Gary Krist > Quotes

“New Orleans' rebellious and free-spirited personality is nothing if not resilient. And so the disruptive energies of the place- its vibrancy and eccentricity, its defiance and nonconformity, and yes, its violence and depravity- are likely to live on.”
― Gary Krist, Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

“This was, after all, New Orleans in 1890- the Crescent City of the Gilded Age, where aliases of convenience and unconventional living arrangements were anything but out of the ordinary, at least in certain parts of town. Identities were fluid here, and names and appearances weren't always the best guide to telling who was who.”
― Gary Krist, Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

“It is no easy matter to go to heaven by way of New Orleans.”
― Gary Krist, Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

“New Orleans, it was often observed, was the first American metropolis to build an opera house, but the last to build a sewage system.”
― Gary Krist, Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

“But there’s fear and there’s panic, y’know. Calm is what matters to the bees. Calm without fear is a peril, and fear without calm doubly so. But the man who can hold both at once within his breast will not be harmed.”
― Gary Krist, Extravagance: A Novel

“Boys did not go to work on the railroad simply because their fathers did. What fetched them were sights and sounds of moving trains, and above all the whistle of a locomotive. I've heard of the call of the wild, the call of the law, the call of the church. There is also the call of the railroad.”
― Gary Krist

“It is no easy matter to go to heaven by way of New Orleans. —REVEREND J. CHANDLER GREGG”
― Gary Krist, Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

“In the cab of the locomotive it was the swaggering hotshot known as the engineer who was boss. This “engine runner” (also called a “hoghead” or “hogger” or even “throttle jockey”) was the object of the most intense popular fascination—it’s been said that even Sigmund Freud dreamed of becoming a railroad engineer.”
― Gary Krist, The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche

“So much, it would seem, for the music that would eventually be regarded as the first truly American art form.”
― Gary Krist, Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

“Steel Arm Johnny, Mary Meathouse, Gold Tooth Gussie, Bird Leg Nora, Titanic, Coke-Eyed Laura, Scratch, Bull Frog Sonny, Snaggle Mouf Mary, Stack O. Dollars, Charlie Bow Wow, Good Lord the Lifter, and many more.”
― Gary Krist, Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

“This new black music represented excess and licentiousness, a direct flouting of traditional moral values.”
― Gary Krist, Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

“the Spanish influenza epidemic had severely depressed box office receipts, as theaters in many cities were closed by government fiat and frightened moviegoers stayed home to avoid exposure to crowds. By 1919, the epidemic was tapering off, but the paranoia lingered. (Lillian Gish, who just barely survived a terrifying bout of flu before the filming of Broken Blossoms, claimed that Griffith refused to come within ten feet of her during rehearsals.) And as the 1920s began, the country was facing a postwar recession that would further complicate the economics of an industry heavily dependent on the free flow of disposable income among consumers nationwide.”
― Gary Krist, The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles

“As one Victorian minister put it in 1868, “It is no easy matter to go to heaven by way of New Orleans.”
― Gary Krist, Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

“And thus did Storyville become history.”
― Gary Krist, Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

“And around this hub, its center enclosed by the rounded rectangle of the elevated Loop tracks, clustered the dozens of individual neighborhoods that together formed this huge and diverse metropolis. Here was Little Poland, Little Italy, the Black Belt, and Greektown, the silk-stocking districts and the New World shtetls, each one of which—whether made up of crumbling tenements, luxurious mansions, or neat little worker cottages—stood in many ways apart from the others, a self-contained enclave with its own ethos and mores. From this height, one could also see the engines that kept this collection of urban villages in operation—the interlocking feedlots and slaughterhouses of the stockyards district to the southwest, the enormous steel mills to the far south, the reaper works, the railcar factories, the gasworks, the warehouses and merchandise marts of the retailing trade, and the endless railyards full of trains that connected the city to the rest of the world. To call this conglomeration by a single name—Chicago—seemed wildly inappropriate. It was less like a city than a world unto itself, bringing together the artifacts and energies of a vast multitude.”
― Gary Krist, City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago

“banana handler.”
― Gary Krist, Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans