Days 46-49: New Orleans

Days 45-49: New Orleans

At last we arrived at our final destination: New Orleans. Lying between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, the reputation of this sizeable city has of course, been tarnished by the dreadful after-effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  However there is far more to New Orleans than Katrina.  It has a fascinating cultural history, it is the home of jazz, played a major role in the American Civil War and is the home to Mardi Gras.

Our hotel was the Sheraton and, like all the hotels we have had on both organised coach tours, it was right in the heart of the city.  This time we were on Canal St, the road dividing  the modern city and the French Quarter. Our literally floor to ceiling window from the 30^th floor looked straight down to the street – quite unnerving!

  With New Orleans being the home town of the great ‘Sachmo’ Louis Armstrong, how appropriate it is for our hotel to have this great sculpture of him.

What an interesting city New Orleans is.  It is a true melting pot of peoples of many nations and cultures, brought together by political buying and swapping over time.

The first people in the area were the Natchez Indians before the French came and imposed their laws, customs and system of government. The city was laid out by a nineteen-year-old military man, Bienville.  He had been sent from France, together with his older brother but the brother died on the way.  Bienville then took on the task alone, setting out the city in French military style, with a parade ground at the centre.  This parade ground is now Jackson Square named for General Andrew ‘Stonewall’ Jackson.

During the late 1700s, French immigrants heading to Louisiana stopped on the way in Haiti to find slaves to bring with them.  They were offered free coloured people to be purchased under contract.  Thus is was that many of the teachers, doctors and tradesmen in New Orleans, although of African descent, were free people.  Many of them had slaves of their own.

The city was then taken over by the Spanish, bringing a Spanish population and customs.  To enforce Spanish law, an general of Irish descent, by the name of Alejandro O’Riely was engaged and so Irish began to populate the city.

So it was that, with the inhabitants being of French, Spanish or Irish descent, all were Catholic and all spoke French.  No surprise then, that the fleur-de-lis is seen prolifically throughout the city. Apparently it had gained new momentum since Katrina as a symbol of rebirth.

In 1803, Spain gave the city back to France but then Napoleon sold it as part of the Louisana Purchase.  Costing the USA $15 million, the funds for the purchase were borrowed from the Bank of England – ironically for a transaction designed to keep the British out!

New Orleans has red trams (called street cars)….

   ….and green street cars.  Made in Melbourne – yes our Melbourne- these ones are on the National Historical Register.

City Park in New Orleans is, in area, larger than Central Park in New York. It houses an excellent botanical garden and also a sculpture garden.  Following Hurricane Katrina many of the trees were threatened because they had been exposed to a mixture of fresh water and salt water.  Arborists from all over the world volunteered their time and skills to make an inventory of which trees could be saved and which would need replacing.  In all, more than two thousand trees needed to be replaced.

Cuisine in New Orleans is commonly ‘creole’ cuisine.  This was explained to us as a combination of all the different cuisines from the contributing cultures.  It is stew type of food, cooked in a large pot and typically served in small portions.

We spent time in the French market –opened since 1791.  Reminiscent of Victoria Market, there is much Chinese junk sold there. However, there is also, if you look for it, hand crafted jewellery also.  I delighted in picking up one pair of earrings made from recycled paper and another pair from recycled vinyl records.

With the maker of special earrings I bought for Terrie

Of course, we spent much time in the famed French Quarter.

External staircases very common in the French Quarter

1215

While Chartres St has quality jewellery shops, …

Royal St has some wonderful art galleries

1373

Jackson Square, in the centre of the French quarter, was originally a parade ground.  At its head stands beautiful St Louis Cathedral.   Now beautiful parkland, people gather around its perimeter to play music, sell artwork, tell fortunes etc. 

There is a huge fortune telling and voodoo presence in New Orleans. Apparently this stems from its Caribbean heritage.

Carriage rides through the French Quarter start at Jackson Square

Jackson Square is named for General Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle for New Orleans.  




