New Orleans, or N’awlins as the locals say it, is an extremely beautiful, but also kind of depressing place. I had to see it during the day, which may have shaped the way I feel about it. Supposedly it comes to life with more vigor in the evening and night, but I had to catch my shuttle back to the campground at 5:45 p.m. or pay at least $30 in taxi fare.
I survived the terrible, humid heat of the night before at the campground, mainly because I sat in the air-conditioned laundry room in the campground. I have a battery operated fan that I used in the tent, which also helped. Around 10:00 p.m. it started to cool off with a nice breeze. The KOA campground was very nice – clean with lots of clean toilets and showers. There was also a clean pool, too. The sites were a little too close though – I could hear every sound the people in the tent next to me made. I slept well on my air mattress until a passing train woke me up at 6:00 a.m. with its loud whistle/horn sounds. At 9:00 a.m., one of the KOA staff members drove our small group of about five adults, two children, and several teen-agers into the city. He took a scenic route and explained things about the places we passed. Much of the River Ridge and Metaire areas we drove through were once parts of plantations. They are now very large cities, though unincorporated and considered part of New Orleans. (The campground is in River Ridge.) There are a large number of suburban areas around the city. He dropped us off by the river levee in front of the St. Louis Cathedral. We went our separate ways; I walked over to Café du Monde, a very old and world famous café. It was extremely crowded, but surprisingly there was no line. As I walked in, a couple of people had just paid their bill and were leaving their table. I took the table. I had café au lait and beignets, which taste like funnel cakes, but they are square and thick. They are delicious. A group of four African-American musicians sat in folding chairs on the sidewalk outside the covered terrace of the café and played old jazz songs with a trumpet, trombone, clarinet, and a singer. It was like something I’d seen in a movie of New Orleans. I saw groups of street musicians singing and playing throughout the city, playing all kinds of music from jazz, to reggae, rock and roll, country, and even electronic New Age music.
I wandered around the French Quarter for about three hours. First I explored Jackson Square, which includes the St. Louis Cathedral, the oldest cathedral in America. It has a rich history (see the link here for more about that). There is a nice park in front of it with a fountain. On either side of it are the Presbytere and Cabildo, state museums, which look like city hall buildings for a German town. The square also includes the Pontalba Apartments, supposedly the oldest apartment buildings in the country. Now they are mostly shops and restaurants.
Then I walked and walked and walked up and down the various streets, photographing the French and Spanish style buildings with their balconies, columns, tall shutters, windows and doors. I found the old Ursuline Convent buildings and St. Mary’s church, which are connected. The convent was an orphanage and school for girls in the late 1700s. Eventually it was used as a hospital, and then as a residence for bishops.
Catholicism is the dominant religion in New Orleans, largely because of the Creole/Cajun history. Approximately 28% of the 90% Christian population in the state of Lousiana are Catholics, according to several different web sources (including Wikipedia, I confess, because there isn’t any current information about religion available yet in the 2010 census data). The rest are scattered into many different Protestant religions. There are at least 44 Catholic Churches in New Orleans, according to The Catholic Directory. That’s why the state is divided into parishes, instead of counties. I suppose you could consider voodoo the next dominant religion in the New Orleans area, though the voodoo shops all seem to be more tourist traps these days than anything serious.
Eventually I wandered onto Bourbon Street. It’s mostly bars, jazz night clubs, sex shops, and tourist kitsch shops. Much of it seemed seedy and dingy, but I suppose at night it would all look better, especially in the light of the gas lamps that illuminate the entire quarter. Many sections of the sidewalks are covered by the porches that stretch out beyond the second and sometimes third floors of the buildings. Gas lamps often hang from the middle of these ceilings, lighting up the sidewalks and streets below them. I found Jean Lafitte’s bar. It was just a bar with a theme – the building does clearly have history (see the link here), but I’m cynical about its claims to the pirate. That street in particular seems to be so commercialized that whatever history is real is buried under the glitz and grime.
I wandered back toward Jackson square, I thought, but never really made it back on my own. I passed the city’s Supreme Court building where a large press conference was about to begin. A woman standing on the steps watching the confusion of press microphones and cameras, as well as large groups of school children, explained to me that it was the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, and this press conference was one of many events going on around town. The Mayor, Mitch Landrieu, and other local leaders of the community were going to give speeches in honor of the anniversary. She pointed out that we were standing not far from the location of one of the largest of the slave auction “exchanges” in the city, where Chartres and St. Louis streets intersect. I walked over to that corner, but there was nothing there to denote its awful history. There was just a hotel there. There is an interesting essay by Richard Campanella of the Tulane School of Architecture about this absence of historical markers regarding slavery (I can't find the original article I saw, but here is another one in the link.)
