For nearly a third of her life, Carolyn Monnie Cushenberry, 74, has been focused on the First and Last Stop, the small bar that sits on the corner of Pauger and Marais Streets in the 7th Ward.
But now the bar and much of her life’s work has been sold from underneath her, by owners who felt like family to her. “I’m hurt and I’m devastated,” said Cushenberry earlier this week, as she tried sell a beer cooler and tables on Facebook Marketplace, preparing for what now seems like an inevitable closure. “It seems like my 20 years of being here was snatched away from me.”
What eats at her isn’t that the building was sold, but how it’s happened: scant notice from the original owners followed by erratic behavior from a new owner. No one really knows what will happen next, Pauger Street neighbors say.
Cushenberry’s trailblazing parents and their Black-run bar room in Jim Crow New Orleans paved the way for places like the First and Last Stop. But what is happening on Pauger and Marais ultimately reflects the shaky state of Black bars in New Orleans today — and the role of the city’s extreme racial wealth gap in that cultural crisis.
The uncertain future hits hard in the Black-masking Indian tribes that have been based at the bar for nearly a century. “When I heard about it, I sat down and I cried,” said Tyrone “Pie” Stevenson, 66, big chief of the Monogram Hunters tribe, which leaves the First and Last Stop on Mardi Gras morning in its new suits, gathers there on St. Joseph Night, and holds regular, often weekly, “Indian practices” there to practice traditional music and dance as Mardi Gras approaches.
In 1970, as Stevenson sewed his first suit at age 11, civil-rights fighter Jerome “Big Duck” Smith picked him every week to bring him to Indian practice in that building with the Yellow Pocahontas tribe, run by the revered Big Chief Allison “Tootie” Montana.
Over the years, the corner has become part of Indian lore. “When we sing, we are always talking about Pauger and Marais,” Stevenson said. “That’s where we came from.”
The place has run through at least a dozen names and operators. It was the Red Canary when Stevenson’s uncle, Alfred Dolliole, ran it in the mid-1980s. Evangeline Small operated it as Vangie’s Lounge in the late 1980s. Stevenson also remembered when Louis J. “Junior” Early ran it with Jessie R. Williams in the 1970s, as J. & L’s Fun Box. Before that, it was the Pied Piper’s Bar run by Maryrose Hamilton. The Lucky Star Lounge, run by Satelina Duplessis. Club Avalon, operated by Alvin Chapital and William Monroe in 1961, Dolores Bellamy in 1964, and Rushell Zanders in 1968, according to Louisiana Alcohol and Beverage Control board notices. Monroe also ran his construction and roofing company from the building in the mid-1960s. Some of the older neighbors remember that before that, in the mid-1950s, it was called the Blue Lamp Bar.
The bar’s current name got its start in 1995, when it was dubbed the First Stop Bar & Lounge by proprietor Milligan Hall, remembered by neighbors as a retired Pepsi delivery driver. Around that time, it was also briefly re-named Ernie K-Doe No. 2, because it was being run by his widow Antoinette K-Doe, Cushenberry’s good friend.
Yet no matter who ran it or named it, Indians saw the same four sacred walls. “They got so many spirits in that place, of the Indians who paved the way for me and everyone else,” Stevenson said. “If God would allow spirits to show themselves in that building, we’d be surrounded by Indians.”
From barmaid to proprietor, overnight
Tiny Carol Cushenberry, who stands about 5 feet tall and weighs maybe 100-pounds, first set foot into the narrow bar 30 years ago, when it was the First Stop. She came there with her friend Frank Cole, her fishing buddy, who lived across the street.
Soon, she was hired as a barmaid by the bar’s owner, Albert C. Steward, who also lived upstairs in one of the building’s three apartments. A few years later, when Steward got sick, she cared for him and kept the establishment running while also staying in touch with his son and daughter-in-law, who lived in Chicago.
