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[ship horn] If you open the tap anywhere in Metro New Orleans today, if you take a shower, you are bathing in the Mississippi River.

And if you drink enough of this and the human body is seventy percent water, well that means you're seventy percent Mississippi River.

(male #1) The President was a great big beautiful steamboat with a paddle wheel on either side.

The Streckfus family in 1933 tore out the staterooms and made this football field dance floor, which was just the biggest dance floor in the South.

And they could put over 3,000 passengers on The President for a moonlight ride.

(male #2) I rode the train every other year on that bridge.

I was always in love with trains so I had already become familiar with seeing that bridge from riding across in the car.

So to be on a train was even a special treat.

(female #1) Well you could hear the boats.

And you could hear the whistles.

And you could hear when a certain captain was, you know, piloting a ship.

He'd toot-toot the horn when he'd pass his family's street.

And I still hear those sounds and I love it.

(male #3) We look up at the river because we're below sea level and God bless the levees because the sea is above us.

It's an awesome feeling when you see all that weight, that tons and tons of steel, massive structure just gliding by you.

I'm Peggy Scott Laborde.

The history of New Orleans begins with and is nurtured by the Mississippi River.

Those of us who live here drink from it, cross over it on boats and bridges.

And even ride on it as a pathway to the world.

Let's look at a relationship that has spanned 300 years.

♪ ♪ ♪ It's fun to say; it's fun to spell.

Every American child goes through the ritual of learning how to spell the word "Mississippi."

It's an indigenous word generally translated as "the father of waters," although you can find all sorts of phonetic spellings in the early Colonial literature.

The French did not originally adopt it.

They called it The River Colbert, which was named after one of the financial ministers in the French Crown.

That didn't stick and Mississippi has been the name ever since.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) The river is responsible for a nickname of sorts for our city.

(Richard Campanella) Joseph Holt Ingraham.

And he writes a book called "The Southwest by a Yankee."

Comes out in 1835 and there's a very clear passage in there that says "I dub this The Crescent City "because of its position "along this crescent shape of the city paralleling the crescent shape of the river."

(Peggy Scott Laborde) The river, with its many tributaries, runs through one third of the United States.

In Lower Louisiana it takes many twists.

(male #1) The river would be shaped like a big backward S if you were a bird and you would see Nine Mile Point and then a great big bend to the left and then you would come down under the greater New Orleans bridge and you would see a big bend going around to the right.

And these are really, really tricky bends.

And I talked to a Greek captain one time and he said he was never as scared in his life.

He had never been around a sharp bend on the water like that before.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) The river's bend at the French Quarter is the deepest spot in the entire system, roughly two hundred feet.

And below the surface, there are inhabitants.

(male #3) We used to fish all the time.

We used to fish with all kinds of sorts of lures but one thing that was successful was grass shrimp, Mississippi River shrimp.

One time we caught a catfish so big, we had to put him on our bike to bring him home.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) While boats were initially the only way of traversing the river, over the years some folks have actually swum across.

Keith Marshall's mother, Naomi Damonte Marshall, won a prize for doing so.

(male #4) October 27th, 1929, when they all arrived in McDonoghville, which is now part of Gretna, they dived into the Mississippi River, and they swam.

It was about a twenty minute swim.

There were about twenty competitors.

And my mother and my uncle were winners in the men's and women's competition.

It took them that long to swim the river and then another half hour to swim the last fifty yards because of the currents and the eddies.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) It wasn't the smoothest of trips.

(Keith Marshall) They ended up at the foot of Canal Street, where the crowds apparently were cheering and shouting and a great welcome to everyone.

But my mother felt a little bit disheveled because as they swam, huge ships would come by and throw oil slicks over her.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) James Amoss, Junior recalls his swim across as a teenager with some friends.

(male #5) Now the interesting thing about that is, the river is about twenty-five hundred feet.

It's roughly a half a mile across.

And when you're swimming in the river, those river shrimp, they have a sharp beak as you know at the end, and they'd bang up against your skin.

And it just feels like little pricks on your skin as you're swimming across.

And the currents carrying you down, and if all of a sudden a ship that you, hadn't been in sight before because it was around the bend, came around, you'd find yourself in the river with a ship bearing down on you.

We did that once and I should say twice because if you swim over you've got to swim back.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Nevertheless swimming in the river is ill advised.

I had friends when I was a boy coming up that drowned in the Mississippi River.

But I never swam or fished in the Mississippi River.

I had too much respect for the Mississippi River to dare try and stroke it.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Taking a ferry was a preferred option.

As a child, Algiers resident Jacquelyn Clarkson and her sister were ferry regulars.

(female #1) We knew the captain.

We rode it alone.

I wasn't even five years old.

And it was safe for us to be brought to the ferry boat, put in the hands of the captain, and my grandmother pick us up on the other side.

We'd have to be dressed up because we'd always go to DH Holmes for lunch.

And then we'd go shopping and then go stay at her house in the French Quarter.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Ferries have been in operation in the New Orleans area since the 1820s.

While there were once numerous routes, today only two remain: Lower Algiers to Chalmette and Algiers Point to Canal Street.

(Keith Marshall) It was always so wonderful just to step off the ground and be on water even for the five minutes that it took to get across.

There's a magic that you don't get going over a bridge when you can look down and the water is three feet below you and it, and you're skating over it on a vessel.

And that was always a thrill to me, even is now.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Judge Edwin Lombard lived in Algiers but went to high school in uptown New Orleans.