I continued wandering, and eventually took refuge from the heat in a small café along [ ] street, where the kind and friendly proprietor/waitress gave me a large glass of ice water before bringing me the large glass of iced tea I ordered because, she said, “You look like you need this.” I was too grateful to wonder about how pathetic I must have looked. I ate a small bowl of her specialty bread pudding even though I was too hot to be hungry. I felt like I should order something, and I was curious about what was billed as a special, local way of making the bread pudding. It was delicious with a rum and raspberry sauce. The restaurant was near where the map I got from the campground office claimed I could get a tour bus. I knew there was no way I could go on walking in this heat, and the tour busses were supposed to be air-conditioned. I could not, however, find that particular company. I did find a tourist information/tourism agency that arranges those kinds of tours. Most of the tours were all full by that time, but the man running that agency found one with room for one more. It was worth the money.
The bus picked me up outside the agency and picked up other customers at different hotels and other tourism agencies. The driver was both entertaining and instructive. He took us all over the city, showing us all of the important buildings and sites. He stopped at one of the old cemeteries and took us for a walk through the streets of mausoleums, explaining the reasons why most of the dead are buried above ground like that. The extremely high water table prevents burying the dead underground unless they are in very strong, cement vaults, which some modern burial sites use. The dead “just come back up” was how our guide put it. Since most of New Orleans was Catholic, and Catholicism until fairly recently forbade cremation, the dead were buried above ground in various kinds of granite, marble or cement mausoleums or other above ground types of burials. MANY generations are often buried in the older mausoleums, from the 17th century up to the present. The ‘fresh’ body is place on top for a year and a day, then taken out and the bones are broken and put into a bag, then placed into the lower space with all of the other bones of the older dead.
We piled back onto the bus and went to City Park for a 20 minute break to use the rest rooms and eat something if we wished. City Park is larger than New York’s Central Park and includes restaurants, picnic areas, a botanical garden, carousel, and much more. It is about 160 years old. Then the driver took us on a tour of the areas hit the worst by Hurricane Katrina.
The city would have survived fairly well except that seven of the walls of the concrete canals collapsed. Ordinarily the canals push the water to Lake Pontchartrain then on to the Gulf. During Katrina, the opposite happened. Our guide claimed that levees held because they are built of earth covered with grass. Some of the newest canals had been built out of concrete, and those are what gave out. However, research shows that some of the levees did not hold, either. At one point the water was 13 feet high. He drove past a memorial to those who died in the storm. Half of it looks like a large red window and partial wall, which is supposed to commemorate all the houses that were destroyed, and the other half is a series of blue columns of different heights, from smallest to tallest, which represent the heights of the water at different sections of the city. We drove through various neighborhoods of the 9th and 7th wards which were hit the hardest. Many of the houses were demolished and never rebuilt. There are many lots with a concrete driveway and nothing else but weeds. There are also many houses and businesses that were never demolished but were left standing, rotting further. According to the guide, many of the homes had been passed down through families who didn’t bother getting titles or deeds because they didn’t understand the need or didn’t want to pay taxes. Consequently, they couldn’t prove they owned their homes and so couldn’t get FEMA or other government aid. However, the problems are much more complicated than that. Many people ran into serious problems with their insurance companies, among other unethical or just difficult situations. See this link for more information about that. We passed a house that still had all the markings from the search and rescue responders still scrawled on the door and front walls. The markings showed that they had found a body in that house. We passed by Fats Domino's house. According to our guide, he had been trapped in the attic but survived. Newspaper reports say he escaped to the roof and was rescued by boat from the roof. He has not renovated the house or returned to it. Next to his home is a house that he had turned into a museum dedicated to himself. That was fixed up. The house he lived in, next to the museum, however, has not been fixed up.
The entire area is sad and looks something from a war torn third world country. We drove by other areas that have been fixed up. Brad Pitt established an organization called Make It Right which has re-built a small community of homes using green technology to make them sustainable and affordable. They all have solar panels on the roofs. This seemed to impress our guide the most, that the owners no longer pay electric bills, and the electric company buys back any electricity generated by their panels that they don't use.
The bus driver dropped me off by the St. Louis Cathedral so I could get to the lot where our campground shuttle would pick us up. I had a little time, so I stopped into the Jackson Brewery bistro for something to eat. The entire menu was made up of seafood in the various New Orleans Cajun/Creole special style of cooking, so I ended up with just a small house salad, but a glass of good beer from the microbrewery. New Orleans is not a good place for vegetarians.
That night a storm blew in quickly. It was mostly wind with very little rain. It knocked out the power in the campground several times. My tent held, though, and it cooled the air down, so I didn't mind. I decided to leave for the Gulf Coast the next day since the city was getting more crowded with Fourth of July crowds, and I didn't want to deal with larger crowds and more of the intense, humid heat.
