On the Road (3): New Orleans

Jackson Square

Café du Monde is just across the street from Jackson Square, on just the other side of the flood wall from the Mississippi River at the end of the French Market. It’s famous, and has a huge multilingual line of visitors stretching down the street to prove it. And rightly so: their plates of beignets — fried dough served in a dust bowl of powdered sugar — are a treat, and even their chicory-laced cafe au lait has a specific charm (that chicory is there as a coffee extender, as local historians and guidebooks will tell you). The place is as New Orleans as it gets, but it can’t escape being a part of the great big globalized world — most of the waitstaff are Vietnamese ladies. Probably not as it was in the old days.

I’ve been to New Orleans three times now — in 1993, 2001, and 2015 — and it remains every bit the great American city we think it is. But like any living place, it’s changing, and thanks to its unique topography it’s changing fast. I didn’t now what it would like now. Would it feel like it’s still on its sickbed, after surviving a near fatal blow just a few years ago? Would it still feel like a convention center adjacent to a permanent frat party, as it is to so many visitors? Or has it moved on to become a consciously dying oddity with the grace of Venice? or a hollowed-out theme park of gumbo and old-timey jazz? The greatness of the place is there is a little of all of that.

My memories from that first trip remain very vivid. I went over winter break while in college to meet up with some Southern friends I’d met the summer before in Washington. I remember eating crawfish for the first time, and going to Bourbon Street and enjoying the idea of being an adult for awhile and ordering a beverage without a hassle. I saw the Mississippi River for the first time there.

That second trip I went for a conference, which was much less fun. I remember going out to slightly better restaurants, walking around alone, dropping by Preservation Hall a few times, spending long hours during the day in impossibly long meetings.

This trip with the family, I felt like we had to touch all the basics for the sake of our daughter. The tourist economy of the city is doing great. I don’t remember ever seeing quite so many people there. Getting to Preservation Hall was almost an ordeal — not just because I spent the set with my daughter on my shoulders because we were stuck against the back wall. The set was more dutiful than inspired, but the line to get in was astonishing. 

Never mind the line, Preservation Hall is still worth it

There is still a great deal to see, and we took an architectural tour of the Quarter to get a sense of the layers of design of the city. Along the way we managed to avoid Bourbon Street altogether, and spent an evening on Frenchmen Street listening to music and going to an open-air art market. It feels alive and healthy, and the pockets of despair visitors like us found were very familiar — the spectacularly drunk, the panhandlers, the squatters, the various fellows you see walking a bit too fast and looking around too much who are clearly up to something.

We stayed a little bit uptown, in a neighborhood that straddles the very posh Garden District and the quite more pedestrian Irish Channel districts. Giant old trees pushed their roots through the sidewalk, and the potholes and scarred pavement was astonishing. It felt like a city falling apart from the ground up.

We tried our best to get a little bit off the beaten path, and were well-rewarded when we did. The most eye-opening place we visited was the Backstreet Cultural Museum, in the lower reaches of Tremé, which is an old funeral home that has become an overflowing collection of items documenting the city’s rich and misunderstood African-American social traditions. It includes a selection of the intricate and complicated costumes of the various tribes of Mardi Gras Indians, and artifacts and items from the city’s Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, and specific traditions like second-line dancing. 

Mardi Gras Indian costumes at the Backstreet Cultural Museum

This is a part of life in the city that is considerably more difficult to understand for outsiders, and in many ways the museum raised way more questions than it answered. This even though we had a wonderful guide, one of the founders of the museum who helped us make sense of the costumes and photos and newspaper clippings. As an experiment in anthropology it is an amazing place — a look at how a living culture choose to represent itself to outsider in an honest and astounding way.

As I said, I didn’t know what New Orleans we’d find — I’d imagined a place once again pulling open and forced to welcome all, a place that couldn’t afford to remain the quaint museum of esoteric culture it was before the catastrophe. It’s a bit of everything, as it always has been when at its best.