Along with other excellent museums, I spent a wonderful 2.5 hours in one in the former Courthouse.

0571  Napoleon’s death mask is a reminder of the French heritage

Free black people from St Dominique - there were around 100 of them in New Orleans

   

Depiction of the 1803 cessation of Louisiana from France to USA.

Earliest known photograph of a Louisiana musician (1850)

The Battle for New Orleans

It seems that well after they had lost America in the War of Independence, Britain kept niggling at North America. In 1812 they were at war again.  The final battle that war was the Battle for New Orleans, a month-long battle ending in January 1815.  Once again we see a rag-tag disorganised US army of 3,500 regular soldiers, frontiersmen, free people of colour, volunteers and Indians soundly defeating a well regimented British force, preventing the loss of all the land they had bought from France in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.  Major Andrew Jackson was the hero of that war. The British had intelligence that the US forces were ill-prepared to defend New Orleans but Jackson’s tactics were to outsmart them.   The US forces suffered only seventy-one casualties in total (dead, wounded and missing) while the British casualties were around two thousand.

Huge Eugene Lami 1839 painting of the 1814-15 Battle for New Orleans. Occupying an entire wall of the museum, the painting measures around 8m x3m.

The left half of Lami’s wonderful painting of the 1814-15 Battle for New Orleans. This half mostly depicts the British troops …

 …while this is the depiction of the makeshift US troops.

The War of 1812, while unknown to those of us who have not studied North American history, is, in some circles, considered second only to the American War of Independence.  It has been immortalised on film and in song.

Here’s Johnny Horton’S 1959 song, well familiar to me as a teenager

Movies such as Cecile B. de Mille’s 1939s ‘The Buccaneer’ and  immortalises the relatively small contribution to the victory by pirate Jean Lafitte

In innovative version of a living statue on the banks of the Mississippi River

Yes,we are in the south so some public Trump support is inevitable

Along with jazz, what New Orleans is probably best known for is Mardi Gras. There is an excellent museum dedicated solely to Mardi Gras – its history, its development, the costumes the balls etc. Intending to spend only a short time in the museum, I found that it just went on and on and it easily consumed ninety minutes of my day. 

It is common to see trees hung with coloured beads around the city.  This is custom is obviously a nod to both the Mardi Gras, where strings of coloured beads are thrown from the floats, and the Spanish Moss that drapes the trees in southern parts of the US.

On a wide street feeding into the city centre are many wonderful Antebellum homes.  I went for a street car ride on our last morning in order to photograph some of them.

Here we again see Resurrection Fern, that we had previously seen in Savannah, Georgia.  This parasite lies along the branches of the oak trees, appearing as a dead mass of leaves and branches until a fall of rain causes it to spring into fresh green life.

But not all experience the fun and luxury of New Orleans.  We were shocked to see the amount of homelessness, particularly amongst the large veteran population.  Here, a woman on patrol checks up on one of the dozens of people lying around on the pavement during the hot afternoon.

It is not only the homeless bedding down for the night that brings shock to the senses.  It is the number of people lying helpless in the hot sun in and on a pile of stinking rags. It is the countless number of those with just a stump for a leg, sitting at street corners asking for compassion.  Of course, the urge to help is strong and I could do little except buy lunch parcels for a few and hope that others might do the same. 

Is poverty worse, I wonder, since Hurricane Katrina, or has New Orleans been a forgotten city, always with a high percentage of poverty and homelessness?  That, of course, is the subject of more research than I currently have time to conduct.

Hurricane Katrina

The hurricane hit in the heat of August in 2005. But it was not the power of the hurricane that caused the major devastation, but the failure of the levee banks holding back the waters of the Mississippi (and I guess Lake Pontchartrain).  Our local guide told us that 80% of the city was under 4 ft of water.  All communication was lost and so families could not check on each other’s welfare for days.  She said that when people did meet up the questions was not ‘did you get flooded?’ but ‘how high did the water come in your house?’

