Among their complaints were the high prices at the company's store.

You're paid a wage, but from your wage they say, Well, you took this, this and this.

You know, you ate this much food, so we've deducted this all from your wages.

And so it's not even the freedom of like, well, here's your here's your money.

And now you can come back and buy something.

They would get a certain amount of money every day.

But then the company that hired them would charge them for their food, for the shovel, for their bed, for the water.

If they got water, if they needed shoes, they didn't provide them.

You have to buy them.

They're coming from Pennsylvania.

And between the transportation and the food and everything else.

At the end of the day, they're really not seeing any kind of actual wage.

They made their grievances known to the city, to the social media of the day, the newspaper.

And that to me, is more indicative of the Irish spirit that they do not tamely submit.

They wanted the day after Christmas, St Stephen's Day off, which was traditional in Ireland, for them to have the day off.

They didn't go to work.

And so in a knee jerk reactionary effort, the canal company shut down the canal construction and threw these workers out.

They protested.

They wrote a very moving and graphic explanation of what they had done and called on their fellow countrymen in New Orleans and elsewhere to come to their aid and rescue.

The digging coincided with a cholera epidemic that hit New Orleans.

Among the cholera victims, where the Irish Canal diggers, who were also highly susceptible to yellow fever, occupational hazards for men who toiled from 12 to 15 hours a day in the mosquito infested swamp land where they worked and lived.

The death count for the Irish diggers is uncertain, but a ballad with mysterious origins of the Dead at 20,000 lyrics published in the Times-Picayune in 1937, turned the fictional account of Mass Irish deaths into oft repeated myth.

There's a ditty that's been published about the situation, and it goes 10,000 mics.

They swung their picks to dig the new canal, but the cholera was greater than they, and twice they'd kill them all implying that 20,000 Irish people died.

And it's not really factual.

In the local cultural memory here, you'll often hear this famous figure of 10,000 Irish men died on the new base in Canal.

This is probably the result of, shall we call it hyperbole of historiography.

Something that they do get right in this ditty is the 1832 33 cholera epidemic that hit New Orleans.

It hit actually throughout the United States at a time when people didn't know how this disease was transmitted and that this bacteria based disease transmits very quickly, very easily, and it infects and kills.

These things came in waves, and sometimes immigrants were blamed for them as they were for the yellow fever epidemic.

It was known as the strangers disease because people thought that only strangers got it.

Immigrants only got it.

And there was a reason for that.

It's a virus transmitted by mosquitoes.

But once you have it and you survive it, you're immune to it.

Aedes aegypti.

The mosquito that was the vector for yellow fever breeds really well, in these urbanized environments, they could breathe in a droplet of water and you'd have a blood meal in terms of humans living right next to all this stagnant water.

It's the perfect environment.

So Irish, among other immigrants, disproportionately suffered from these diseases.

What confuses most people is that because New Orleans is this necropolis, they conflate the 1831, 1832, the cholera epidemic that took the lives of maybe 4,500 people in New Orleans, most of whom were Irish, but they weren't canal diggers.

The probate records, the burial records show that the men and women who died in the cholera epidemic were already living in New Orleans doing other jobs, not digging the canal, rather than a story of tragedy.

The New Basin Canal is testament to Irish resilience and strength during the famine between, say, 1847 to 1853, somewhere in the neighborhood of 170,000 Irish come through the Port of New Orleans.

Obviously, all do not stay, but there's a sizable group that does stay.

Around 1850 at the next the 1850 census, there is roughly 20,000 Irish in the city of New Orleans.

One out of every five white people in the city is an Irishman, and they thrive and they begin to feel that they belong.

They came here because of the economic opportunity, which meant that you may have been digging a canal and part of a team.

In 1832.

But when I follow you through time in 1840, you're now a construction boss.

You now are leading your own teams.

You may have been working for somebody else with a cart transporting the tools that this puts needed back and forth between the canal and the city or between the port and a warehouse.

