Known since the turn of the twentieth century as the New World, this Clarksdale neighborhood was a breeding ground for ragtime, blues, and jazz in the early days of a prosperous and adventurous new cotton town, when brothels attracted both white and black clientele. Jews, Italians, Chinese, Syrians, Greeks, and some African Americans owned businesses here, including the Messenger family, which opened its first business on this block in the early 1900s. According to H. L. Talbert, who arrived in Clarksdale in 1891, the district took its name from Nelson Jones, an African American who built a saloon with an upstairs rooming house on the south side of the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad tracks; it was also once known as Yellow Bottom(s), after yellow-painted shanties used by early railroad workers and later occupied by African Americans. After a devastating fire, brick buildings were constructed. W. C. Handy, who lived in Clarksdale from 1903 to 1905, wrote of money flowing in the New World red light district, where his orchestra played on big nights and arranged tunes later called boogie-house music. Beginning in 1914, a civic campaign brought curfews and laws aimed at houses of ill repute, streetwalking, gambling, noise, and liquor, and World War I added economic restrictions, but the district remained vibrant, especially on Saturdays when plantation workers came to town. Blues singers performed on the streets, in juke joints, and at the train station, and after curfew the festivities shifted back to the plantations. Messengers, founded by Edward Messenger, who had a liquor license as early as 1907-08, was one of the earliest African American-owned local businesses, and later New World establishments included Wade's Barbershop and Lounge, the Casanova, the Blue Den, J.J.'s, Club 2000, Club Champagne, the Red Top Lounge, Dr. Aaron Henry's 4th Street Drugs, the Roxy and New Roxy theaters, and Early Wright's remote WROX radio studio.