Immediately after the storm, the population dropped from 482,000 to just 150,000.  It has now gone back to 305,000.  There was a dilemma for the education system – do you rebuild schools for a population that may never come back?  The result is now a series of centralized schools and there is now a requirement to deliver a higher standard of education.

She told us of the trap many who wanted to rebuild their homes were caught in.  The insurance companies would not pay out until the underpinning of a house was repaired and the house was level.  Because this is such a costly exercise, many could not afford to do it and so they could not claim insurance and subsequently rebuild.

Apparently, many homes that have been restored have been bought by younger people with the income to be able to do so.  Many have been beautifully restored to be historically correct.

Although our local guide was very informative about Hurricane Katrina, she said very little about the evacuations to the Superdome and the subsequent disaster that turned out to be.  It was not until I visited the museum that is dedicated to Hurricane Katrina that the memories of horror came flooding back: the despair, the looting, the abandonment by the rest of the world. I was reminded of some words I penned at the time in response to my horror of the situation:

 

On New Orleans

We are immune now –

Another disaster, another country

News for a moment

Then forgotten

But no – this is different

What’s that I hear?

A whole city trying to flee

From the impending disaster

Not just any city –

Not a third world city

People of a different language,

A different lifestyle

This is New Orleans-

A city of our culture

Our language

Somehow that makes it different.

Katrina hits and we assume

That all is now well.

Many got away

And those who stayed

found shelter in the superdome.

How oblivious we are

To the fragility of the line

between

The third world and our world.

In Katrina’s wake

the line becomes muddied

Suddenly it’s us under siege-

people are starving, dehydrated, dying

‘God help us!’ we hear their desperate cry

Why have we been deserted?

Deserted they are-

left to rot in their gulf hell hole.

Aid is slow in coming

Food and water gone

temperatures rise – the ambient

and the emotional

Desperation surges

And with it the looting,

raping, terrorism in the streets

They cower, huddled together

against the enemy

that only last week

was dressed in decency

A first world city-

How easily it has slipped

into that third world indecency

that now seems so much closer.

Miriam Peck

September 2005

‘Fats’ Domino’s piano lies just as it was found when the waters receded.

Resident Tommie Mabry was forced to evacuate his home in which he had shelterd during the storm and subsequent to it.  He had diarized his experience on the walls of his house.

 This was the sort of scene that reached our TV screens.

Humanity Street is one of a cluster of streets with similarly ironic names: Abundance, Pleasure, Treasure, Benefit.

This guy wrote his details on his jeans incase his lifeless or unconscious body should be found.

We went on a lunch cruise on the last true paddle steamer still working on the Mississippi. The width the Mississippi is astounding.  It makes the Murray River look like a creek!

  

Here, for the third time, we caught up with the American Queen

 

A smaller paddle steamer on the Mississippi

The width and depth of the Mississippi was astounding!

The aspect of New Orleans that we were most looking forward to was the jazz.  We were told that we must not miss Preservation Hall, a venue that has hosted live jazz every night since 1961.  At least three shows are held each night and we were warned that we would need to line up to get tickets.

 Preservation Hall

The warning to line up was well given.  For the 6pm show, we were way back with no chance to get in, so we took turns to stand in line for 2.5 hours.

These are the faces of two happy people at the head of the queue for the 9pm show.

This is it – the very grungy interior of Preservation Hall

But the jazz didn’t disappoint. This photo is from the internet because photography is absolutely forbidden once the show gets underway.

http://www.greatamericanthings.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/PH-by-Britannicadotcom.jpg

In pursuit of more great music, the next night we went to see dueling pianos.  It was a great experience.

The huge wall mirrors behind the pianos gave us a great view of the keyboards. 

But the best musical treat of them all was this street band, Tuba Skinny.  We came across them playing in the entry of a shop at about 11pm.  We stood spellbound while they played traditional jazz.  What a great end this impromptu concert was to our seven-week American extravaganza!
(This is another internet photo because although I took extensive video, neither of us thought to take a photo of them.)