Bernard de Marigny: The Creole Playboy Who Named the Streets and Invented Craps

The Creole Playboy Who Named the Streets and Invented Craps

Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville was born in 1785 in New Orleans — a name so long and so French that it practically required its own paragraph. He was Creole aristocracy, the son of a wealthy planter who died when Bernard was fifteen, leaving the teenager one of the largest fortunes in Louisiana. What young Bernard did with that fortune is one of the great stories of New Orleans excess.

He gambled. He partied. He traveled to Europe and brought back the English dice game Hazard, which he introduced to the streets and gambling halls of New Orleans. The locals simplified the rules, and the game evolved into what they called "Crapaud" — French for toad, possibly a reference to the crouching stance of street dice players. That game became craps, and craps became the most popular casino dice game on earth. Bernard de Marigny introduced it to America.

Faubourg Marigny

When Marigny came of age in 1806, he subdivided his family's plantation downriver from the French Quarter and created a new neighborhood. He named the streets with the whimsy of a man who had never been told no: Desire, Music, Pleasure, Craps. He named the main thoroughfare Elysian Fields — the paradise of Greek mythology. Tennessee Williams would later set a streetcar on that avenue and change American theater forever.

Marigny also funded the first organized Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans in 1833, which influenced the Mistick Krewe of Comus's inaugural parade decades later. He served on the City Council and as President of the Louisiana State Senate, ran for governor twice and lost both times.

The Fortune That Disappeared

By the 1850s, crop failures and bad business decisions had consumed Marigny's once-vast fortune. He died in 1868, nearly broke, and was buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. But his neighborhood lives on — the Faubourg Marigny is one of the most vibrant neighborhoods in New Orleans, and every time someone rolls dice in a casino anywhere in the world, they're playing Bernard de Marigny's game.