Did you know that New Orleans once hosted The Black Plague itself? It’s true. (We’re hospitable like that.)
It appeared in 1914 when Swedish sailor Charles Lundene arrived in the city, found himself a firm bed at The Volunteers of America Home…and within days began burning up with agonizing fever. After four days of his groaning and delirium, residents of this boarding house—located at 713 St. Joseph Street—called for help for the 49-year-old man. Charles was rushed to Charity Hospital, isolated, and examined by a small team of very nervous doctors who noticed severe swelling in his armpits and groin. On the last day of his life his fever was 105. The Swede died, and his autopsy confirmed what those nervous caregivers had surmised: bubonic plague, the infamous “Black Death” which had decimated swaths of Europe during the 14th century.
A second case popped up the day after the Swede’s death, followed by one new case every three days for the next 3 months. By August 7th—when a 22-year-old car cleaner working at a shop on Louisville and Nashville Streets presented with a “femoral bubo,” the egg-sized swelling of infected glands characteristic of plague—just 14 cases in humans had been documented. Which is, by Black Plague standards anyway, a pretty low rate of infection.
This was because New Orleans and the federal government not only had a healthy working relationship at the time, but powerful and competent leaders who took on the plague with the ferocity of an old priest and an young priest attending an exorcism.
Rather than arguing over the ridiculousness of a “foreign disease” like bubonic plague landing in Louisiana, or downplaying the truth in order to give residents/tourists a false sense of security, officials immediately stormed the Volunteers of America Home and moved all residents into quarantine at a plantation home outside the city. Everything inside the boarding home was pulled out and burned in a public bonfire right on St. Joseph, and armed guards were deployed to keep everyone in the neighborhood IN their neighborhood to prevent spread. Rat populations in the city were aggressively trapped and tested, with workers catching around 375,000 rats.
Which is NOT easy. As one journalist noted in May 1915, “the examination of rats is a matter requiring considerable skill and much experience, and whenever there is a plague outbreak as many sanitary officers as possible should visit the scene and thoroughly familiarize themselves with the methods to be used in diagnosing, studying, and combatting the disease.” Those methods were dipping every dead rat in kerosene to kill the fleas, carefully combing the dead fleas out of the rat’s fur, looking at the dead soaked fleas under a microscope to see if they were infected, dissecting each rat to find the "tell-tale lesions that indicated the likely presence of plague,” a keeping painstaking notes of the entire disgusting process.
What a party!
Additionally, over 6000 railcars, 4200 buildings, and 101 ships were inspected and fumigated in a SINGLE WEEK by just 380 workers. If the rat infestation was found to be too problematic, New Orleans leveled the building entirely. 7000 structures were ultimately demolished, including the historic St. Louis Hotel on Canal Street.
When the epicenter of the rat issue revealed itself to be our Stuyvesant Docks, the city waged a borderline nuclear attack on anything with a tail and whiskers in the area. They burned a LOT of shit down in the process, but also put into place new protocols—from assigning guards to gangplanks to kill any rats which tried to escape newly docked boats, to complete maritime quarantines—which would go on to redefine “rat proofing” in ports across the nation.
Keep in mind this was over one hundred years ago, all done without the benefit of computers or cell phones or even a nice Toyota Camry rental to help speed up travel from fumigation to fumigation.
Because of the decisive, no nonsense leadership demonstrated by Mayor Martin Behrman and The Board of Health of Orleans, as well as firm support from President Woodrow Wilson, Surgeon General Rupert Blue, and the Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana, cases dwindled to nothing by Thanksgiving of that year. Within six months, a filthy swamp city built on the backs of undereducated pirates and French hookers had “entirely averted the disastrous menace of the plague.”
It was an accomplishment that improved quality of life for all New Orleanians, because not being overrun with infected rats and vermin is something the very poor and the very rich can enjoy equally.
By 1915 it was written into law that “every building, outhouse, and other superstructure, stable, lot, open area, and other premise, sidewalk, street and alley, now constructed or hereafter to be constructed in the city of New Orleans, shall be rat proofed.” This was made possible through a variety of methods, including:
- requiring landlords to put trash in proper trash cans while it waited to be collected instead of slopping shit everywhere
- mandated concrete layers of no less than 3 inches under the wooden floorboards in houses, businesses, and outhouses
- raising some structures onto pillars of no less than 18 inches
- requiring restaurants and grocers to store “foodstuffs” in “hermetically sealed containers impervious to rats”
- altering how the city handled it’s considerable amount of horse poop
What also played a role in New Orleans’ success was “germ theory,” aka science proving that black plague was caused by toxic bacteria rather than Jews (yes, there was really a time when Jewish people, and then Chinese people, and then both, were blamed for plague) or bad smells. The United States government was even able to send NOLA’s medical professionals a serum which could put a serious dent in active bubonic infection, something those poor Europeans eating emeralds and drinking urine did NOT have at their disposal during the outbreak in 1347.
When it was all over, the 1914 outbreak produced 31 cases of plague. 10 were fatal.
Between 1900 and 2017, according to the Louisiana Office of Public Health, 1045 confirmed or probable cases of plague have occurred in the United States. Not all were bubonic. Around 7 cases a year are still reported domestically, the majority of which now stem from kids and bro-hikers poking at dead rodents they find outside.