A Vanished New Orleans Captured on “Straight from the Projects”

The bar at 3901 Thalia Street first appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1933. Its liquor license had been revoked for allowing patrons to imbibe on premises permitted solely for the sale of beer in “unbroken packages.” Housed in a small clapboard building on the corner of Thalia and Dorgenois, deep in the Third Ward, it was renamed Rose Tavern shortly after the 1941 completion of the Calliope Housing Development, which all the locals simply called the “Cally-oh,” even after the city attempted to rebrand it, in 1981, as the B. W. Cooper Apartments. The Rose Tavern, located across the street from the Calliope’s central courtyard, became a hub for the projects and a clubhouse for the Calliope High Steppers and Lady Steppers, the local social-aid and pleasure organization. Outsiders knew the bar only as an intermittent location for shootings, stickups, and gambling arrests reported in the newspaper. But within a culture that existed outside the boundaries of any tourist map, it was a landmark.