And I look and five years later, you've got three or four dray licenses, which are quite expensive.

And I'm like, now you have your own team, you have your own business.

It's an incredible story.

They built churches, they built schools, they built relationships.

That was the essential ingredient that made them connect and stay together as a potent social and political force inside the city in New Orleans.

Schooners, loggers, barges and tugs almost filled the canal from bank to bank, carrying freight from Lake Pontchartrain to the city, charging 37 and a half cents per ton on all vessels.

After its first year of operation, the bank showed a profit of about $405,000, roughly the equivalent of $10 million today.

For almost 100 years, the new Basin Canal contributed to the economic vitality of New Orleans.

Ship traffic carried building materials, fruits and vegetables, seafood, cotton and other products into the growing city from the Lake Pontchartrain Basin and the Gulf Coast.

We also had a population boom here in New Orleans, and so there were more and more goods that were needed in the city itself.

So once this canal was built, it had a huge commercial use bringing in lumber and goods into the heart of the city.

This was the easiest, quickest way to get everything downtown down this shipping canal.

The Pontchartrain version is over 10,000 square miles.

It's 16 parishes in Louisiana.

Goes all the way up to Washington or to East Baton Rouge, down to Plaquemines.

So it's a huge amount of land.

There's actually 22 essential ecosystem habitats throughout this area.

So it's very diverse.

So it's a booming business.

We probably have untold quantities of floorboards and beams and timbers from probably thousands of New Orleans historic structures built between the 1840s clear into the early 1900s that came in on the new Basin Canal.

You could not calculate the amount of benefit that came from this canal, from its ability to bring in lumber and foodstuffs and from truck forms and cattle and things of that nature that came into the city that augment did.

New Orleans is already a mighty commercial empire.

In his research on antebellum New Orleans, historian Terence Fitzmaurice recently discovered records indicating that slaves were also transported on the New Basin Canal.

The canal was a wonderful inlet for goods coming in from the areas of Mississippi and Alabama and the North Shore.

But because the city of New Orleans was the primary focus and locale for the internal slave trade that came primarily along the coast between 1807 and 1860, there was a trickle, a small stream of slaves that were coming through the new Basin Canal.

We know this because the records are there for us to see.

The slaves that were coming in were one, four, seven, 12, a small group of slaves on a sloop or a schooner that would come out of Pensacola, Apalachicola Mobile that were coming from the inner areas of Mississippi and Alabama.

And they would go into the city of New Orleans, where they would be consigned to a slave trader who would then advertise in the paper.

The slave society in New Orleans is just that.

It affects everyone, everything.

It's a fact that is part and parcel of what New Orleans was in antebellum times.

The 25 foot wide shell road along the canal provided access to the lake and helped facilitate development of New Orleans West End as a lakeside resort.

It was a popular carriage drive and unofficial horse racetrack, inspiring the phrase “Once famous in harness racing, traveling like 240 on the Shell Road.

” It was a favorite sport when harness racing was a big thing in the South and New Orleans was particularly famous.

That became a well-known expression, meaning, you know, lickety split.

Newspapers reported the dangers on the Shell road from rowdy miscreants who outrace each other at a furious pace in buggies.

Police action was recommended.

A portion of the canal is still open from Lake Marina Drive to the Southern Yacht Club, with its first clubhouse being built in 1879.

This extension at West End was added in the late 1920s.

The tradition of lighthouses at the entrance to the harbor dates back to 1834, when the U.S. Congress authorized $25,000 for construction of a lighthouse.

So once the canal was built, the first lighthouse to stand here was a cypress tower.

It was octagonal with a light on top and realized really quickly why you shouldn't build an octagonal tower on marshy ground because it immediately started to sink and tilt.

This is the fourth lighthouse, but it's made out of parts of the third lighthouse.

And we did have the original blueprints from the third lighthouse.

