Casey Levy and his 10 siblings grew up on Aztec Street in Bucktown, a Jefferson Parish neighborhood that abuts New Orleans out on Lake Pontchartrain. Levy, who’s now 75, said that back in the 1950s and '60s when he was a kid, the streets of Bucktown were covered with clam shells, the telephones were connected to party lines, and you could hunt rabbits out where Lakeside Mall is now.
People were proud of the name Bucktown back then, Levy said. It had a certain distinction, a cachet. “We’d say ‘We live down in Bucktown,’” he recalled, relishing the alliteration. Levy lives in Zachary now, and as he recently recollected his childhood, it crossed his mind that he was never exactly sure why they called his old stomping grounds Bucktown to begin with.
“I kind of recall that it was named for some old shrimper or crabber named Buck,” Levy said. “Some strange guy.”
Original caption for this 1950 photo: 'At the east end of Jefferson Parish, but connected to West End by a bridge, is the section called Bucktown. Many of the structures are residences or camps, some of which are built atop pilings sunk into Lake Pontchartrain. Before the seawall was built, many such buildings lined the lakeshore."
It certainly makes sense that Bucktown would be named for an old shrimper or crabber, because one of the area’s claims to fame was the fishing village that stretched out into Lake Pontchartrain starting in the mid-1800s. A historic photo you can find online, dated 1890 to 1910, shows rambling rows of wooden shacks lining the canal that coursed into the lake at the time. Pirogues are tied to the piers.
But fresh trout, flounder and shellfish weren’t Bucktown’s only attractions. The enclave just over the border from New Orleans also had a reputation for, uh, maritime debauchery. The name, Bucktown, seemed to fit, seeming redolent with certain wild, hotblooded implications. But some residents felt the title wasn't appropriate at all. To them, the term Bucktown seemed like a slur, especially when used by visiting New Orleanians.
“Bucktown isn’t exactly a city of angels,” wrote New Orleans Item newspaper reporter Herman Drezinski in a 1921 article, headlined PLEASE STOP CALLING US BUCKTOWN, “but New Orleans isn’t either.”
Drezinski reported that John Bruning, the proprietor of “one of the Bucktown cabarets,” told the Louisiana Legislature that the people of the area were tired of the criticism that the term Bucktown implied. Bruning pleaded that the less evocative term East End be used instead.
“The more we try to be refined,” the nightclub impresario said, “the more the name Bucktown prevents us.”
Bucktown Bridge at West End in 1976.
It’s interesting to note that Drezinski’s story includes a cartoon illustration of an Eastender, who appears to be a hard-working outdoorsman, toting a sack of oysters, a stringer of fish and a few felled ducks. It is also illustrated with the image of a “Bucktowner,” who is depicted as a portly, pistol-toting, cigar smoker with liquor bottles hidden in his boots, and a one-eyed tomcat sculking at his side.
These days, newspaper editors discourage reporters from digressing capriciously from the storyline. But Drezinski was given the liberty to report that Bucktown was thought to be haunted by a starved detachment of Confederate soldiers, who had “lost their way and died one by one, with only the lapping of saline waters, and the sinister dipping of vultures overhead, as their exequies.”
Drezinski also mentions a woman who drowned herself in the canal and could be heard wailing from the great beyond on windy nights, and a Yankee gunboat captain who built the first house in the so-called East End and eventually haunted it.
We are delighted to have taken this metaphysical detour, but more to the point, Drezinski mentioned a mustachioed character named William Wooley who was still alive in 1921 and — in a way — is still remembered to this day.
In 1980, the 17th Street canal, 'the lifeline of Bucktown.'
In Drezinski's telling, Wooley was a private watchman in the rowdy waterside neighborhood, who had “a number of opportunities of meeting the young blades of the place,” according to Drezinski. It’s unclear from the newspaper account if Wooley was a no-nonsense keeper of the peace or a Barney Fife precursor. It’s also unclear why the young blades anointed him with the nickname Buck Oliver, or why they began calling his hedonistic beat Buck’s Town, or why that had come into general usage as Bucktown. One legend paints Wooley as an expert deer hunter, another as a violently jealous suitor.
But, despite those lingering historic mysteries, we are satisfied to have gotten to the bottom of the why-Bucktown matter. The name was derived, as Mr. Levy believed, from “some strange guy,” but he was a private cop, not a fisherman.
Sure, there are other non-Wooley theories: The enclave may have been named for the generally excellent deer hunting in the area at one time, or for a colorful, frequently incarcerated cowboy. But no etymology is as detailed or delicious as the one above.
John Bruning hoped to publish a petition in the newspaper to curtail the use of the term Bucktown. But he obviously failed. Which is a good thing, because if he’d succeeded, Jelly Roll Morton may not have written the “Bucktown Blues” in 1924 or thereabouts.
John Bruning was related to Theodore Bruning, who established the Bruning’s seafood restaurant in 1859, that survived across the Canal from Bucktown for 146 years, until it was finally destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Bucktown flourishes as a suburban neighborhood, and a go-to seafood destination, though the rambling fishing village-notorious nightspot on the Lake is only a memory, replaced by an enormous pumping station.
The New Orleans Item newspaper Nov. 13, 1921