(Edwin Lombard) We had to be up to school for 8:30.

We've got to get that 7:15 ferry that would get us over to the bus stop.

We'd probably be on that Magazine bus by quarter to eight to safely get up to Xavier Prep on time.

And I would venture to say but for the fog, we were on time 98.9 percent of the time.

We never were late.

I mean detention was too painful.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Even trains could take a ferry.

Among the most prominent of the train ferries were the Mastodon, and the Mammoth.

(Doc Hawley) There were no bridges over the Mississippi to carry a train until 1935.

And the ferry would be pulled up to the dock and they would segment the train into four sections, four sections of cars.

And then the ferry would float over across the river.

If they woke up while they were crossing the river, all of a sudden they would look out at the state room window and realize that they were all of a sudden over the water.

And it must have been a very disconcerting feeling going across the river on the railroad car.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) By the 1930s the automobile had come unto its own, and a bridge was built to accommodate both trains and cars.

(Richard Campanella) The first bridge in the metro New Orleans area comes surprisingly late.

St. Louis has had one since the 1850s.

New Orleans doesn't get one until 1935.

And it's built outside of city limits primarily because it is designed for railroads.

And not, and automobiles are secondary.

And this explains why it had such a gradual rise.

It needs an incline that railroads can negotiate.

And so this explains why it's so far out of the city.

It's probably also safe to say that Huey P. Long was no great friend of New Orleans and was a friend of rural Louisiana.

(female #2) It almost felt like The Zephyr at Pontchartrain Beach, because the going up part seemed like you would never get to the top.

It seemed like forever, just because I was afraid to ride on it.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) But New Orleans needed a bridge closer in.

(Richard Campanella) There had been long-time pressure to finally have a bridge in downtown New Orleans.

And the champion for this is a man by the name of Neville Levy, who is drawing upon ideas that are coming out of New York and the Northeast of how to go about funding these downtown bridges.

And what they'd do is that a state authority would issue bonds and then tolls would be charged to defray the cost of that, those bonds, such that the users of the bridge would pay for the bridge over time.

And so he's circulating in the 1940s and then with Chep Morrison becoming the mayor right after World War II, Morrison's main prioritization is modernizing the city and that means transportation.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) The bridge opened in April of 1958.

Why that location?

(Richard Camanella) The New Basin Canal had been filled in right around 1950.

And if you traced the trajectory of that now opened right-of-way, which would make an ideal corridor for the highway, eventually Interstate 10 and the Pontchartrain Expressway, it kind of points to a certain area within downtown New Orleans where this bridge had to be.

And so that's why the right-of-way and the land acquisition was that corridor.

It was a hit almost immediately.

And the West Bank starts to become the West Bank.

We called it a number of things before the bridge was there.

In historical times, we actually called it the Right Bank and the East Bank was the Left Bank.

And if you look at historical descriptions both by New Orleanians as well as river travelers, they don't say east and west; they say left and right.

So the Left Bank was the East Bank, and the Right Bank was the West Bank.

And even into the 20th Century, people would call it the West Side.

If they called it the West Bank it would be with a small w and a small s, but once the bridge is in, it starts to boom, and it starts to kind of solidify its identify.

And so congestion happened very soon on this new bridge and there was a call for a second bridge.

And that opened 30 years after the first one and together we call them the Crescent City Connection.

(Allen Toussaint) I remember going over The Connection as we call it, the new Mississippi River Bridge.

And I took my mother for a ride, and by this time I was driving for myself of course.

And she again couldn't stand it.

And I had to turn around before I completed it because the bridge, there was only one bridge at that time, and it was in a place where you could actually make a U-turn.

And she couldn't, she was so afraid and I didn't think it was worth taking her through such trauma to just get across the bridge.

The first accident on the bridge was my cousin, Gene Harrison, who was a local bar owner, in this beautiful brand new Lincoln Continental.

And Gene would kind of partake a little bit of this product that he was selling and he came out that Claiborne Avenue curve and christened the bridge.

He missed the curve and hit the bridge.

So he, the first official accident on the bridge was Gene Harrison, my cousin.

♪ (Peggy Scott Laborde) Deciding where to build the second bridge wasn't easy.

And there were hiccups along the way.

Napoleon Avenue was a serious consideration, as was Press Street in the Marigny Neighborhood.

Yet another "what if" was the construction of a riverfront expressway alongside the French Quarter.

(Richard Campanella) The riverfront expressway, the idea for it is traceable to the famous and some would say infamous New York planning czar, Robert Moses, who does consulting in New Orleans, again, during the Morrison administration, 1946.

And he comes up what he calls were the arterial plan for New Orleans.

And one of its elements entails what he called the waterfront expressway.

And it's a raised expressway, come right in front of Jackson Square, and eventually over an envisioned bridge over the Mississippi that eventually comes in place.

So this is 1946 and it's not until about 10 to 15 years later that it gains the momentum and the funding of the national interstate system.

And by this time the plan is not just in front of the riverfront expressway, but also a Claiborne expressway.

And the plan going into the mid-1960s was both of them.

So what happened here was that there was fierce resistance among the more, very civically engaged population who cared passionately about the French Quarter, which was iconic and nationally famous and the city's showcase neighborhood and already preserved, vis-a-vis the Vieux Carre Commission.

But you didn't quite have those voices in the poorer, more likely to be African American neighborhood along Claiborne Avenue.