So it is pretty much exact replica.

Today the new base Canal Lighthouse is a museum run by the Pontchartrain Conservancy.

The harbor at Lake Pontchartrain became new and Lake a lakeside port.

The Waterfront Boardwalk Resort, renamed West End featured hotels, restaurants, music venues and an amusement park.

If you look at photos from the early 1900s, it's incredible.

It's up on boardwalks.

It overlooks the lake.

There are rollercoasters.

There are restaurants that traffic in all things Louisiana cuisine.

You know, it's about Louisiana seafood.

It's the same sort of culinary things that we cherished today.

It's a place for jazz bands.

It's a place for jazz musicians that make an extra buck.

There are vessels that go out on the lake for four moonlight cruises.

It is quite a destination.

On June 28th, 1896, moving pictures came to Louisiana.

The first Vitascope films were shown outdoors at West End.

Initially, they thought it was only going to be shown in open air parks, but you had to have some type of electricity.

So they came down to New Orleans.

Fortunately, the West End had just finished putting in the generators there to run the streetcar line.

And once it was put in that basically let all the hotels go in place that basically fueled the whole making of West End.

They literally had to take and do the power line through a barrel of water to weaken it down enough to run the Vitascope.

It had to be dark.

So 8:00 and 10:00, they were going to have two showings.

The showing time was 20 minutes.

The films, which ranged from 30 seconds to a minute in length, were shown on canvas, stretched across the bandstand.

They filmed the train coming in under the station and literally had people jump up, scream and run out because they thought it was a live train coming at them.

A kiss shocked the crowd at the city's first movie night.

They were flushed out for showing it out at West End.

You had pastor started raising Cain.

The council got together and said, you can't show that in public.

The people were just amazed of simple movement, though.

A little bit of variety.

He had dancers and he had even some boxing.

The first night they had almost 12,000 people show up just to see this movement.

It was phenomenal.

It had everything.

It was basically the center of entertainment at that time.

[coronet playing] The West End offered large band concerts and performances by early ragtime and jazz bands.

Local cornetist Joe King Oliver commemorated the lively entertainment area in his composition West End Blues.

West End Blues is a song named after West End and recalls the experiences of playing at West End.

It was composed by the most famous musician, at least bandleader, in New Orleans at the time.

Joseph King Oliver.

The most famous version of West End Blues was done not by King Oliver, but by his protege, Louis Armstrong, who recorded it a few weeks after King Oliver.

And he put an incredible introduction on it.

It sort of signaled and heralded a new age, not only in jazz, but American music and even America itself.

West End was an important place for musicians to find work.

There were many different types of bands and musicians that played.

There were classical ensembles for sit down brass bands that read music.

There were, of course, jazz bands, and bands had played ragtime music as well.

It was a place where musicians seemed to enjoy playing because people were dancing.

And it was it seemed like it was a freer time in terms of being allowed to to further develop music.

I think the combination of being on the lake cooler breeze out in the open air, it just kind of bred a freer environment for the music.

And since the music is about freedom, it sort of enhanced the musicians ability to to loosen up and really play swinging, hot creative music.

So I have here a very precious heirloom that comes from my family.

It was handed down by my grandfather, who got it from some people that he worked for in the Garden District.

So Silver Water Pitcher.

And it says Maestro El L'Enfant Souvenir of the West in season 1890.

So this represents part of the musical tradition that was at West End Lumberyards and building material suppliers lined the shores of the new Basin Canal.

Janky service was the largest and principal user of the canal, earning it the nickname Jahnckes Ditch.

Jahncke had an operation right on the basin and at Carrolton Avenue, right where Pelican Stadium was.

And in fact, Pelican Stadium was still there when they were operating adding sand.

And of course, at that time, Lakeview was building.

So it was close proximity for them to service the foundation as a construction area.

Keep in mind that the barges huge and have a big payload and you need a strong tug.

