| Louisiana Division/City Archives | New Orleans Public Library |
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| JULIA DEAN
Julia Dean was a madam who operated brothels in several locations in the years before and during the Storyville era in New Orleans. A native of Virginia, Dean was in business locally as early as 1868, when she is listed in the city directory as operating “furnished rooms” (a common euphemism for brothel) at 211 Customhouse Street. The 1870 census shows her as owning $3000 in personal property with three courtesans and three domestic servants in her household. In 1886 she purchased the three-story house at 16 Basin Street and operated there until she had to sell the property in 1897 in compliance with the Storyville ordinance. In the meantime, she and fellow madam Irma Rose opened a brothel in Chicago, hoping to generate profits there during the slow summer months in New Orleans. That project failed, however, leading to some serious financial difficulties for Dean. In later years, she had houses on North Basin Street and on Customhouse Street; she is last listed in the 1913 city directory when she was seventy-nine years old. The February 25, 1906 edition of the Sunday Sun referred to Dean at that time as “the oldest landlady in the district to-day.” |
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Copy of an 1880 warrant for Julia Dean to be imprisoned on a charge of “having rented or hired rooms to women notoriously abandoned to lewdness.” She challenged her incarceration claiming the ordinance was null and void, and she secured her release on a writ of habeas corpus.
(Julia Dean vs. John Fitzpatrick. Orleans Parish Superior Criminal Court, #2728) |
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The three-story building at the right in this 1908 postcard was 121 Elk Place (16 Basin Street before street name and number changes went into effect). It was built for Mary Jane Kingsbury (J. N. B. DePouilly was the architect) in 1866. Mrs. Kingsbury intended to use the thirty-five-room structure as a brothel, but she and several dozen of the women who were to occupy it died in the wreck of the steamer Evening Star on October 3, 1866 during a hurricane encountered on its voyage from New York to New Orleans.
(Louisiana Division Postcard Collection) |
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The tax assessment record for square 301 in the First Municipal District records the recent purchase by Julia Dean of three lots of ground on Basin Street between Canal and Gasquet, the site of 16 Basin SStreet. It also shows her residing at 18 Basin, the building next door to that property. She paid $21,000 for the land, building, and its furniture. Assessment records for subsequent years show Dean operating “furnished rooms” at 16 Basin.
(Orleans Parish Board of Assessors. Tax Assessment Rolls, 1886) |
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The sale advertised in 1894 apparently did not take place, but it suggests the severity of Dean’s financial difficulties at the time. It also indicates the splendor of the house. Several years after Dean parted with the property, it was purchased by the local Elks, Lodge #30. Ernest J. Bellocq’s photographs of the interior of the Elks’ Home give us some idea of what Julia Dean’s establishment must have been like. They were published in the March 1907 issue of the Southern Buck and can be viewed online at archives.nolalibrary.org/monthly/january2007/january2007.htm.
(Daily Picayune, May 27, 1894) |
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The Daily Picayune, October 25, 1908 advertised another Dean sale, this time of the contents of the house that she rented in Storyville. |