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2023 Oak Street Po Boy Festival in New Orleans
But the truth is slightly more complicated.
It’s July 1, 1929, and the Amalgamated Association of Electric Street Railway Employees, Division 194, is on strike. 1,800 unionized streetcar drivers and motormen simultaneously walk off the job and onto the picket lines.
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2023 Oak Street Po Boy Festival in New Orleans
“Our meal is free to any members of Division 194…We are with you until hell freezes, and when it does, we will furnish blankets to keep you warm,” proclaimed the Martins.
The meal? A fried potato and roast beef gravy-stuffed French loaf.
Martin Brothers’ Coffee Stand and Restaurant opened in the French Market in 1922. The men had been deep in foodservice for nearly a decade when their former colleagues went on strike and thus were uniquely aligned to stand in solidarity.
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2023 Oak Street Po Boy Festival in New Orleans
This was well before the ‘poor boy’ was said to have been invented to feed the strikers.
Meanwhile in the Treme neighborhood…
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Hot Jazz: From Harlem to Storyville by David Griffiths, page 29.
Joseph “Joe Sheep” Lambert, a Creole gentleman, operated a restaurant at Dumaine and N. Claiborne that sold po boy sandwiches for a nickel well prior to the streetcar worker’s strike.
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Miss Victoria, Mahogany Blue Baby Doll at 2023 Oak Street Po Boy Festival
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Joe Sheep’s restaurant in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. An early progenitor of the po boy sandwich. Louis Armstrong favored their red beans and rice. Image courtesy Hogan Jazz Archive, Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. Tulane University.
Stand in a crowded barroom on a Saturday night in the 3rd Ward and inquire aloud as to where one may purchase a poor boy and you may find yourself instantly corrected as to the proper verbiage. Most folks nowadays call them po boys.
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Calliope Beer Works beer-ia po boy at 2023 Oak Street Po Boy Festival
The word birria itself derives from the onomatopoeic berrear which in Spanish means to bleat or bawl. Nowadays, at least in the U.S, birria is nearly interchangeable with well-seasoned brisket or beef roast cooked into a tender stew and served on tortillas.
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Calliope Beer Works’ vendor’s booth at 2023 Oak Street Po Boy Festival
That dipping sauce is the engine that drives this po boy. I imagine the chef tending to a vast black pot filled with bones as she slowly reduced her brew down to a dense, meaty consommé à la the ancient Creole cooks who trotted out daube glacé to their well-heeled patrons at old school restaurants like Antoines and Galatoire’s.
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2023 Oak Street Po Boy Festival
This cow did not die in vain.
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Parkway Bakery and Tavern vendor’s booth at Oak Street Po Boy Festival
I could swear I’m eating at a bánh mì joint out in Village de’Lest.
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2023 Oak Street Po Boy Festival
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Breads on Oak vendor’s booth at 2023 Oak Street Po Boy Festival
Research portal:
In Transit, Volume 12, Issue 6. Analysis of Electric Railway Operating Costs and the Cost of Living as Related to Wages of Conductors, Motormen and Other Trainmen (1920)
New Orleans States [newspaper]. November 5, 1929. Page 2. [early mention of po boy sandwich]
Library of Congress
Hot Jazz: From Harlem to Storyville by David Griffiths
Hogan Jazz Archive, Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. Tulane University.
Times-Picayune archives
Lost Restaurants of New Orleans by Peggy Scott Laborde, Tom Fitzmorris
The New Orleans Underground Gourmet by Richard Collin
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Crabby Jack’s vendor’s booth at 2023 Oak Street Po Boy Festival