ABSTRACT

Civic spirit and technological advancements enabled dramatic changes in New Orleans's municipal services during the Progressive Era, from the 1880s to the 1920s. New infrastructure investments introduced municipal water treatment and distribution, modern sewerage service, street paving, and new parks and playgrounds. New technologies brought telephony, electrification, the internal combustion engine, and steel-frame high-rise construction. As a modern American city emerged, its footprint expanded upon deltaic lands readied for urbanization by the premier environmental alteration of the turn-of-the-century era: municipal drainage. New Orleans had tried repeatedly since colonial times to drain runoff and groundwater from its soggy soils. Construction of the drainage system, which commenced in 1896, received an additional boost in June 1899 when voters, including women, who had the suffrage in this special municipal-bond referendum and enthusiastically supported municipal improvements, overwhelmingly approved a two-mill property tax to fund waterworks, sewerage, and drainage.