His home on Newton Street was renovated by the Preservation Resource Center more than 20 years ago, and a historic marker is displayed in the front yard. Red Allen Way street signs have recently been installed from Brooklyn Avenue to Behrman Avenue.

Allen was the son of a popular local bandleader Henry Allen. He took trumpet lessons from a young age from Peter Bocage and Manuel Manetta, both well-known Old Algiers musicians at the time. His career began in Sidney Desvigne's Southern Syncopators.  By1924, Allen was performing professionally with the Excelsior Brass Band and the jazz dance bands of Sam Morgan, George Lewis, and John Casimir. After playing on riverboats on the Mississippi River, he left for Chicago in 1927 to join King Oliver's band. Around this time he made recordings with the band of Clarence Williams. After returning briefly to New Orleans, where he worked with the bands of Fate Marable and Fats Pichon, he was offered a recording contract with Victor Records and went to New York City, where he joined the Luis Russell band, fronted by Louis Armstrong in the 1930s. 

As a bandleader, Allen was an innovator and was praised for his “tonal colors” and enthusiastic performance, beginning each set with “Whamp!” even if it was a slow song. Allen moved easily from Dixieland to traditional jazz to swing and other popular music of the day. He became a prolific recording artist and received favorable attention in the U.S. and Europe. He recorded for Victor from 1929 through 1930. He made a series of recordings as co-leader with Coleman Hawkins in 1933 for ARC (and continued as an ARC recording artist through 1935, when he was moved to ARC's Vocalion label for a popular series of swing records from 1935 through late 1937). He recorded a solitary session for Decca in 1940 and two sessions for OKeh Records in 1941. After World War II, he recorded for Brunswick in 1944, Victor in 1946, and Apollo in 1947.

Allen continued performing and made many recordings with his own band, and also with the bands of Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton, and he accompanied such vocalists as Victoria Spivey and Billie Holiday. After a short stint with Benny Goodman, Allen began to lead his own band at the Famous Door in Manhattan. He then toured with the band around the United States in the1950s.  In December 1957, Allen appeared with Pee Wee Russell on the television program Sound Of Jazz. In 1959, he made his first tour of Europe when he joined Kid Ory's band. He led the house band at New York's Metropole Cafe from 1954 until1965. Allen was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1966 and died in 1967 at 59 years old.

This story appeared in the June issue of PRC’s Preservation in Print magazine. Editor’s Note: Featured here are excerpts from the introduction and conclusion of The West Bank of Greater New Orleans — A Historical Geography (LSU Press, 2020), by geographer and long-time Preservation in Print writer Richard Campanella, associate dean for research at the Tulane School of Architecture.

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The West Bank has been a vital part of greater New Orleans since the city’s inception. It has been the Kansas, the Birmingham, the Norfolk, Atlanta, Pullman, and Fort Worth of the metropolis — that is, its breadbasket, foundry, shipbuilder, railroad terminal, train manufacturer, and livestock hub. It had been the Gulf South’s St. Louis, in that it had a diversified industrial sector as well as a riverine, mercantilist, and agricultural economy. It served as a jumping-off point to the Western frontier, and a Cannery Row for the “great thalassic littoral” to the south. The West Bank has also been the Queens and Oakland of New Orleans: an affordable if rather plain purlieus, proud but not pretentious, pleasant if not prominent, comfortable in its own skin — even if at times thin-skinned vis-à-vis the grandiloquence of its cross-river counterpart. A majority-black sub-region of a majority-white greater metropolitan area, the West Bank is home to some of the most diverse demographics in the region, including many immigrants. Yet it also has substantial populations of deep-rooted locals, folks who speak with New Orleans accents, who practice old cultural traits with a minimum of pomp and self-awareness, and, in some cases, who retain family ownership of lands held since antebellum times. The West Bank makes up 30 percent of the metro population, and a commensurate amount of its urbanized footprint. It is, in short, integral to greater New Orleans in every way.