So they have something like one or two or three, maybe more barges coming in with sand and gravel, and they'd get some of the sand from the lake, dig it up and put it on the barge and then bring it down through the new basin canal to pass broad Street to that industrial area down there.

For many years, the arrival of the Zulu king by boat on the new Basin Canal was a carnival tradition.

On Mardi Gras day, the Royal Party of the Zulu aid and Pleasure Club would arrive at the foot of the new Basin Canal on Rampart Street, then parade the streets of New Orleans.

You know, the New Basin Canal.

Not only is it a central in the history of New Orleans, but really a very important one to Mardi Gras history, thanks to Zulu.

And we know from at least 1917, 1949, that's how Zulu entered the city.

Zulu decided in 1917 to use the new Basin Canal instead of the Mississippi River and the very first Zulu king in 1917, James Robinson, actually was rode across the waterway in a skiff.

Not exactly a royal entrance, but that's how the tradition started.

Most years, as the tradition developed, tugboats were used and then gravel barges.

So no matter what the vehicle, you know, Zulu did its thing and in some way maybe a mockery of Rex, but all tongue in cheek and fun.

In 1949, when Louis Armstrong reigned as the Zulu king, the world renowned New Orleans musician sailed the new Basin canal on a royal barge loaned by Jahncke Service.

Now, I've never been able to determine how Ernest Jahncke, related to Zulu, but certainly did.

He lent them for several years and I think perhaps rent free these these gravel barges for them to arrive in.

And that was so important in 1949 to Louis Armstrong.

They purposely stopped the parade on Howard Avenue at the Jahncke headquarters to toast them.

You know, because he gets credit for starting the celebrity king craze in 1969.

But the really first celebrity king of all was Louis Armstrong in 1949.

It was incredibly important.

He went up on the cover of Time magazine as a result of him being a Zulu, that that year, the part of the canal that that Louis Armstrong rode in on was closed the next year in 1950.

So this this was it.

So it was kind of the end of an era, really, in 1949.

And what a what a way to end with Louis Armstrong.

The New Basin canal transforms swamps into building lots, ushering in new neighborhoods, including West End and Lakeview.

Orleanians rode steam and later electrified trains to the resort.

The real connection joined the city's streetcar system and the new West End line carried people to the lakefront.

I grew up on Colbert Street 6718, and we were the only house on the block on our side of the street.

My mother was so Irish.

She came from seven children, one of seven children.

Her father was off on the riverboat as a fireman.

We had a little frame wooden house, what used to be called the Lakeview cottage.

I didn't get to ride on the streetcar alone until it came for high school, because high school was Dominican.

Uptown.

Then we used to get on this streetcar at Fillmore where we walked from Colbert Street to Fillmore, and we sit in the little great playhouse until the clerk, we could hear the car when it was starting because you could hear the tracks.

It's so quiet then.

no people, no cars.

It was wonderful on the streetcar because the streetcar would rock along the track and you could open the windows and you could smell the fresh air.

And it was a it was a great experience.

We didn't have any movies except the ones downtown.

So it went to go to the Saenger or the Lowes.

We went on the streetcar.

Just 7 cents to go to town.

it was an adventure.

So had two sets of tracks.

And the people would come walk up with about a car.

Brooks and West End so we saw the traffic from to and from the streetcar stop from our darling living room window.

So we took the streetcar to town.

And while I was going to just take the streetcar there when I changed to Warren Easton, I'd take the streetcar to there, just go up to that station house, which was really nice.

It was painted gray and it was sturdy, you know, it was a nice wide really around it and a nice double bench, you know, that people could sit on.

It was like a hangout in the summertime.

The canal added to the vibrant culture of the city.

Sailboat and rowing club races were popular pastimes.

The waterway is also where thousands of area youngsters learned how to swim.

They used to have races in the canal and my husband and family was super swimmers.

And his younger sister used to swim against the competition in the New Basin Canal.