Old beside older

On the Road (2): Destin

 

Destin, March 23

The beach in Destin is one of the few I’ve ever seen that can sell itself. It is way out on the Florida Panhandle toward Pensacola, surprisingly far from the rest of the state, and has clever marketing team at work for it that has come up with the name “the Emerald Coast.” That’s fair: the sea is a bright, lively green, especially in contrast with the perfectly white, powdery beach. It checks every box: the sea was even warm enough in March to go into it.

Beach economies tend to be so similar that the small distinctions become big differences. The infrastructure in Destin at first glance is very familiar: a strand of beach, fronted by hotels, with a strip just inland of eating and entertainment options (things to do in case it rains).

But Destin’s big advantage is that it is new. The hotel where we stayed was just across the beach road from the great ocean-fronting behemoths, and was so new it appears on Google Earth as a construction site. It is so new that no older, shabbier layers of development are present — the small motel-like places you find in older beach areas. The restaurants are new and mostly chain locations, which lack in local character what they make up in reliability. The alternative entertainments aren’t limited to just mini-golf places, but include some pretty rad-looking go-kart racetracks. The common denominator you’d find anywhere by the shore are those giant discount beach-supply emporiums, spaced on nearly every block which sell cheap beach towels with SEC team logos, novelty shot glasses, and spade-and-bucket sets for kids.

This sudden growth around the area shows just how efficient market capitalism is in talent-scouting. But this moment in capitalism isn’t much interested in long-term, sustainable development, but in developing resources and extracting as much money out as quickly as possible. So you see some big new hotels, and a lot of condos crowded wherever they’ll fit within walking distance of the beach. Most of them seem to be built on this generic ideal of fancy Southern living, with big galleries and porches and plenty of space for rocking chairs. They seem pleasant and comfortable, but blank.

All that newness is reflected in who you see there. We saw a lot of families with kids, a lot of late-model SUVs with stickers for soccer associations and the like in the parking lots. No battered sedans that look like they won’t make it back to where they came from, no rusting campers, nothing that a successful upper middle class family would be ashamed to climb into.

Word of this complacent bourgeois atmosphere has apparently gotten around. I read in the Pensacola newspaper an article about the Spring Break economy, which noted that college kids in the region had decided that Destin is boring as hell and to be avoided in favor of places like Panama City Beach. This was a relief to us, even if we did spy more than a few beer funnels on display at the beach shops, and a smattering of college kids on the beach who seemed pretty well-mannered. 

Unconvincing

It was interesting to see how these little groups of college kids interacted and spent their days. The girls would arrive in groups, content to lie in the sun listening to music on their headphones, occasionally taking photos of themselves. The boys would arrive a bit later (go-karts?), stand in little circles around a cooler of Bud Light and chat. Occasionally they’d take a break to throw around a football. Eventually, a group of the girls would take the initiative to go talk to the boys, they would throw the football around altogether, and there, temporary friendships are sealed, I suppose.

It looked a bit backwards from how these things happened when I was their age, but the elements were all the same. What has really changed — and so much so to be alarming — is how technology has butt in to even the simplest things. One night, we went to a restaurant on the main drive, one of those giant seafood shack places. As we waited for a table, an enormous group of college kids arrived and was seated at several long tables pushed together. This kind of group you expect to be loud and fun, but on the contrary, they were dead silent. Each of them settled in, whipped out their phone, and stared down, maybe occasionally showing something in a whisper to their neighbor. To be young, at the beach, with an abundance of people to flirt with, and they stare furiously at their phones imagining they were elsewhere. I fear how crippled these kids have become.

I think my phone stayed away most of the time we were there. When I wasn’t silently judging college kids in my near vicinity, I was busy just enjoying being outdoors in the warm air, rejoicing to be outside again and not freezing to death. Who could ask for more?

Our seaside fortification, Destin, Florida. March 22.