And so the riverfront expressway was defeated because of this emphatic citizen intervention, whereas you didn't have that, those voices in opposition along Claiborne.

And a lot of people believe that it was defeated from the riverfront and ended up in Claiborne Avenue.

That's not really the case.

The plan was for both of them.

One of them was defeated and the other was not.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) And had there been a riverfront expressway, the following observation could not be made.

Ben Sandmel worked on the river as a deckhand.

(male #6) It's very dramatic to arrive in New Orleans via the river, especially when the river is high and you can see over the levee and you can see Jackson Square and the St. Louis Cathedral and the Pontalba Buildings.

It's very beautiful; it's a living picture postcard sight.

♪ (Peggy Scott Laborde) In 1682, the explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle landed near the mouth of the Mississippi.

He claimed the Mississippi River basin for France and named the territory Louisiana, after King Louis XIV.

In 1699, the Canadian-born Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville was continuing French exploration up the Mississippi.

He asked his brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne Sieur de Bienville, to explore downriver.

English Turn refers to that hairpin meander just below New Orleans proper.

A 19-year-old Bienville is exploring around, while his older brother is upriver exploring.

He encounters a shocking sight.

And that is an English ship, flying the English flag, the Carolina Galley, coming up, hell-bent on a mission of settlement.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Iberville's brother did some quick thinking.

(Richard Campanella) And so, Bienville, who's just a teenager at the time, meets the captain, Captain Lewis Bond, on deck, and he bluffs them.

He explains that just around the bend there are reinforcements.

Perhaps he makes allusion to his brother, Iberville, who by this time is a well-known war hero in French Canada.

And Captain Bond buys the bluff.

He turns around, he sails down and presumably he returns to Charleston.

Had that not happened; had that teenager not bluffed that well-known captain, we might have, well have, an entirely different Colonial history here.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Almost two decades later, Iberville was assigned the task of settling the territory but he left the job of founding New Orleans to Bienville.

Bienville had a daunting task: to create a city that generated revenue for the French crown, through the Company of the Indies.

He selected a location on high ground along the Mississippi that was also close to Lake Pontchartrain.

(Richard Campanella) One of the paths of the early French Colonials would have been to come through the Mississippi Sound, Lake Borgne, through the Rigolets, into Lake Pontchartrain, up Bayou St. John and take the Bayou Road portage, the back door route.

In fact, that's why he located the city here.

But otherwise, if these were larger vessels, they would come up the river.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Traveling on the Mississippi River was no easy task.

(Richard Campanella) There's debris strewn everywhere; there's tree carcasses.

And so just finding the main channel was something of a challenge.

Now later on when steamboats come along, steam tugs would come and pull you up the river.

But it was for this reason that Bienville smiled upon finding this alternative route through the lakes and through Bayou St. John and so that added to his argument that the city should be located there.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) The city began as what we know of today as the French Quarter, surrounded by dense wooded areas and swamps.

From early days there was a location where residents would gather to procure food and supplies.

(Richard Campanella) If you look at the portage, that is to say, Bayou Road, that little high ridge connection that connected Bayou St. John with the riverfront, this was the old pre-historic Indian path that natives used to, could get from the lake to the river.

So if you continue Bayou Road through the French Quarter, it intersects the river roughly where the French Market is today.

And so, since prehistoric times, this had been an encampment, a trading spot for natives.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) And providing much of the labor was an enslaved population from Africa, primarily from Senegal, along with a portion of the local Native American tribes.

Thomas Jefferson knew the importance of the Port of New Orleans.

It was foremost as a reason for his purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France, that would ultimately comprise one-third of America.

(as Thomas Jefferson) "This little event, "of France's possessing herself of Louisiana, "is the embryo of a tornado "which will burst on the countries "on both sides of the Atlantic "and involve in its effects their highest destinies."

- Thomas Jefferson ♪ (Peggy Scott Laborde) In 1803, just a few blocks away from the Mississippi River, in the Cabildo, the purchase was signed.

New Orleans was now part of America.

By the 1820s the popularity of steamboat passenger travel had flourished and through the years the demand for comfort grew strong.

The J. M. White was the fanciest of all.

It was the Queen Mary of the Mississippi if there was such a thing.

It was paneled in rose wood and teak and mahogany.

Had Parquet floors.

Silverware.

It was the zenith of the riverboats.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Alas these floating palaces were very vulnerable.

(Doc Hawley) Those big chandeliers that you would see swinging back and forth in the dining room.

Boat comes down the river fifteen miles an hour, hits a sandbar, and the chandelier goes shaking back and forth, spilling the oil out and setting the boat on fire.

A lot of the boats burned simply because the beautiful crystal chandeliers that they carried.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) In 1828 and 1831 New Orleans had a visitor who would alter both the city and the country's history.

Along with a Captain Gentry, a young Abraham Lincoln took a modest flatboat down the Ohio and onto the Mississippi river.

♪ (Richard Campanella) Starting in the early 1800s, you have thousands of young western men, kind of, almost as a rite of passage, proving their manhood and their responsibility and their nettle by building a flatboat, taking their dad's and their uncle's surplus commodities, figuring out how to navigate the river, which was so difficult, coming down with the current, just on a flatboat.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) The trip was a hard one but worth it.

(Richard Campanella) So you'd have these young men flush with cash.

They would spend a couple of weeks in the city and then they would take a steamboat, at least after the eighteen-teens, when steamboats are in place, they would take a steamboat back home.