I survived the terrible, humid heat of the night before at the campground, mainly because I sat in the air-conditioned laundry room in the campground. I have a battery operated fan that I used in the tent, which also helped. Around 10:00 p.m. it started to cool off with a nice breeze. The KOA campground was very nice – clean with lots of clean toilets and showers. There was also a clean pool, too. The sites were a little too close though – I could hear every sound the people in the tent next to me made. I slept well on my air mattress until a passing train woke me up at 6:00 a.m. with its loud whistle/horn sounds. At 9:00 a.m., one of the KOA staff members drove our small group of about five adults, two children, and several teen-agers into the city. He took a scenic route and explained things about the places we passed. Much of the River Ridge and Metaire areas we drove through were once parts of plantations. They are now very large cities, though unincorporated and considered part of New Orleans. (The campground is in River Ridge.) There are a large number of suburban areas around the city. He dropped us off by the river levee in front of the St. Louis Cathedral. We went our separate ways; I walked over to Café du Monde, a very old and world famous café. It was extremely crowded, but surprisingly there was no line. As I walked in, a couple of people had just paid their bill and were leaving their table. I took the table. I had café au lait and beignets, which taste like funnel cakes, but they are square and thick. They are delicious. A group of four African-American musicians sat in folding chairs on the sidewalk outside the covered terrace of the café and played old jazz songs with a trumpet, trombone, clarinet, and a singer. It was like something I’d seen in a movie of New Orleans. I saw groups of street musicians singing and playing throughout the city, playing all kinds of music from jazz, to reggae, rock and roll, country, and even electronic New Age music.
I wandered around the French Quarter for about three hours. First I explored Jackson Square, which includes the St. Louis Cathedral, the oldest cathedral in America. It has a rich history (see the link here for more about that). There is a nice park in front of it with a fountain. On either side of it are the Presbytere and Cabildo, state museums, which look like city hall buildings for a German town. The square also includes the Pontalba Apartments, supposedly the oldest apartment buildings in the country. Now they are mostly shops and restaurants.
Then I walked and walked and walked up and down the various streets, photographing the French and Spanish style buildings with their balconies, columns, tall shutters, windows and doors. I found the old Ursuline Convent buildings and St. Mary’s church, which are connected. The convent was an orphanage and school for girls in the late 1700s. Eventually it was used as a hospital, and then as a residence for bishops.
Catholicism is the dominant religion in New Orleans, largely because of the Creole/Cajun history. Approximately 28% of the 90% Christian population in the state of Lousiana are Catholics, according to several different web sources (including Wikipedia, I confess, because there isn’t any current information about religion available yet in the 2010 census data). The rest are scattered into many different Protestant religions. There are at least 44 Catholic Churches in New Orleans, according to The Catholic Directory. That’s why the state is divided into parishes, instead of counties. I suppose you could consider voodoo the next dominant religion in the New Orleans area, though the voodoo shops all seem to be more tourist traps these days than anything serious.
Eventually I wandered onto Bourbon Street. It’s mostly bars, jazz night clubs, sex shops, and tourist kitsch shops. Much of it seemed seedy and dingy, but I suppose at night it would all look better, especially in the light of the gas lamps that illuminate the entire quarter. Many sections of the sidewalks are covered by the porches that stretch out beyond the second and sometimes third floors of the buildings. Gas lamps often hang from the middle of these ceilings, lighting up the sidewalks and streets below them. I found Jean Lafitte’s bar. It was just a bar with a theme – the building does clearly have history (see the link here), but I’m cynical about its claims to the pirate. That street in particular seems to be so commercialized that whatever history is real is buried under the glitz and grime.
I wandered back toward Jackson square, I thought, but never really made it back on my own. I passed the city’s Supreme Court building where a large press conference was about to begin. A woman standing on the steps watching the confusion of press microphones and cameras, as well as large groups of school children, explained to me that it was the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, and this press conference was one of many events going on around town. The Mayor, Mitch Landrieu, and other local leaders of the community were going to give speeches in honor of the anniversary. She pointed out that we were standing not far from the location of one of the largest of the slave auction “exchanges” in the city, where Chartres and St. Louis streets intersect. I walked over to that corner, but there was nothing there to denote its awful history. There was just a hotel there. There is an interesting essay by Richard Campanella of the Tulane School of Architecture about this absence of historical markers regarding slavery (I can't find the original article I saw, but here is another one in the link.)
