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.

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