The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

by Rich Cohen

Saddest of all is the United Fruit Building on St. Charles Avenue north of Canal Street. You can see the entrance from a passing car. The doorway is arched, the stone etched with filigree, a frieze of tropical plenty. It’s the sort of entrance that was built when this city was sure of its future and U.F. was king, the first of the truly global concerns, with a hundred ships and a million acres and a hundred thousand employees. But when you step through the arch, you find nothing but a shabby foyer, a building dumb to its own glory, its rooms rented to foreign consulates, nondescript law firms, a bank. When I went into the bank and looked at the ceiling—there was once a Diego Rivera–like mural there that showed a banana steamer coasting a palm-fringed bay—the teller seemed irritated. “What are you looking at?” “I wanted to see if the United Fruit mural was still up there.” “What’s United Fruit?”