Huey Long's Best Friend and the Man Who Built the Blue Room
Seymour Weiss arrived in New Orleans as a shoe clerk from Bunkie, Louisiana — a tiny town in Avoyelles Parish that most people couldn't find on a map. He left the world as the man who ran the Roosevelt Hotel, created one of the most famous nightclubs in America, served as Huey Long's closest confidant, went to federal prison, received a presidential pardon, and then went right back to running the Roosevelt. In any other city, that biography would be fiction. In New Orleans, it's just Tuesday.
Weiss was born in 1896 to immigrant parents — his father Samuel came from Austria-Hungary, his mother Gisella from Berlin. He grew up working retail, selling shoes and department store goods, learning the fundamental skill that would define his life: how to make people feel important. In 1923, he talked his way into managing the barbershop at the Grunewald Hotel, a grand establishment on Baronne Street. Within five years, he was managing the entire hotel. By 1931, he was its president.
Somewhere along the way, the Grunewald became the Roosevelt — renamed for Theodore Roosevelt — and Weiss transformed it into the center of New Orleans social and political life. His masterstroke was the Blue Room. The hotel had a basement nightclub called The Cave, and Weiss reimagined it as an elegant supper club that booked the biggest names in music. The Blue Room became nationally famous, a place where New Orleans society dressed up on Saturday nights and where traveling musicians knew they'd arrived when they got the booking. It was the kind of room that made you feel like you were somewhere, and Weiss had the instinct to create that feeling.
But the Roosevelt wasn't just a hotel — it was a political headquarters. In 1928, Weiss backed Huey Long's gubernatorial campaign, and the two men formed a bond that went beyond politics. Long made the Roosevelt his New Orleans base of operations, and Weiss became his chief of protocol, his fixer, his confidant, the man who managed the logistics of power while Long managed the spectacle. Insiders considered Weiss the man at Long's right hand — not a political advisor exactly, but something more intimate. A best friend with a hotel.
When Long was assassinated in 1935, Weiss lost his protector. The Louisiana Scandals that brought down Governor Leche also caught Weiss in their net. He was convicted of tax evasion and mail fraud in the late 1930s and spent sixteen months in federal prison. It was the price of proximity to the Long machine — everyone who'd been close to the flame eventually got burned.
But Weiss was a survivor. He got out, received a full pardon from President Truman in 1947, and went straight back to running the Roosevelt Hotel. He served on the Port of New Orleans commission, sat on the fire and police boards, and remained a fixture of the city's business establishment until his death in 1969. The man who'd gone to prison for corruption died as one of the city's most respected civic leaders. New Orleans has always been generous with second acts.
Seymour Weiss matters to New Orleans history because he represents a type: the outsider who comes to the city with nothing and builds himself into the center of everything. He wasn't born into the old Creole families or the Garden District establishment. He was a Jewish immigrant's son from a town nobody visited on purpose. But he understood something essential about New Orleans — that this city runs on hospitality, on making people feel welcome and important, on the alchemy of a good room and a good band and a well-mixed drink. He built the Blue Room, he built the Roosevelt into an institution, and along the way he got tangled up in the most colorful political machine in American history. That's a New Orleans life.
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