Willie Piazza

Can't wait to be New Orleans next week and see these archives!

Above: Willie Piazza. Image Source

In anticipation of taking my show to New Orleans this month, I did an interview with Claus Sadlier, the founder of the new Storyville Museum . I’ll be touring the museum while I’m in NOLA, and I’ll include highlights from that interview when I post about it later this month!

I told him I feature Willie Piazza in my show, and he knew all about her. I love it when I talk to someone who knows about a person I consider historically significant, but who seems to be generally underrecognized.

The Storyville District was segregated, but the women of color there were most illustrious in spite of that. Famous brothel operators like Lulu White and Piazza, also known as Countess Willie, owned mansions and were famous for the beauty of their interiors, their employees, and their fashions. When the Countess and her girls would go for a stylish promenade in the District, they’d be followed by the seamstresses of wealthy white women, who, though afraid to get too close themselves, wanted to know what the most fabulous women of Storyville were wearing.

Countess Willie was more than a fashion plate, however. When the city attempted to expel BIPOC women from Storyville, Willie fought back to keep her home, and won.

The city of New Orleans is proud of its history, and proud of the history of Storyville, a vice district that lasted only a few decades but which has echoed through to the present because of its triumphs, its travails (it wasn’t all glamour for the women there, by a long shot), and its incredible culture of music, fashion, and food. I can’t wait to see the museum and tell you all about it!

Above: A perfume ad for a fragrance based on Willie Piazza. Illustration by my beloved friend, artist, author and activist Molly Crabapple. Image Source

Read more:

The Storyville Madame Who Challenged Jim Crow and Won

Guidebooks to Sin: The Blue Books of Storyville

Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red Light District by Al Rose

The Great Southern Babylon: sex, race, and respectability in New Orleans, 1865 - 1920