I continued wandering, and eventually took refuge from the heat in a small café along [ ] street, where the kind and friendly proprietor/waitress gave me a large glass of ice water before bringing me the large glass of iced tea I ordered because, she said, “You look like you need this.” I was too grateful to wonder about how pathetic I must have looked. I ate a small bowl of her specialty bread pudding even though I was too hot to be hungry. I felt like I should order something, and I was curious about what was billed as a special, local way of making the bread pudding. It was delicious with a rum and raspberry sauce. The restaurant was near where the map I got from the campground office claimed I could get a tour bus. I knew there was no way I could go on walking in this heat, and the tour busses were supposed to be air-conditioned. I could not, however, find that particular company. I did find a tourist information/tourism agency that arranges those kinds of tours. Most of the tours were all full by that time, but the man running that agency found one with room for one more. It was worth the money.
The bus picked me up outside the agency and picked up other customers at different hotels and other tourism agencies. The driver was both entertaining and instructive. He took us all over the city, showing us all of the important buildings and sites. He stopped at one of the old cemeteries and took us for a walk through the streets of mausoleums, explaining the reasons why most of the dead are buried above ground like that. The extremely high water table prevents burying the dead underground unless they are in very strong, cement vaults, which some modern burial sites use. The dead “just come back up” was how our guide put it. Since most of New Orleans was Catholic, and Catholicism until fairly recently forbade cremation, the dead were buried above ground in various kinds of granite, marble or cement mausoleums or other above ground types of burials. MANY generations are often buried in the older mausoleums, from the 17th century up to the present. The ‘fresh’ body is place on top for a year and a day, then taken out and the bones are broken and put into a bag, then placed into the lower space with all of the other bones of the older dead.
We piled back onto the bus and went to City Park for a 20 minute break to use the rest rooms and eat something if we wished. City Park is larger than New York’s Central Park and includes restaurants, picnic areas, a botanical garden, carousel, and much more. It is about 160 years old. Then the driver took us on a tour of the areas hit the worst by Hurricane Katrina.
The city would have survived fairly well except that seven of the walls of the concrete canals collapsed. Ordinarily the canals push the water to Lake Pontchartrain then on to the Gulf. During Katrina, the opposite happened. Our guide claimed that levees held because they are built of earth covered with grass. Some of the newest canals had been built out of concrete, and those are what gave out. However, research shows that some of the levees did not hold, either. At one point the water was 13 feet high. He drove past a memorial to those who died in the storm. Half of it looks like a large red window and partial wall, which is supposed to commemorate all the houses that were destroyed, and the other half is a series of blue columns of different heights, from smallest to tallest, which represent the heights of the water at different sections of the city. We drove through various neighborhoods of the 9th and 7th wards which were hit the hardest. Many of the houses were demolished and never rebuilt. There are many lots with a concrete driveway and nothing else but weeds. There are also many houses and businesses that were never demolished but were left standing, rotting further. According to the guide, many of the homes had been passed down through families who didn’t bother getting titles or deeds because they didn’t understand the need or didn’t want to pay taxes. Consequently, they couldn’t prove they owned their homes and so couldn’t get FEMA or other government aid. However, the problems are much more complicated than that. Many people ran into serious problems with their insurance companies, among other unethical or just difficult situations. See this link for more information about that. We passed a house that still had all the markings from the search and rescue responders still scrawled on the door and front walls. The markings showed that they had found a body in that house. We passed by Fats Domino's house. According to our guide, he had been trapped in the attic but survived. Newspaper reports say he escaped to the roof and was rescued by boat from the roof. He has not renovated the house or returned to it. Next to his home is a house that he had turned into a museum dedicated to himself. That was fixed up. The house he lived in, next to the museum, however, has not been fixed up.
The entire area is sad and looks something from a war torn third world country. We drove by other areas that have been fixed up. Brad Pitt established an organization called Make It Right which has re-built a small community of homes using green technology to make them sustainable and affordable. They all have solar panels on the roofs. This seemed to impress our guide the most, that the owners no longer pay electric bills, and the electric company buys back any electricity generated by their panels that they don't use.
The bus driver dropped me off by the St. Louis Cathedral so I could get to the lot where our campground shuttle would pick us up. I had a little time, so I stopped into the Jackson Brewery bistro for something to eat. The entire menu was made up of seafood in the various New Orleans Cajun/Creole special style of cooking, so I ended up with just a small house salad, but a glass of good beer from the microbrewery. New Orleans is not a good place for vegetarians.
That night a storm blew in quickly. It was mostly wind with very little rain. It knocked out the power in the campground several times. My tent held, though, and it cooled the air down, so I didn't mind. I decided to leave for the Gulf Coast the next day since the city was getting more crowded with Fourth of July crowds, and I didn't want to deal with larger crowds and more of the intense, humid heat.