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or the accumulated interest on its $53 million debt. 2 Investment capital, to the extent that it stayed within the region, gravitated to natural resources and oil fields, with attendant wealth moving outside New Orleans to other parts of Louisiana and beyond the state line to Texas. The boisterous histories of New Orleans jazz often obscure this underlying truth: by the time of the birth of jazz, New Orleans was already a city in decline.
    The city’s population had increased more than fourfold during the half-century from 1825 to 1875, but in 1878, 2 percent of the city’s inhabitants perished in a devastating yellow fever epidemic. The risk of pestilence was always present in nineteenth-century New Orleans, especially during the long, hot summer months. The city sits below sea level, and its damp, warm climate combined with dismal local sanitation—the city had no sewage system until 1892, long after most North American cities had adopted modern methods of fluid waste disposal—made the Crescent City an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes, roaches, and other assorted vermin. New Orleans bassist Pops Foster recalled conditions being so poor that he was required to wear mosquito nets during some performances. 3 After the 1878 epidemic, population growth resumed at a sluggish 1 percent annual rate, but the number of foreign-born members of the population actually declined, as new immigrants sought more flourishing economies and healthier surroundings.
    The average life span for a black native of New Orleans in 1880 was only thirty-six years; even white inhabitants lived, on average, a mere forty-six years. Black infant mortality was a staggering 45 percent. During that decade, mortality rates for New Orleans as a whole were 56 percent higher than for an average American city. Seen in the context of the time and place, the New Orleans natives’ extreme fascination with celebrations, parades, and parties—an obsession that reaches its highest pitch in the New Orleans parade for the dead, that extraordinary combination of funeral and festival—is reminiscent of the revelers in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” whose merrymaking allowed them to distance themselves from the sufferings and pestilence of the here and now. From one point of view, this exuberance is the utmost decadence; from another, it is a necessary self-defense mechanism of a society living on the brink.
    The dictates of commerce made it inevitable that a major city would be established near the base of the Mississippi River. But, in the words of historian Ned Sublette, it was “a terrible place to build a town.” 4 New Orleans has the lowest elevation of any major U.S. city, and with 41 percent of the continental United States’s runoff flowing down and through the Mississippi, the Crescent City is to America what plumbing pipes are to your home. Tropical storms are frequent visitors, brushing by or making a direct hit once every three or four years on average, and any resident who lives to middle age will likely confront the ravages of the region’s hurricanes, marauders that periodically force evacuations and leave behind untold damage. And in a land that is gradually sinking lower and lower below sea level—some foresee a day in which New Orleans will be completely surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico—the risk of flooding is ever present. In short, the city’s history of homegrown catastrophes, whether acts of God or merely those of the lower deities known as elected officials, testifies both to the challenges facing the inhabitants as well as to their hardiness and perseverance.
    Yet historians of New Orleans jazz have preferred to focus on the city’s moral dangers, linking the rise of hot music to sin and licentiousness. One can construct a colorful story here. After all, the city was named after a debauched noble (Philippe Charles d’Orléans, Duke of Orléans), populated with prisoners and prostitutes (Louisiana became a