08/24/2026
From Algiers. Live and love the accent.
He was mayor of New Orleans for ten years, and the most famous thing he ever said was about oysters. 🦪
Robert Maestri came out of the Third Ward, the son of Italian immigrants, and he made his money in furniture and real estate before he ever made it in politics. He was not polished. He had little formal schooling, spoke in a thick New Orleans accent that the newspapers loved to mock, and never quite learned to perform the part of a statesman.
He became mayor in 1936 in the wreckage the Long machine left behind, and he was installed without an election, which tells you something about how the city ran in those years. He stayed until 1946.
The story people still tell happened in 1937, when Franklin Roosevelt came to town and Maestri took him to dinner at Antoine's. Somewhere between the oysters Rockefeller and the rest of it, the mayor of New Orleans turned to the President of the United States and asked how he liked them ersters.
The reporters could not believe their luck. It ran everywhere. For the rest of his life and long past his death it was the one line attached to his name, offered to the rest of the country as proof that New Orleans was a comic opera run by men who could not talk right.
Here is what got left out. Maestri paved streets that had been mud since the French. He put in drainage and sewerage in neighborhoods the city had ignored for a century, most of them poor, many of them Black or Italian or both. He worked on Charity Hospital. He pulled the city's finances out of a hole. He spent a decade on the unglamorous machinery that lets a below sea level city stay livable.
He also ran a machine, and machines in Louisiana are never clean, and none of that should be smoothed over.
But it is worth noticing what a city chooses to remember. A man spends ten years laying pipe under the streets his neighbors walk on, and what survives is four words about oysters and the accent he said them in.
We do that to our own people. We remember the way they talked instead of what they built. ⚜️