When Steward died, his family held a big repast at the bar. Then they asked her to take over. “We would love you to have this,” said his son, who sold her the bar and gave her a box of his dad’s ashes to keep in a corner there. She and her husband Freddie Cushenberry bought the contents from Steward’s family and signed a lease with the building’s owners, Al Reagle and his wife, Virginia “Ginny Kay” Sortino Reagle.
On February 25, 2002, the Times-Picayune ran an ad from Freddie Cushenberry, a notice that he was applying for a permit to sell alcoholic beverages at 1843 Pauger.
The couple dubbed it the First and Last Stop Bar and began paying weekly rent to the Reagles. For years now, regulars have been drawn to the place for its warm atmosphere. Kids used to be flock here too, to a front window that’s now bricked in, where the bar’s proprietors used to sell pickles and potato chips.
From Pauger Street, customers walk through the red iron doors and find a long wooden bar lining the wall on the right. On the left are wooden bar chairs pulled up to a row of small, waist-high tables. In the back, there is a pool table, video poker machines, and an open space where people dance and sing during Indian practices.
Longtime customers greet each other with hugs and kisses before placing a drink order with Cushenberry’s daughter, Trinette Monnie, 54, and taking a seat in the front. “Bars like ours go through waves of customers,” Monnie said. “Some have died. Some have changed their lives and don’t hang in bars anymore. Only a few have stuck with us the whole time.”
On most days, the First and Last Stop is a quiet spot with a jukebox that plays old R&B and jazz, perfect for its crowd of middle-aged regulars, both people who grew up in the 7th Ward and newcomers who just moved there. Tourists often take selfies with Cushenberry, who has become a legendary figure, called “Totsie” by many of her customers — a nickname her husband gave her because of her petite size. On Tuesday’s, the bar serves its hefty Big Mouth Burgers, topped with sauteed onions and made by Cushenberry in the bar’s kitchen.
Tuesday, November 11 turned out to be the last day that the bar was open to serve drinks or burgers. Yet most customers who came through the door hadn’t heard that Cushenberry would soon be closing down. “This bar has been here forever. And this news bothers me immensely,” said Jerilynn Scott.
The bar was a reliable spot for both its customers and owners, who signed a new 10-year lease with the Reagles in 2023, with slightly higher rents to adjust for rising taxes and insurance, she said.
Then in late September, Al Reagle called Carol Cushenberry to tell her that he had bad news. “I’m selling the building. I got an offer for it,” he said.
The decision to sell came as a shock to the Cushenberrys, who were only two years into their new lease. “My understanding was that I had first preference,” she said. “When he and his wife decided to get rid of it, I would get it.”
She and her son, Tarikh Duckworth, a construction contractor tried to reach Reagle to make an offer. But within days, it was too late. “It’s already sold,” Reagle told them.
Heated encounters with new owner
Cushenberry asked the new owner, Daniel Sellers, to honor the terms of her existing lease. That could happen only if she started paying for liability and fire insurance policies that the Reagles had always paid as part of the lease, she said. Then, on November 1, he posted a hand-typed notice on the bar’s door, giving her 10 days to vacate the premises. He also shut off her lights at the main breaker and put a chain on her door, locking her out.
Seeing Sellers and the notice, neighbors frantically called Cushenberry. She arrived to find Sellers leaving the bar, she said. He told her he had people coming to help him throw the bar’s contents into a dumpster. “He had me so upset. I was trembling,” she said. “He was right in my face.”
Twice during the confrontation, he called her a n—– b—-, she said. It’s an allegation that Sellers adamantly denied, saying he has never used the n-word in all of his 40 years.
They also differ on other key points. She says she called 911; he says he called 911 and ran on foot all the way to the Treme because she went into her car and grabbed a gun, an allegation she denies. He says he hasn’t been paid rent in two months; while Cushenberry said that she paid him in cash. He says that he had a hammer in his hand because he was just trying to see the stucco that covered the historical building’s surface before the bricks were added to the exterior; she says that she heard an impact near her head and saw that he’d used the hammer to make a dent into a brick by the door as she walked onto the bar’s doorsill.