And Lincoln did exactly that.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) An overnight stop before Lincoln and Gentry arrived in the city proved to be almost fatal.

I should report that he came very close to getting murdered the night before he first set foot in New Orleans.

And flatboat men lived very risky lives.

First of all, there were the currents and the unknowns of the river, hitting an eddy, these planters and sawyers, these trees bobbing in the water that could knock you over.

Right around Convent, Louisiana, he and his captain, Allen Gentry, tied up for the night, and they were attacked by seven marauders.

And there was a violent fight.

And one of the bandits clubbed him above probably the right temple or the right ear.

As soon as day breaks, they high tail it for New Orleans.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) For the young Lincoln, visiting New Orleans and the outlying areas was an eye-opening experience.

(Richard Campanella) And they would have seen a complex and exciting and smoky and muddy and noisy place.

The cityscape of New Orleans would have been replete with evidence of the slave trade.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Cotton, sugar, bounty from the Gulf of Mexico; New Orleans was booming in antebellum times.

A young riverboat pilot named Samuel Clemens worked up and down the Mississippi during the 1850s.

Better known as Mark Twain, in his memoirs of his nautical career, "Life on the Mississippi," Twain clearly had an admiration for the body of water.

(as Mark Twain) "When I was a boy "there was but one permanent ambition "among my comrades in our village "on the West Bank of the Mississippi river.

"That was to be a steamboatman.

"We had transient ambitions of other sorts, "but they were only transient.

"But the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained."

- Mark Twain (Peggy Scott Laborde) But boom turned to bust in the early days of the Civil War.

(Richard Campanella) The Union swiftly recognized that the Mississippi River was the western life line for the western half of the confederacy.

And so early on in the war, they devised the Anaconda Plan, which you could just picture a snake encircling the Confederacy on all sides.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) After over a week of fighting the Confederate forces at Forts Jackson and St. Philip, in April of 1862, Rear Admiral David Farragut led his fleet that included ironclads up the river to New Orleans.

The city surrendered peacefully.

After the Civil War, New Orleans was back in business, even though river traffic now had competition from the railroads.

In the ongoing relationship between man and the Mississippi, a constant challenge is the buildup of silt in the most important arteries connecting the Gulf of Mexico.

Such shallow byways prevented bigger ships from sailing up the river to New Orleans.

Missouri-based James Buchanan Eads, inventor, civil engineer and ship builder, had an idea.

(Richard Campanella) Captain James Eads built the Eads Bridge over St. Louis even before the Civil War.

And in the 1870s, the Port of New Orleans was really struggling.

It's doldrums, economically, but also there are sandbars and sedimentation at the mouth of the river such as there's very little tonnage coming in and out of the port.

He thought that by narrowing the channel, you increase the speed and the power of the river to scour out the bottom.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Eads felt strongly that he had the right solution.

(Richard Campanella) And so it worked and within about ten years, there was tenfold increase in the tonnage shipping from the Port of New Orleans.

Eventually South Pass became abandoned as a shipping channel and that activity moved to Southwest Pass, where it is today.

And in the 19-teens and '20s, Army Corps replicated the Eads Jetties in Southwest and that's what's in place today.

♪ (Peggy Scott Laborde) As passenger travel declined with the expansion of the railroads, inventive ways had to be found for the utilization of riverboats.

Excursion boats and showboats going up and down the river with live music flourished.

But even before the transition, music was long a part of the river culture.

(male #7) Along the river, you had people working on the river docks, roustabout songs, all kinds of dock songs, the lore of the Mississippi River itself.

♪I been workin' on the levee♪ ♪and sleepin' on the ground,♪ ♪Lord, workin' on the levee,♪ ♪boys, and sleepin' on the ground.♪ ♪That ain't nothin' but an old habit.♪ ♪I got to lay down.

♪Oh Lord, lay down.♪ The musical legacy is huge of the river people coming down river to Louisiana, and becoming part of the society, and then the fact the river is essentially the opening port from New Orleans down to the Gulf, to the Caribbean in a sense, and to Europe and to West Africa.

All those places provided people.

It's the river that makes it possible for people in Trinidad to be playing early Calypso music that sounds almost verbatim exactly like Jazz.

It's the Mississippi River that gave the life blood to the Biguine music in Martinique.

It sounds just like early Jazz at the turn of the Twentieth Century, is because of the riverboats, the produce boats.

So it went all directions.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) The most famous example of the way New Orleans music was transported can be found in the experiences of a young musician who favored the trumpet.

(Doc Hawley) Louis Armstrong's first job was on a river boat in 1918, the Steamer Sydney, which belonged to the Streckfus Company.

But these boats could take these musicians all the way up to St. Paul, Minnesota.

Can you imagine a native New Orleanian who had been playing in one of these joints on Basin Street?

All of a sudden he's spending the summer going to St. Paul, Minnesota and having to wear a sweater to do that?

(Sunpie Barnes) He did have to start learning to read music to play on the boats because that was a part of the strict type of way that they wanted to play the music for different people.

But at the same time, Louis Armstrong was his own phenomenon.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) For over forty years New Orleans was home to the Streckfus family owned S.S. President.

This excursion boat was known for its music offerings.

♪ (Doc Hawley) The Streckfus family in 1933 tore out the state rooms and made this football field dance floor, which was just the biggest dance floor in the South.

The dance floor was 280 feet long and 80 feet wide.

