Caroline Rowe: My Bourbon Street Village

Caroline Rowe in the courtyard of her childhood home on Bourbon Street, photo by Ellis Anderson

May 2025

If it takes a village to raise a child, it might as well be one of the most interesting ones in the country.

~ by Caroline Rowe

Hello, everyone, I’m Caroline Rowe. When my mother bought the house on Bourbon Street between St. Philip and Ursulines, I was around 8 years old. It was my domain, mine to explore, replete with curiosities. It made me feel a little like Indiana Jones.

In 2004, during some renovations, a crew had just begun to tear up another layer of floor in the kitchen and discovered that at some point, a square opening had been cut into it.

I think anyone in this city has heard enough grisly French Quarter ghost stories to see a clumsily cut and clumsily patched up hole in the floor as incriminating. I remember the look on the faces of my mother, the contractor and his workmen.

Everyone looks at one another intrepidly, wondering, “What are we about to see?” and “Should we maybe get the kid out of here?”

When the hole is pried open, the first thing we see under a plume of dust, are the necks and outlines of thick, seafoam green glass bottles. Reaching into the hole to bring one up, I see there’s another beneath it. Also, a few shards of blue and white china and a small cloth slip with some French writing on it – a receipt, my mother thinks. By the time the workmen have gone home, we reach a new layer – a sea of scattered, sharp, yellowish-white objects.

Bones.

1024 Bourbon Street in 2025, photo by Ellis Anderson

The next day my mom called in Uncle Louis, my grandmother’s brother-in-law and a pediatrician, to get his medical opinion. Were the bones human or animal?

Though there was one vertebrae that gave him pause, he concluded the bones likely came from butchered animals– not butchered humans. But just to be safe, my mom called Father Young, a priest. He blessed the space and pronounced the kitchen clear of any potentially lingering evil.

My mom also called in one of her tenants, a woman named Kristen, who worked at Voodoo Authentica. She burned sage and enacted her own blessing over the space. My mom calmed our fears the New Orleans way, syncretically – leaning on her community to cover all possible bases.

Dixie’s Bar of Music, Marid Gras, early 1950s, THNOC 2012.0172.26

The house’s owners were every bit as colorful as the stuff they left behind. My mother’s own introduction to the house came while visiting her Aunt Dixie as a child. Dixie was the long-term partner of my mother’s Aunt Lura.

After gaining recognition in a string of all-girl jazz bands, Dixie and her sister opened and ran the famous Dixie’s Bar of Music, one of the first openly gay bars in the city. Dixie was a devout Catholic and never publicly came out. But that didn’t stop her from bailing out her gay patrons jailed for “lewd behavior” with money from the register.

The chain of title shows one of the earliest homeowners as Fransisca Montreuil, a free woman of color. A couple owners later, another free person of color, Felix DeLille, purchased the house in 1832.

Mother Henriette Delille: the only known photo of her, taken in 1855, courtesy The Sisters of the Holy Family.

You might know the name Delille as the candidate to be the first African-American saint, the venerable Mother Henriette Delille. Felix was her half brother. Upon putting this together, my mother began praying to Henriette Delille almost exclusively, making her patron saint of all Caroline-related problems – of which there were many.

As I grew up, the house kept revealing more secrets. One day, we found a small metal box nailed to the floor of the attic, another rather incriminating image. But when pried open, we discovered it must have belonged to a child.

It was filled with a child’s treasures: a marble, some decorative shells, a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. We also found multiple shoes: one, a tiny baby’s shoe, white leather and with holes for little laces. And other children’s shoes, too, of every size.

Like me, these belonged to children of the Quarter – a neighborhood that once held hundreds of playing, shrieking children. But by the time I came around, children had become scarce. People would ogle me and my brothers, looking on in amazement and sometimes snapping photos as I sat on the balcony, blowing bubbles or reading. Kids in the Quarter are their own little tourist attraction.

And I’ll admit, I relished the attention. My mom always stressed being welcoming of tourists. “Those people are what lets us be a city. You have to be nice and be grateful,” she would remind me. I don’t know if I exactly feel that way today, but her view helped me understand the distinction between those who resided in the Quarter and those who passed through.

Growing up in the Quarter meant I was raised by the most colorful of villages. My mom rented almost exclusively to gay men, and at some point, people called the building “the gay orphanage.” And the gay orphanage gave me many “dads” who spoiled and doted on me.

They would take me to Fifi Mahoney’s to try on wigs, which quickly became my favorite, albeit expensive, activity. I wanted to have my tenth birthday party at the drag boutique, and though they had never hosted a child’s party, they gladly put wigs and lashes on me and 10 of my friends.

Though children had been a feature of the house over the years, my mother and I feared my brothers and I might be the last children in our house. Thankfully, this has not been the case.

Caroline and her mother at the Historic BK House during her Quarter Kaleidoscope presentation, photo by Melanie Cole for FQJ

My son, born in 2023, is also a Quarter kid. After making his début at the Touro Infirmary, he came home to our place on Saint Ann. He spends a lot of time with my mom in the house on Bourbon Street.

Who would I be without New Orleans, without having grown up with my crazy village, my archeological expeditions, the folly of tourists, the Quarter? It’s hard to conceptualize my life without it. The Quarter runs deep.

Caroline Rowe at the Historic BK House in the French Quarter, photo by Melanie Cole

After giving five to six years to bartending and starting college in the pandemic, I often say when asked what I want to do: I want to do something, anything, for the city to which I owe my personality, the neighborhood to which I owe my sense of humor, the beauty and decay to which I owe my style, and the amalgamation of it all, to which I owe my creativity.

It seems easy to get complacent about what the city has to offer when you grow up essentially taking it for granted, because it’s all you know. But my hope is to be able to do my part to keep the Quarter a neighborhood, a community and not just an attraction; to make it possible for more people, more children, to be nourished by it the way I have been.

Thank you.