New Orleans: Gateway to the Americas
Bananas, ca. 1910 |
Bananas imported from Latin America made fortunes in New Orleans and contributed substantially to the establishment of hemispheric relations. By mid-twentieth century, twenty to twenty-five per cent of all the bananas imported into the United States came across the docks at New Orleans. Two rival fruit importers dominated the scene: New Orleans-based Standard Fruit, founded by the Vaccaro brothers and Salvador D'Antoni, and the giant United Fruit, which established its southern headquarters in New Orleans. From the turn of the century, when banana imports first began to flow through the port of New Orleans, until the late 1960s, when Standard Fruit moved its operations to Gulfport, the banana trade provided one of New Orleans' strongest commercial ties to Latin America.Besides providing hundreds of jobs in the Crescent City, the banana wharves were also something of a tourist attraction in the first half of the twentieth century, as this post card collage of the docks suggests. The WPA's Louisiana: A Guide to the State, published in 1941, says, "For sightseeing value, the river front is second only to the French Quarter," and lists "BANANA UNLOADING, at the Thalia Street Wharf, where the United Fruit Company unloads a large share of the 23,000,000 stems brought into New Orleans yearly" among its "chief points of interest" along the water front.
[Louisiana Postcard Collection]