On November 1, when New Orleans Police Department officers arrived, they retrieved Sellers from Gov. Nicholls Street and conferred with both of them outside the First and Last Stop. The incident report notes that officers told Sellers “to report to Civil District Court for proper eviction proceedings and to stay away from said property until eviction is secured.” He soon texted Cushenberry, telling her that he’d give her notice a day before he’d be in the building.
Despite that promise and the advisement from police, Sellers continues to show up outside the building. “It’s like he’s taunting her,” her son said. The text messages that Seller sends his mother range from notes urging her to spare herself the “embarrassment” of going to the eviction court to two social-media videos showing Black women who are angry at being evicted by deputies.
“The videos I sent her? Guess what, that was completely wrong,” Sellers said on Thursday evening. “That’s immoral. That’s not a good thing to do. But you know what, the humanity in me, the evil inside of me, the part of me that was not the best behavior, did that because I am extremely frustrated that everybody wants to be the victim.”
He also says that her son, Duckworth, threatened Sellers’ life after that day.
On Tuesday evening, November 18, Sellers walked out of the building’s alley and almost ran into a neighbor walking home from the grocery. He was carrying some sort of clippers and ran to his work van after he saw her, she said when interviewed by The Lens on Thursday night. She’d called Cushenberry about it at 5::32 p.m., the neighbor said, checking her phone. When they inspected the corner where he’d been, a sliced cable was hanging off that side of the building, she said. When Duckworth walked the entire building on Thursday, he found several additional cut cables, including the one connected to the bar’s side door camera.
Sellers said he had nothing to do with the sliced cables. “Yes, I saw the neighbor. The neighbor saw me,” Sellers told The Lens. “I did what I needed to do and I left.” He needed to cut the lock on the side gate, he said.
‘Opening soon’
Five days later, on November 7, trumpeter Kermit Ruffins posted a photo of the First and Last Stop on Instagram. “Old school bar I just got, opening soon,” he wrote.
No one believes that Ruffins is behind her eviction. Cushenberry has known Ruffins since he was a child. “I watched him grow up,” she said.
Ruffins did not purchase the building. Public records show that on October 1, Sellers bought the place from the Reagles in a cash sale for an undisclosed amount.
The Reagles also own the building at 1500 N. Claiborne Ave. that houses Kermit’s Treme Mother-in-Law Lounge, which Ruffins has leased and operated since 2012. And until 2007, the Reagles also owned the building at 1532 Ursulines St. that housed the bar Joe’s Cozy Corner.
The first newspaper mention of the bar at 1843 Pauger St. came just after World War II, in January 1946, when Lawrence Sortino, Virginia Reagle’s father, applied to sell alcohol at a place he named for his wife, Sadie Demma Sortino. Sortino, later described as the operator of Lucky Star Coin Co., a jukebox distributor, moved away from managing the place. By 1950, he was advertising to rent Sadie’s Bar and Restaurant, a “colored” establishment.
In neighborhoods like the 7th Ward, where Black masking Indians patronized groceries and bars run by Italian families, traditions merged. It’s because of those bonds that Indian tribes began coming out a second time each year, on St. Joseph’s Night, where they would celebrate the Catholic feast day sacred to local Italians and stop at Italian bars along the way.
Yet few Black New Orleanians rose to ownership. Though customers rely on beloved neighborhood figures like Cushenberry and Ruffins, neighborhood bars are frequently owned by outside owners, who sign leases with bar owners to run the places. Photographer L. Kasimu Harris touched on the fragility of these traditional Black-run establishments in his photographic series, “Vanishing Black Bars and Lounges.” As he wrote in his notes for the series, he has seen drastic changes in recent decades. “Black bars in Black communities are turning white,” he wrote.