Yet, until now, the story of the West Bank has never been told holistically, on its own terms. Most books about New Orleans — and there are thousands — treat it as a sideshow or an afterthought, if at all. The limited literature on the West Bank has been at the community level, and published only locally. Various dissertations and government reports have been written on certain West Bank topics. But a full-length, in-depth book about the whole sub-region? You’ll find plenty about that other West Bank, in the eastern Mediterranean, but none about the one on the lower Mississippi.

This book positions the West Bank front-and-center, viewing it as a genuine sub-region unto itself, with more holding it together as a social and economic space than dividing it by various jurisdictions. It understands West Bankers to have had agency in their own place-making, and challenges the notion that their story is subsidiary to a more important narrative across the river.

The West Bank of Greater New Orleans is not a traditional history, of mayoral administrations and important political figures such as Martin Behrman and John Alario. Nor is it a cultural history, paying homage to beloved natives like Mel Ott and Frankie Ford, or notable restaurants, such as Mosca’s. (I am fascinated by the regularity with which East Bankers mention Mosca’s whenever the West Bank comes up in conversation.) Rather, it is a historical geography — that is, a spatial explanation of how the West Bank’s landscape came into form: its terrain, environment, peoples, land use, jurisdictions, waterways, industries, infrastructure, systems, neighborhoods, and settlement patterns, past and present. It explores the players, power structures, and decisions behind those landscape transformations, and their contexts, contingencies, and consequences. The West Bank of Greater New Orleans explains how the map of this sub-region came into shape, and how this place came to be.

I did not employ fixed boundaries of what was inside or outside my study area; as a geographer, I tend to resist such artificial lines. I instead used a core/periphery approach, in which the emphasis is on the Algiers-Gretna-Harvey-Marrero-Westwego core of the urbanized West Bank, but not to the exclusion of important places toward the periphery, such as Belle Chasse, Avondale and Waggaman, the Nine Mile Point and English Turn promontories, Lafitte, and even Grand Isle. There are times when the regionality of the West Bank becomes one-and-the-same with the Barataria Basin, or extends out to the German and Acadian coasts, even to Texas. If the evidence took me to the periphery, I went there — but never to the point of losing sight of the core….

The world abounds in West Banks. Just about every city has one — not literally or nominally, of course, but phenomenologically. They have to, because the working families and gritty industries that keep cities running have to be somewhere, and they’ve been pushed out of the historic center by bistros and boutiques. The West Banks of the world are separate yet near their urban cores, apart yet convenient, a spacious counterpart to inner-city crowding and costs. Historically, this made them attractive for land uses like truck farms and manufacturing, and for the folks who worked those jobs, to reside and raise their families.

Yet as ubiquitous as they are, the world’s West Banks defy a perfect, pat term, probably because they draw so little scholarly attention. “Suburbs” doesn’t quite do it, because, as we have seen for New Orleans’ West Bank, some communities therein began as a centuries-old concinnity of nucleated villages and are “cities” by any definition. “Inner suburb” or “trolley suburb” don’t work either, because, unlike the faubourgs and banlieues of the East Bank, there was no primary bourg to which abutting neighborhoods could attach. Nor do the jargon terms “exurbs,” “beta cities,” or “edge cities,” all of which miss the mark. Subrural? Subtopia? Interurban? Ethnoburbs? Inner-ring suburbs? Second-hand suburbs? All true; none perfect.

The West Banks of the world, and our West Bank, are at once working-class and middle-class, mostly modern yet historically undergirded, suburban and interurban, dependent on the urban core yet increasingly autarkic. Their “hybrid quality,” wrote Amanda Holson Hurley in her book Radical Suburbs, “confounds the neat binaries of town and country, village and city, manmade and natural,” such that their apparent exceptions—the West Bank’s many affluent communities, for example — are not really exceptions but evidence of their variability.

West Banks are typically liminal, marginal, and ordinary to the eyes of those who don’t live there. To those who do, they are home — decent, affordable, and pleasant. Maybe they defy a perfect term because those who know them best aren’t in the business of coining academic cant. Urbanists, by their very nature, spend little time studying suburbs as legitimate environments, despite that most Americans live there, and more continue to move there than to the trendy inner-cities that get all the attention. To be sure, the academy is investigating emerging suburban topics like diversity and inequity, and academic architects are increasingly making the case for “retrofitting suburbia” for livability and sustainability. But in the meanwhile, too many urbanists still disdain and avoid suburbia, and Urban Studies programs outnumber Suburban Studies a hundred to one. The West Banks of the world, it seems, will likely persevere in their quotidian normalcy, unmolested by scholarly inquiry….

