< Back to Oral History project: Career Servers
ORAL HISTORY
Maggie Marx
Maggie Marx was born in 1945 to artistic and intellectual parents. She grew up in New York’s Greenwich Village at a time of great ferment. In 1964, at the age of nineteen, she left home to study at Vermont’s Marlboro College. Along the way, Marx began waiting tables, first at tourist landmarks in Martha’s Vineyard. She lived and worked in Key West from 1976 to 1989, where she became the owner of a restaurant aboard a houseboat.
In 1989, Marx moved to New Orleans, joining the number of newcomers who, over the years, have renewed the city’s population of bohemians. There she worked along Frenchman Street music corridor and from 1990 to 2004 at Feelings Café in the Marigny. Now retired, Maggie looks back on her career with justified pride, having seen the fullest range of the good and the difficult that restaurants can offer. Today Maggie lives in her Marigny home, a place in New Orleans that she has carved out through a lifetime of hard work and determination.