And they could put over 3,000 passengers on The President for a moonlight ride.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) During the 1950s and into the '60s, the longtime house band was The Crawford-Ferguson Night Owls, led by drummer Len Ferguson and trombone player Paul Crawford.

(male #8) We'd go practically every Saturday night, danced and it was good music for the present time, music of the '50s.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Longtime trumpet player Mike Lala played on The President in various bands.

(male #9) The bandstand was in the middle of the dance floor.

The dance floor used to stretch out the length of The President.

And the acoustics were very good there.

(Nate Normand) It was big.

It was big.

We'd go to Audubon Park and turn around and come back.

And sometimes we'd go a little bit past Canal Street, Chalmette, and turn around and come back.

It was a pretty stable boat.

Now the river doesn't really get that rough, but The President was a big boat.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) On the tables were small ice buckets for drink setups.

(Nate Normand) Some people left with them.

They were, they disappeared pretty quickly.

They had to replenish them because they were a good souvenir piece.

It was nice.

Nothing special but it was a good souvenir piece.

♪ (male #10) My memories of The President are really mainly going to Jazz Fest in the late '70s and early '80s and thinking that this is great.

You can come out here on the boat and listen to The Meters, Doctor John, Allen Toussaint, you know, K-Doe whoever they had.

And the idea that you could get out on a boat ride, dancing to some of the greatest music New Orleans has produced, having a drink.

You know, being in the flow of all this.

So, I always loved The President, really more for that, than the boat itself, just the experience of being there.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Some musical connections to the river are surprising.

Well a lot of New Orleans rhythm and blues, and blues musicians, have worked as longshoremen on the river, mainly unloading ocean-going ships.

And I used to play with a blues guitarist named Boogie Bill Webb, who lived in the Lower Ninth Ward, and he was a longshoreman.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) The International Longshoremen's Association initially had separate chapters for black and white laborers.

In recent years, unions have been diminished quite a bit, but there was a definite connection between the longshoremen and the music community, and one of the big venues in the '50s and '60s for R&B performances was the Longshoremen's' Hall, the ILA Hall.

Allen Toussaint, Irma Thomas, Smiley Lewis, Ernie K Doe, Lee Dorsey, Dave Bartholomew, just the whole pantheon of New Orleans R&B.

When they built the new hall on Longshoremen 1419, Clarence Henry's union, built the new hall uptown, most of the dances were there.

I went to numerous wedding receptions and every high school dance we had was there.

I can rightfully tell you that I probably was in that place about 200 times in my life.

(Nick Spitzer) Well Aaron Neville actually worked as a stevedore.

You know we think of him as muscular, and in muscle shirts, and knowing his sense of culture of downtown and riverside New Orleans and he told me, actually, that he worked in the holes of ships, dangerous work, heavy loads.

He felt endangered a few times on the job in the dark down there with heavy weights swinging around.

And he said he sang to pass the time.

He said the hole of an empty ship is a great place to sing doo wop music because it echoes back to you, and it just sounds so majestic.

You know, it's your own private opera house in the dark, except don't pay so much attention to the song or you'll forget that huge pallet is coming swinging in your direction.

When Aaron Neville's "Tell it Like it is" was number one, he was still down in the hole of ships, you know, pumping coffee sacks out.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Some longshoremen have been part of the Mardi Gras Indian community.

The tradition of masking as an Indian at Carnival time and around St. Joseph's Day, dates back to the late 19th century.

This stems from earlier days in New Orleans, when slaves would escape their master and find shelter with local native Indian tribes.

(Ben Sandmel) There is definitely an overlap between the longshoremen and the New Orleans R&B/Jazz musician community, and the Mardi Gras Indians.

And that, to a large degree, is because there's a great overlap between the Mardi Gras Indians and musicians, particularly in some families such as the Nevilles.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) The Nevilles brothers uncle, George Landry, known as Big Chief Jolly was a Merchant Marine.

For over forty years The Natchez has been sailing out of New Orleans on excursion trips.

And a few times a day up top there's even the sound of the calliope.

(Doc Hawley) When we got back from our stay up river during Katrina, we got the same reaction that the Café du Monde got.

"Boy, glad to smell those beignets cooking."

People called up and said, "Glad to hear that calliope play.

We're really, we really missed it."

[calliope playing] ♪ (Peggy Scott Laborde) But for all the transporting of a musical culture, we need to remind ourselves of the physical strength of the Mississippi, its movement, and at what point does man exert control?

In April of 1927, this 'tug of war" reached a climax.

Extreme rainfalls created unprecedented flooding upriver, which was heading downriver, to New Orleans.

In 1927, the river at its peak was probably carrying closer to three million cubic feet a second.

So it's fifteen times, you know, it's like ten to fifteen times the size of Niagara Falls when Niagara Falls is in flood.

It's just an enormous, enormous amount of water.

Ironically, the people who knew most about the river, in particularly an engineer named James Kemper, he was convinced that the levees well above New Orleans, hundreds of miles upriver, couldn't possibly hold the water.

And by letting the water out upriver when the levees broke, he felt the flood would never reach New Orleans.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Despite this expert advice, a decision was made to dynamite a portion of the levees in an area called Caernevon, in St. Bernard Parish.

(John Barry) I think probably the decision makers, they certainly were aware of this opinion.

But they wanted to make a statement to reassure bankers and their business colleagues in New York and London and Chicago.

At that time, New Orleans was the leading financial center in the South.