They would have races in the canal.

Well, I never played in the canal.

My mother would never have allowed that.

No way.

By the mid 1920s, Lakeview was beginning to emerge as a neighborhood.

Development was slowed by the Depression.

But after World War Two, many Irish-American families took advantage of the GI Bill to purchase homes in the area.

We lived at 5835 Western Boulevard, and my dad had a nice house for sale.

Two story, four bedroom house.

Well, eight kids, six boys and two girls.

We're an Irish Catholic family.

And share me go to.

We love it.

But it was heaven for us.

Lakeview was an exciting place for us.

My mother is a Gaffney, and she's 100% Irish.

My father, his mother was a Caldwell.

They moved to Polk Avenue and then eventually bought a house on in the 6000 block of Louisville.

I think they moved there because that was the place to go.

A million fresh watermelons arrived annually on the New Basin Canal.

The quest for the political fruit by local youth was legendary.

You'd hear this chh, chh, chh, chh, and somebody would come out and go see the watermelons.

And go, “Schooner!

Schooner!

” We would in my house, all the boys would show up in the middle of dinner and run out to the New Basin Canal to see if we could get us a watermelon.

And we spent a lot of time just sitting out there, crabbing or swimming and watching those schooners come in, getting some.

All of that was from them.

During the summertime.

you know, we'd get up, would put on our bathing suit and go up to the car stop and would hang around there, and one would see a watermelon schooner or the Jahncke barges come in from the Lake Pontchartrain area.

You know, would get the word out.

You know, the big thing was when you got your first watermelon and then after that, you know, you initiated.

I remember growing that first watermelon home and I was dripping wet.

I walked in.

My mother was furious and she started scolding me and I said, Mom, look, look, I have this watermelon Like that was going to be my pass?

It was to me a Huck Finn type of existence.

It was a happy time.

It was a gathering place.

Well, we played baseball on it and played football on it.

It was a it was beautiful.

It was well-kept.

It was a paradise for me and the rest of us.

You know, it cost you a penny to go put all your short pants up in the New Basin Canal.

Advances in shipping and competition with rail and road transportation decreased the economic viability of the New Basin Canal.

Filling and paving of the channel began in 1937, and by the early 1950s, the historic canal was completely covered.

Today, the Pontchartrain Expressway follows the canals bid from New Orleans heading to Lake Pontchartrain.

Keep in mind, the channel itself, the water was 60 feet wide and six feet deep.

But the right of way, the purchases made through all those the rivers of all those plantations in the 1830s was 300 feet and 300 feet.

To this day, if you look at the I-10 corridor, plus some of the service roads and maybe some of the railroads between the Superdome and the cemetery, it's 300 feet wide.

Even clearer once you come off the interstate as it veers westward to Metairie, you're on West End and Pontchartrain Boulevard and probably the widest neutral ground in the city.

The reason for that, 300 feet wide, that was the the right of way that the that the original charter called for.

There's a state law.

I think it's part of the constitution that this state owned asset was no longer needed.

It was an impedance to transportation trucks could now get resources in.

So from 1937 through World War Two, the portion closest to downtown was filled in.

And by right around 1950 or so, a little after 1950s, the rest of it is filled in.

The only part that isn't filled in is the part that was built in the 1920s.

By the 1950s, there's this state owned empty corridor, and it's the perfect place to build the Pontchartrain Expressway.

It was a way when they started to fill it.

Our country was building five airbases in North Africa, so I was over there for years, so I was aware of it.

But I said, because what a wonderful place that thing was for commercial and relaxing and, you know, entertainment.

My family moved onto West End Boulevard, which was the boundary of the Basin Canal when it was in its heyday.

We moved in 1958.

They had just filled in the canal in those days, and I remember the neutral ground, which was always sinking because it had been a canal at one time.

And I remember the rains and the and in those days we had terrible freezes.

I mean, sometimes it would go below zero for for a couple of nights and it would be like a gigantic skating pond.

