Situated in the city’s Fourth Ward, the approximately ten square blocks that defined Storyville extended from the uptown side of Customhouse (now Iberville) Street to the uptown side of St. Louis Street, and from the lake side of Basin Street to the river side of North Robertson Street. In the fifteen years or so before it was designated as a vice district, the area was both residential and industrial. Home to a largely working-class population that was primarily African American, the neighborhood was dotted with small wooden houses, a firehouse, a school, and a church. These structures coexisted with Wood’s Cotton Press, which dominated most of three square blocks along Canal Street from Claiborne Avenue to Marais Street; L’Hote and Company lumber factory and yard near the Old Basin Canal; and two breweries. Major landmarks flanking the area included St. Louis Cemeteries Nos. 1 and 2, the Old Basin Canal, and the Spanish Fort and Lake Railroad line, which ran from Canal Street down Basin Street for two blocks before turning north on Bienville Street toward Lake Pontchartrain.

By 1908, the midpoint of Storyville’s existence, there was more commercial development along the perimeter of the District, including a bottling plant, a cement block manufactory, and a fire extinguisher factory. The grand terminal building of the interstate Southern Railroad had opened at Canal and Basin Streets. Within the neighborhood, saloons, brothels, and dance halls abounded, supplanting the residential properties of the previous era. Rising rents had driven out most of the neighborhood’s residents, and after years of declining membership, the church, the Union Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, closed in 1914.