I think they wanted to tell their correspondent banks that the river was never going to threaten New Orleans, that they had the political power to make sure that was not going to happen.

And they did.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) While compensation was promised to the thousands of residents who were displaced, the promise was never fully realized.

(John Barry) They were farmers and they were trappers.

Trapping was actually very lucrative.

That area produced more fur than Russia, more fur than Canada, from just that area of St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parish.

A trapper could make several thousand dollars a year, which was a lot of money in 1927.

They had income but they did not have political power.

And there were not that many of them, in total probably about 10,000.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) The 1927 Flood was the catalyst for the New Orleans area's current levee system.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for its maintenance.

(male #11) And we go back to 1927 in determining and talking about what happened in 1927 with the Great Flood, and that's why we have the levee system today.

And that's why the levees are all here.

And basically as a containment, if you will, of all of the water inside the Atchafalaya basin, which as it turns out is a safety valve for the Mississippi River.

And that's day in and day out, every day right now as we sit here.

One third of the Mississippi River in Central Louisiana is diverted down into the Atchafalaya Basin, and eventually the Atchafalaya River and goes out at Morgan City.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Other safety valves to prevent river flooding are the Bonnet Carre Spillway in Montz, Louisiana, near LaPlace and a spillway in Morganza.

Since the city's earliest days there have been residents who have lived on the river's edge, the narrow strip of land beyond the levee known as the batture.

James Amoss, Junior had school mates who lived on the batture in uptown New Orleans.

The dwellings were modest at best.

(James Amoss, Jr) They didn't have electricity, no.

They lived like people in the olden times with kerosene lanterns and things of that sort.

And they lived a scratch kind of existence but they were fascinating kids.

And some of them I still know that are still around in various situations.

One of them was a tugboat captain.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Even the levee has held some fascination for some locals.

(Allen Toussaint) I've ran up and down the levee and at times rode bicycles.

Oh yeah, we loved the levee, because there wasn't nearly as many things when I was a boy coming up to do as there is now, all kinds of games and other activities.

So the levee was something unusual in such a flat area as New Orleans.

And so yes, I did love running up and down the levee and even rolling down sometimes.

I had a good time with the levee.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Another child enjoyed sitting on the levee and watching the ships go by.

(Edwin Lombard) I always wanted to go places.

I wanted to go where those ships went.

I could tell you the schedules of the ships.

I could tell you when the Del Sud was coming, when Del Norte was coming.

The Delta steam ship was on the uptown side of Canal Street.

They used to dock there.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) The Delta Lines was one of the steamship companies that offered passenger service while transporting cargo.

(Gary LaGrange) My uncle was a mariner.

He was actually a purser with Delta Steamship Lines.

And he sailed back and forth to South America quite a bit, Brazil mostly.

His job mainly was to take care of all of those folks and make sure that they had all of their needs and things that they wanted and-but yeah, you could take a cargo vessel down to Brazil to Santos and other areas in Brazil and where he would sail and actually have twelve or maybe twenty, as many as twenty passengers on board.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Lykes Brothers Steamship Lines also handled cargo and passengers.

(Jim Amoss) We had some nice accommodations, and the mix of passenger and crew was much more evident in that situation on voyages than it would have been on a passenger ship as such.

When I was posted to Europe for the first time in 1953, Berthe and I and our three children at the time traveled to Europe on a Lykes ship.

I had relatives who were dock workers and relatives who were seamen.

I had, my daddy's best friend was a steward on a Lykes ship, and my uncle, my mother's brother was a chief cook on a lot of the ships.

But Mr. Dyer was a steward for Lykes Brothers.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) The trading of fruit enhanced the city's economy.

(Richard Campanella) This city has long had a tropical fruit trade.

It had direct shipping lines to Tampico, to Havana, to Palermo where you had things like figs and dates coming in.

And so by the late 1800s, 1870s, 1880s, bananas were being imported into Mobile and into New Orleans.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) As recently as the end of the 19th century, bananas were not a part of the diet of middle class America.

(Richard Campanella) And they were an expensive, exotic fruit for the, mostly for the upper class.

And 1890s on the docks of Mobile, Alabama, there's a young man, Russian-born, by the name of Sam Zemurray.

And he notices to his amazement that any one of these sweet, yellow bananas that had blemishes on it that were a little getting too close to ripe were completely discarded, which took profit away from the whole business and it created this garbage that you now had to get rid of.

So he came up with the idea of buying, in large quantities, these bruised fruits at very low prices.

It's garbage after all, right?

And selling them at very low rates to working class and middle class people.

And there was a brilliant idea.

And he made a lot of money.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Zemurray shifted his operations over to New Orleans and grew the business.

(Richard Campanella) And he eventually buys huge expanses along the Cuyamel River in Honduras.

And he creates the Cuyamel Banana Company.

And he eventually sells this to United Fruit in Boston, and then buys United Fruit himself later.

At the same time, the Vaccaro brothers in New Orleans are creating the Standard Fruit Company.

And so between the two, New Orleans is the epicenter of the American banana trade.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) In the early 1960s, Angelo Brocato III worked as a banana handler on the wharves.

(male #12) I was picking up boxes and putting them on the conveyor.

They'd go from there to the top of the ship then down to the dock.

And there the inspectors would separate them.

Orange to green.

And the ones that were ripe or greener and direct them to conveyors to the different trucks to how far they were going.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Angelo Brocato's grandfather was a banana inspector.

