John Churchill Chase: The Man Who Explained New Orleans' Street Names

The Blind Tiger Who Made New Orleans Laugh

John Churchill Chase wrote the book on New Orleans—literally. His 1949 classic Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children... and Other Streets of New Orleans became the definitive guide to the stories behind the city's street names, and it's been in print for over seventy years because nobody has ever done it better.

Chase was born in New Orleans in 1905 and spent his career as a cartoonist, author, and local historian. He drew editorial cartoons for the New Orleans States-Item for decades, developing a style that was sharp, witty, and deeply informed by his encyclopedic knowledge of the city's history. His cartoons captured the political and cultural life of New Orleans with an insider's eye and a satirist's pen.

But it was the street names book that made him immortal. Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children took a simple premise—where did New Orleans' wonderfully strange street names come from?—and turned it into a narrative history of the city itself. Because in New Orleans, every street name tells a story. Tchoupitoulas comes from a Choctaw word. Chartres honors a French city. Elysian Fields references a Greek afterlife. Desire was named for a streetcar line, which was named for a street, which was named for a plantation.

Chase traced each name back to its origin, and in doing so assembled a mosaic of the city's entire history—French, Spanish, American, Creole, immigrant, enslaved, free. The book is funny, learned, and readable in a way that most local histories are not. It's the rare reference book that people actually read for pleasure.

He also wrote Louisiana Purchase: An American Story and other historical works, but the street names book is his monument. It's the book that locals buy for newcomers, the book that sits on the shelf in every New Orleans household that takes the city seriously, the book that answers the question every visitor eventually asks: "Why are these street names so weird?"

John Churchill Chase died in 1986, but his book keeps going—reprinted, updated, passed from generation to generation. In a city where the streets themselves are a text, Chase was the man who read them aloud.