The Olympic Club was established in New Orleans in mid-1883 as a
gentlemen's athletic club catering to the city's expanding
immigrant population in the Third District, known then as the
Faubourg Washington, just downriver from the Faubourg Marigny.
Between 1883 and 1893 the club's membership grew from twenty-three
to nearly eleven hundred gentlemen engaging in a wide variety of
athletic and leisure-time pursuits ranging from target-shooting and
gymnastics to billiards and boxing. Members included city
councilmen and other politicians, bartenders and businessmen,
attorneys, physicians, and represented a diverse cross-section of
New Orleans society. By 1889, boxing was the single most popular
sport in the city and professional boxing was prominently offered
by the athletic clubs across New Orleans. At that time in New
Orleans, as indeed throughout the United States, there were
prohibitions against boxing and prizefighting. But in 1889 a
revised city ordinance and an equally nebulous state statute were
frequently tested by the Olympic Club to allow boxing events
sponsored by chartered athletic clubs. Thus began a transformative
process at the Olympic Club that propelled the club and New Orleans
into the spotlight as the epicenter of boxing in America. In a
brief four-year span between 1890 and 1894 the Olympic Club's
massive 10,000 seat arena was the venue for six world championship
title fights and seven national or regional title bouts. The most
famous of these events was the Fistic Carnival-an event in 1892
that featured three successive world championship title matches
over three successive days, culminating in the heavyweight
championship fight between John L. Sullivan and James J. Corbett.
However, increased competition, legal challenges, and a dramatic
shift in the moral standards in New Orleans saw prizefighting fall
into a precipitous decline, hastened by several deaths in the ring,
most notably that of Andy Bowen, the "Louisiana Tornado." By early
1896 the club went into liquidation, experienced a brief revival in
1987, only to end in a fiery inferno that reduced the country's
most popular prizefighting venue of the 19th century to a pile of
rubble and ashes. The Olympic Club of New Orleans provides an
in-depth chronicle of boxing in New Orleans during the latter half
of the nineteenth century, interspersed with brief vignettes of New
Orleans' history that helped shape the prevailing attitudes
influencing the rise and fall of perhaps the most famous boxing
venue of its day-the Olympic Club.
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