Coming home from work one day he discovered a tarantula in his pocket.

(Angelo Brocato) But my grandfather, he'd come home.

One time he came home, a tarantula came out of his pocket.

And my mother got the broom and chased it around and killed it.

It just came right out of his pocket.

He came all the way from the United Fruit Company to Dauphine Street with a spider in his pocket and he didn't know it.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Before the modern containerization of cargo, the manual labor that was required at the port was staggering.

In the 1960s, dock workers on the New Orleans waterfront exceeded 8,000.

There were over 150 shipping companies that provided plenty of work.

Well, before, you would see men actually carrying stalks of bananas, or bags of coffee, or five or six men carrying a 500 pound cotton bale.

The average weight of a cotton bale is between 450 and 550 pounds.

We used to see all of that, but you don't see all of the people working anymore.

But you do see these ships, which are just like mountains of these boxes that you put on the trains.

You know, the steel box?

Cargo boxes are the newest thing in shipping, is the transfer of cargo from a steel box that comes in riding a train or goes out riding a train, or on the back of a trailer truck, these big steel boxes.

And that's the newest thing in shipping now.

But down here, from the deep draft navigational part of the river, and that would be Baton Rouge to the mouth, which is approximately 291 miles, that's a long stretch.

So we have three different pilot associations where one group, actually the bar pilots, begin the trek at the mouth of the river down at Southwest Pass and they come up to Venice.

And then the bar pilots get off at the Venice area at that point.

And then the Crescent River pilots take over at that point and they bring it up to just upriver from New Orleans.

And then at that time the NOBR pilots, the New Orleans Baton Rouge pilots, take over.

(male announcer) "Under the skillful guidance "of pilot and captain, "the mighty ship comes alive with smooth, powerful motion.

"Pushing her nose into the river, "the ship moves slowly away from the wharf.

♪ "A tugboat helps the ship "out into the fast moving current "in the middle of the river, "helping her to round up and head downstream to the Gulf."

And you got to know the names of the tugs and the cranes had names.

They would name the cranes like Nicki and Sherry Lee.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Judge Edwin Lombard's Algiers neighborhood included many residents who worked on the river.

When I went to college, as a summer job, I went out and became a sweeper.

For instance if you're on a grain ship, you had to sweep the grain off so nobody would fall.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Typically, those employed along the riverfront worked in groups known as gangs.

Lombard's neighbors looked out for him.

(Edwin Lombard) A lot of the guys from my neighborhood were foremen and members of these gangs who looked forward to me coming out there because they knew I was a student and so what they would do was, most of the time, if I was in that gang, they'd tell me to go find a spot in that warehouse, and do my homework and they would cover for me.

It was incredible to be a sweeper for my neighborhood.

I was going to Tulane and I'd go sit in the shade and do my homework and the guys said, "If we need water, "I'll take care of it.

"Don't you move.

You got to get out of school."

(Peggy Scott Laborde) It was only until the 1960s that Orleanians had a view of the Mississippi River.

The redevelopment of Audubon Park uptown included its batture area.

Today that section is known as the Riverview or Fly, derived from a long-gone park riverfront structure that resembled a butterfly.

On much of the city's river banks, warehouses impeded a view, but as the port has been transformed with the popularity of containerized cargo, the availability of space has opened new vistas.

By the mid-Seventies, during Mayor Moon Landrieu's administration, an area was developed in front of Jackson Square that came to be known as the "Moon Walk."

In 1983, the Jax Brewery complex was converted to a festival marketplace.

But it was the 1984 World's Fair that gave locals and visitors an unparalleled view from the east bank of the river.

It also provided a new mode of transportation for getting across.

The Mississippi Aerial River Transit, known as the gondola, allowed for breathtaking views from wire suspended cars that resembled space capsules.

And I couldn't wait to get in it.

And, you know, my husband and I jumped in it and it wasn't at all scary.

I didn't think so.

And you know, you rock and you shake and you know, I had trust.

And I did at one point, when it kind of was very rocky, I thought, "Well if it breaks, I can swim."

I was a swimmer.

Of course I wasn't talking about the Mississippi River with a current.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Among the permanent structures built for the fair is what is now The Outlet Collection at Riverwalk.

It housed the international pavilions, and the first phase of what would become the Morial Convention Center was completed in time to host fair exhibits.

In 1699, d'Iberville was exploring land for France.

On March 3rd, he set up camp for the night near the mouth of the Mississippi.

And he and his crew raised a toast to the fact that day was actually Mardi Gras.

He dubbed the area near what is now Fort St. Phillip in Plaquemine parish the Bayou de Mardi Gras.

The bayou is gone, but carnival-related events continue to take place on the river in the New Orleans area.

On the East Bank, from the 1880s up to 1917, Rex would arrive by boat for his annual visit to his favorite city on the Monday before Carnival.

This tradition was resurrected in 1987 during what has become known as the Lundi Gras celebration at the foot of Canal Street and the river at Riverwalk.

For many years the then West Bank based Krewe of Choctaw has had a small river parade in addition to their land parade.

(Edwin Lombard) They used to have some nice sized boats out there.

Now Choctaw, you looked forward to that.

You knew it was Carnival time when the Choctaw parade was on the river.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) One day in 1996, an incident occurred at the port that no one could have anticipated.

Gary LaGrange was a guest at the Riverside Hilton Hotel at the time.

And as I walked out of the elevator, there was all darkness and nobody there and two firemen approached me and said, "Who are you?