All around the First and Last Stop, entire residential blocks of the 7th Ward also changed hands during that time period, to be rented out as AirBNBs and bought up by neighborhood newcomers, often white professionals who made more than the working-class families who used to live on these blocks.
Some of the newcomers have also become regulars and Cushenberry enjoys the visitors from around the world, including the band members of Jimmy Royal and the Regals, a British band that included a painting of a New Orleans building labeled “First and Last Stop” on the inside centerspread of their CD jacket. An autographed copy sits behind the bar, signed “To Totsie. Much love.”
The buyout, and the faces in today’s 7th Ward, is an economics lesson in action, illustrating wealth gaps within the city. Nationally, white households typically have six times the wealth of a Black households. It’s even more concentrated in the New Orleans area, a new study found. Here, the ratio is 13 times white to Black, with median net worth for Black households standing at roughly $14,000, compared with $185,000 for white households. The largest imbalance is among the top 10% of households, where roughly 9 of 10 households are white.
Rising insurance policies and utility bills have made ownership much more prohibitive for everyone across the city. But for working-class residents, ownership now seems virtually impossible.
“From when I was 11 years old until now, all the people who ran this bar didn’t own it. They were just leasing it,” said Pie Stevenson, who believes that Cushenberry is caught in the middle of forces she cannot control. “Look at our most famous Black-run bars. The bar managers can lease and be the face of something. But if they don’t own it, that light could go off at any time.”
Cushenberry, a child of the Black bar room
Some operators of Black-run bars do own both their businesses and their buildings. Among them are the Sportsman Corner Bar at 2nd and Dryades Street in Central City, which has been owned and run by the Elloie family since the 1960s, and Bullet’s Sports Bar on A.P. Tureaud Street, long owned by Rollin “Bullet” Garcia Sr. – who announced this summer that he was hoping to sell his establishment.
In the Treme, Cushenberry’s parents, George “Crip” and Byrdies “Mama Bert” Monnie, were considered trailblazers, who owned a dry cleaner’s on Basin Street and a boarding house at the corner of Marais Street and Ursulines Avenue where they rented to famous tenants including musicians K-Doe and Dooky Chase. Then the couple bought a building across from the boarding house, a grocery with living quarters attached. They ran the grocery, Bert’s, at 1333 Ursulines, for a few years before turning it into what’s said to be the neighborhood’s first Black-owned bar, called Monnie’s.
The lot where the grocery once stood is now empty, overseen only by a pecan tree planted by Mama Bert that towers over the property.
But Castenberry vividly remembers life there, and the rhythms of running a bar.
As a child, she helped her mom load the icebox in the bar. She would stand on a stool to stir the tall pots of red beans and gumbo that fed many Boh Brothers crews during their lunch breaks. People still call her Mama Bert’s daughter.
Others call her Ms. Monnie. When that happens, her customers look confused, she said. “I tell them, ‘That’s my 6th Ward name.’ If they call Ms. Moonie, you know they’ve known me for a long time.”
Now, when Trinette is moving around town, people say, “Hey, Ms. Carol’s daughter.”
Here at Pauger and Marais, after their customers leave, Carol Cushenberry is often wide awake. That’s when she pulls out her toolbox or her paintbrush to keep up with the bar’s maintenance. She had hired crews for bigger jobs, like re-wiring the building or fixing broken pipes after a freeze. But more often, her son helps her make repairs. When Christmas is coming, she decorates and throws an annual party. “I have spent so much on this building,” she said. “I get the licenses. The bills are in my name.”
During recent bursts of late-night energy, she refreshed the front bar’s white ceiling tiles with a coat of denim blue and she painted the floors fire-engine red and. “She started with red doors and then it got red all over,” her daughter said.
Customers say that this little red jewel is a vital part of the 7th Ward. It’s also essential to her mom’s identity, Trinette Monnie said. “She definitely doesn’t want to walk away like this.”