And we would go over and with tennis shoes on and skate weren't supposed to and skate and come back full of mud and, dirt.

My mother would scream at us.

Irish immigration to New Orleans all but stopped with the collapse of the economy after the Civil War.

But Irish Americans continued to influence the community.

In 1870, they established Hibernia Bank and four years later, the first local chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians was formed Demonstrations of Irish ethnic pride continued through social organizations and politics.

One of the fascinating stories about the Irish in New Orleans is that normally you need a continuous flow of immigrants to kind of fill the pool, to reconnect with with the with the old country, to keep that bridge open.

And without it, things kind of fizzle apart and you lose the that ethnic identity and sort of become generic American.

And but in New Orleans, after the Civil War, when the the flood of Irish immigrants to the city, you know, slowed down to a trickle and down to a drip, that's where the story ends.

To just stop there because we don't have that.

And yet it doesn't it coheres.

It becomes different.

And more dynamic.

And it continues in the 20th century and including the rise of the assessors, the rise of New Orleans with the Burke family, with the Comiskey families, with, again, these strong Irish, strong roots, strong neighborhoods, strong communities.

Beginning after World War Two, the Irish Uptown Parade.

And that's the fascinating aspect.

Here in New Orleans, they began to form civic and benevolence societies.

And those societies are here because of the desire to be connected to your fellow countrymen, because there's a love of Ireland that does not leave them.

In 1980, the Irish Cultural Society of New Orleans was established to foster the traditional culture of Ireland.

The organization is motto We Preserve The Treasure reflected its dedication to the history, language, literature and music of Ireland.

Dr. Rodney Junge was one of the group's first presidents and founder.

It was just to get the Irish, I think, aware of the fact of what they had contributed to, because that's what Dr. Jung talked about a lot.

How they had contributed so much to this society as a group.

And when the Irish came here.

They rose to the top in leadership because they knew how to work hard.

And I think that's what the Irish Culture Society did for a lot of Irish people, gave them something to do and something to be proud of.

To honor the Irish laborers who dug the New Basin Canal.

The group made plans for a monument on the wide, neutral ground between West End and Pontchartrain Boulevards, where the canal once flowed.

The New Orleans Levee District allocated a portion of the filled in canal to the Irish Cultural Society in 1987 to establish a landscape park with a monument to the Irish diggers.

Johanna Siether, She brought it up.

She said, I have been doing some research and I realize that the Irish, many of the Irish who came here had to work very hard and dig in the canal.

They had brought up the idea of putting the across the monument and everybody was so excited about that.

The Irish Cultural Society raised $25,000 for the Stone Monument through grassroots fundraising that included a society cookbook and special events like an Irish Day at the Races at the fairgrounds.

They were very innovative in all the ways they approached raising money.

Once they got the idea, people just dug into their pockets and really helped us.

It was the McGlincheys who stepped forward and really put up the amount of money, and we were terribly grateful to them, you know, forever grateful to them for that.

I was shocked and surprised at the responses, But I think it was the Irish love of Ireland.

I really do.

The seven foot Celtic cross carved in Kilkenny, Ireland, was dedicated on November 4th, 1990, with guest of honor, U.S. Irish Ambassador Padraic MacKernan in attendance So when we look at this monument today, we remember, I think, the poignancy of the lives of all of these young men.

At the height of their strengths who toiled here literally to build the United States.

It gave me a sense of pride, the Irish and I think it gave the people in the Irish dwellings a sense of being noticed and cared for that they weren't rejected, you know, but they had finally done something.

It was a beautiful one.

What it was like.

We did it.

We did it.

We didn't know if we could, but we did it.

And it's like we proved something to the community after we formed The Hibernians and we became interested and I and several other people became members of the Irish Culture Society with Dr. Jung, of course, was a leader, and we were always there to help.

And of course, finally Katrina came and changed the complexion of everything.