What are you doing here?"

And I remember saying, "Well, I'm a guest in the hotel."

They said, "We've evacuated the hotel."

Well it must have been when I was in the shower and they evacuated the hotel.

And I said, "Why did you evacuate the hotel?

What's going on?"

He said, "A ship hit the hotel."

And I almost laughed.

"A ship can't hit the hotel," I thought in my mind.

Well it sure did.

It hit the hotel, it hit the Riverwalk and it hit the condominiums and everything around it.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) This 70,000 ton freighter, loaded with grain, lost power.

With his emergency horn blaring and emergency flares, pilot Ted Davisson managed to avoid two cruise ships and steered into the wharf at Riverwalk, hitting part of the hotel and stopping right before the Flamingo Riverboat Casino.

Incredibly, there were no fatalities.

Most of the injuries were slight and sustained by shoppers being trampled by others as the vessel approached.

The cause of the accident was a breakdown in an oil pump that served the engine lubricating system.

(news reporter) Ted Davisson, was that the worst moment of your life, we just saw?

No, I wouldn't say that.

It was the most anxious moment of my life.

I'm just glad everything worked out the way it did.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) Davisson was acknowledged for his efforts to minimize injury and damage.

In 1990, the Aquarium of the Americas was constructed, and alongside is Woldenberg Park, spanning the upper French Quarter.

In 2014, the Crescent Riverfront Park, located in the Marigny neighborhood, opened with future expansion plans.

In 2005, a call from the White House underscored the importance of the Port of New Orleans to the rest of the country.

(Gary LaGrange) Therein lies the reason in this very room why I received a call from the White House about five hours after Katrina hit, asking me what we needed.

Right away the answer was first aid, supplies, food, water, clothing, whatever.

And there was this long pause, and then the question came back again.

"What do you really need?"

And I realized, the light bulb went off, and what I really need, what they meant was to reopen the Port of New Orleans, because not only New Orleans or Louisiana, the nation cannot stand for the gateway to America to be closed.

(Peggy Scott Laborde) According to LaGrange the port experienced over 200 million dollars in damage.

Today, there's much reason for optimism with the city's ongoing relationship to the river.

The prospect of trade with Cuba looms in the distance as does the impact of the deepening of the Panama Canal, which would allow larger ships to seek New Orleans as a port.

And the amount of rail, barge and trucking lines is enviable.

Also encouraging is such statistics as ranking number one in the importing of natural rubber, number two in coffee importing and one of the top cruise ports in the U.S. (Gary LaGrange) Geographically speaking and physiographically speaking, it's the right place, it's the perfect place, and it's again all the more reason we need to work with our good friends down on the coast line with coastal erosion embankment to make sure that the city doesn't go away and it's not eroded off into the Gulf of Mexico in many years to come and that generations to come will have a possibility to enjoy it as we do today.

(male announcer) "New Orleans, port of progress, serves the nation and the world."

♪ (Peggy Scott Laborde) And while we may rely on the river for mostly commerce, it also allows us a chance to dream.

(Edwin Lombard) I used to sit on that river and dream about going places where the ships went.

And I have to say that I went to a lot of them.

I think my dreams came true.

(Nick Spitzer) Well, the river is an enduring presence.

It's high; it's low, but it's always flowing.

And you can kind of mark the seasons by it.

And then it's a working river.

I mean, you're constantly seeing people moving goods and ships that are empty riding high, and ones that are laden riding low.

And it's just a reminder, it's sort of a, it's like a bloodstream.

It's like life itself, I suppose.

And like life itself, an ebb and flow.

Whether you ride over it, ride on it or merely watch it go by, the Mississippi river and New Orleans will both keep rolling along.

Blaine Kern told me he was going to build a gondola.

I said, "You are out of your mind."

He said: "I just came back from Europe "and they have these things "and this river is not half as long "as the gondolas over there.

So it's no big challenge."

I said, "Okay, Blaine, when you build it, I'll believe you then."

So it's up and he and I get the first ride.

It's a different smell than anything else on Earth.

And it can be a funky smell once in a while if there is a dead fish nearby.

But it's a smell of cleanliness.

It's like after a rainstorm.

You know, the terra ferma smells differently than it did when it was dry.

It's the same thing when you walk down the river, you just smell this refreshing breeze.

And, of course, I think the breeze has a little to do with the pleasantness of the smell.

I grew-up with two grandmothers on both sides of the river from different worlds, different cultures, different religions, different everything, and they were best friends and loved each other and respected everything about each other.

The only argument I ever heard my two grandmothers have was who lives on the wrong side of the river.

♪ ♪ (announcer) This program is made possible by the Port of New Orleans.

Our connections run deep, with a network of waterways, railroads, highways and cruise lines.

Multi-million dollar investments in capital improvement projects strengthen our economy.

We choose Louisiana.

New Orleans and the Mississippi River is a part of WYES's New Orleans tri centennial salute, which is made possible by The Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum, research center, and publisher dedicated to preserving our area's distinctive history and culture.

Details on current exhibitions, books, and programs available at hnoc.org.

And by the Arlene and Joseph Meraux Charitable Foundation, dedicated to improving the quality of life in St. Bernard parish, and implementing innovative strategies to create lasting, positive change for the entire community.

New Orleans and the Mississippi River is also made possible by the WYES Producers Circle, a group of generous contributors dedicated to the support of WYES's local productions.

And by viewers like you.