The Good Hope Hall was also very much known as a dance venue where popular bands would perform. The argument has been made that benevolent organizations did not merely provide venues for jazz, but were indeed greatly responsible for the growth of this influential African American art.15 Such halls were also typically sites of Civil Rights organizing and activities in Louisiana.
1912
The 1912 Sanborn map shows this as a two-story establishment offering gambling and a saloon on the first floor with a dance hall on the second floor. By 1921, billiards and pool occupied the first floor with the hall and stage on the second. From 1928 after, it was identified simply as “Lodge Hall (Colored)”. The building may have been replaced between 1940 and 1949.
Île Copal
Formerly part of the “Île Copal” plantation belonging to Jean Mouton, the subdivision registered as the Mouton Addition became known as Freetown, and had a heterogeneous mixture of lower- and middle-class Free Men of Color and Caucasians before the Civil War and the 1860’s.
This building housed the True Friends Society which was formed after the Civil War to band against the terror of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the Riders of the White Camellia. Later the Society was no longer needed for safety of the local population and the group shifted from a goal of mutual defense to one of public welfare, attending to the sick, planning celebrations and tending to the social agendas of the African-American community. The True Friends Society built the Good Hope Hall as a Community center for their neighborhood.
1920s
In the 1920s and during the Great Depression of the 30s, the Good Hope Hall became one of the great jazz halls of America where outstanding but mostly unknown traveling musicians of the time would play: Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Ethel Waters, and many others. Week after week, they graced the stage of the hall week after week to entertain the thriving community.
1950s
After World War II, the building sat dormant for a time before being used as a Catholic Church in the 50’s, a barber shop and it became a wedding hall then was purchased and resold many times to area businessmen before becoming the law office of Glenn Armentor in 1981.