After Hurricane Katrina, the park became a dumping ground for storm debris.

The monument survived the disaster, but many cultural society members had left the area and upkeep became almost impossible.

Out of necessity, the care of the Celtic Cross monument was assumed by the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

The water was so high, obviously as close to the Lake as we were.

It was devastating.

It was terrible.

And nobody thought that the city would ever open again.

Unfortunately, this West End, this huge, huge, neutral ground that went for almost a half a mile, became a dumping ground for the debris.

Three or four blocks, the cross itself was a mound that must have been 30 foot high, 40 foot high.

Nobody had the Celtic cross high on their agenda at that time.

So we started knocking the weeds down ourselves on our own.

Later, Margaret who was one of the remaining member of the board of the Irish Cultural Society, approached us and so we got involved and formed a committee to recognize the contribution and colorful history of the Irish in Louisiana.

A bill by Senator Edwin Murray in 2012 established the month of March as Irish-American Heritage Month.

That is certainly one of the biggest steps we took in putting the Irish on the map, so to speak, in Louisiana.

New Orleans has always been known as a French city, and I'm sure it will always be known as a French city.

But the Irish played a big, big part in the building of this city.

And you don't have to listen to me go to the to the walls of City Hall and look at the Irish mayors that we've had and the Irish city councilman that we've had.

And the Irish assessors we've had.

The Celtic Cross was a symbol of the Irish presence in New Orleans.

There's no question about that.

And we started playing race every St Patrick's Day to remind the people in New Orleans that the Irish are alive and well and we never forget.

In 2013, the AOH established the Louisiana Hibernian Charity to develop a four acre heritage site devoted to the Irish experience in New Orleans.

The Celtic Cross Monument is the heart of Hibernian Memorial Park, and we called it the Hibernian Memorial Park to memorialize the Irish who dug the canal represented by the Celtic Cross.

That Dr. Jung and the Irish Cultural Society had erected the New Basin Canal is an extraordinary episode in New Orleans history and is a rallying point for many of the city's Irish-Americans.

The canal gives us that sense that the Irish have arrived.

They become part of the story of the city.

And it was not just part of it, but perhaps instrumental in making the city of New Orleans what it is today.

The Irish Cultural Society's Celtic Cross Monument was dedicated to the sons and daughters of Ireland who came to this country seeking freedom and a better way of life.

The organization's message rings true today.

They face the unknown and an uncertain future with courage, determination.

They ask only for an opportunity to work and work they did.

By their hard work and diligence.

They created an Irish community that we can all be proud to belong to.

That says it all, doesn't it?

Yes, it's it's a it's exactly what how we came to this country, why we came to this country, and why we're still around and kicking in this country.

They say that in New Orleans, community is first, Families first, friends are first.

When they wake up in the morning, they hear the church bells ringing.

Life is a bit slower.

You stop, you ask about how's your mama and them?

How's the family?

It reminds them of home.

And if they can't be in Ireland, New Orleans is a pretty good second home to have.

As I got to high school age, We started having people in the neighborhood, and if they had boys, the boys were a problem because they would go play in the canal and steal watermelons.

The base of it was nothing but mush.

I mean, if you went down and put your foot in, you know, you came up with all this nasty stuff, and after you got out, you had you had green stuff, all over you.

under your nose and chin.

you could walk close to the to the mound where the streetcar tracks were and just walk through that slushy mud and pick up golf balls because people guys would get out and hit golf balls a lot, but they would hook them, you know, go right, right.

behind the basin..

So we could periodically, once it filled up, we would just walk into the mud and pick up golf balls and we'd go clean them off and go sell them to the golfers for 25 cents.

Funding for They Swung their Picks was made possible in part by the Government of Ireland through the Emigrant Support Programme commemorating Irelands link to New Orleans and through the generosity of the Gale and Tom Benson Charitable Foundation committed to funding educational causes.