New Orleans Owls - West End Romp

The New Orleans Owls played regularly at hotels in New Orleans between 1922 and 1929. The band decended from The Invincibles String Band which had been playing around New Orleans since 1912. West End Romp refers to a leasure zone on New Orleans' Lake Pontchartrain shore which knew its hayday in the period 1880-1900. It comprised the former Milneburg Harbor (to which refers the famous tandard "Milenberg Joys"), the old Spanish Fort, built 1701 and onwards) and the West End (the lake's west shore). The Spanish Fort featured restaurants, a casino, a resort hotel, dancing pavilions, an alligator pond, and in its later decades a rollercoaster. It was billed as the "Coney Island of the South". Starting in the late 20s, a project reclaimed land from Lake Pontchartrain, extending the shoreline out away from the old fort. The city's main amusement park became Pontchartrain Beach. This great record was made in 1926.