Perhaps this enduring localism is the up-side to being ignored. Living outside the limelight, in the shadows of the rambunctious, has made the West Bank a place where folks can live affordably, where old New Orleans perseveres, and where future New Orleans has found a home.
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Richard Campanella is a geographer with the Tulane School of Architecture and author of The West Bank of Greater New Orleans; Cityscapes of New Orleans; Bourbon Street: A History; and Bienville’s Dilemma. Campanella may be reached through richcampanella.com, rcampane@tulane.edu, or @nolacampanella on Twitter.

Happy neighbors means less awkward confrontations in the laundry room, and a happy landlord means peaceful living without surprise visits. When it comes time to renew the lease, a great tenant knows the landlord won’t drop them suddenly and may even be able to re-negotiate the terms. Also, a favorable rental history could get you lower rent rates without moving and more perks on your lease renewal.

Here are some useful tips for ways you can be that great tenant.


1. Read Your Lease
Read your lease cover to cover before you sign it. It will help you catch potential problems before they actually happen. Most good landlords will work with you on the terms of the lease. If you know you have a special circumstance, such as a family member or friend who visits regularly, tell the landlord about it ahead of time. If the landlord makes any verbal agreement with you, like providing lawn care, make sure he puts it in writing in the lease. Then ask for a copy of the lease for yourself as soon as you sign. Having a well-rounded lease will help you avoid any tenant’s rights issues later on.

2. Don’t Break the Lease
Most renters think of breaking a lease in terms of the big things like not paying the rent, cutting out early or subletting without permission. However, smaller lease points count too. While a landlord can technically evict a tenant for breaking any term of a lease, most won’t. But the better you stick to your lease, the better chance you have of existing peacefully with your landlord.

3. Pay Your Rent on Time
Nothing makes a landlord happier than a renter who pays rent on time every month. Make sure you have the check in the mailbox a few days before it’s due to avoid any mail or bank holdups. You might even score a few brownie points if you pay a few days early. And since no one is immune from financial hardship, if you know you might have to pay late one month, let your landlord know as soon as possible. The landlord may not mind the late payment as much, if you’re upfront about it.

4. Treat Your Rental Like You Own It
Taking good care of your rental will ensure that you get your deposit back when you move out, and it will also put you in good favor with your landlord. While normal wear and tear is typical in rental units, do not cause any major damage to the rental. Damages will eat away at your security deposit and annoy your landlord. Many states require that you pay for any unnecessary repairs out of pocket.

On that same note, keep your rental property clean. This goes double if you have pets. Pet owners typically become de-sensitized to the odor their pets give off, but your landlord will notice it. If your landlord comes in and sees your unit in a good, clean, scent-free condition, he’ll trust you more. And more trust equals more negotiation power when the lease renewal rolls around.

5. Get to Know Your Neighbors 
Meeting my potential neighbors is always part of my game plan for finding a new apartment to rent. Part of this is because I like to meet new people and another part is because I have a dog. I think the odds of having the neighbors call me to complain about the dog – and not the landlord – improve if I meet them in person.

Knowing your neighbors has several additional benefits. You can watch out for each other. If you have to go out of town some time, your neighbors might keep a better eye on your unit if they know you. You can also do small favors for each other (e.g. I routinely sign for my neighbor’s UPS packages because I know and trust her). Most importantly, establishing a line of communication between tenants reduces the chance of your neighbor escalating a problem to the landlord.

Despite your best efforts to keep quiet, you may upset your neighbors from time to time. Small problems like this can seem like a much bigger deal by the time they get escalated to the landlord. Avoid it altogether and give your neighbors your cell phone number to contact you instead.

What are your best tips for being a courteous and conscientious tenant? Are there any additional tips that you’d add in?