Curiouser and curiouser
I go to New Orleans without an agenda but with a good pair of walking shoes
New Orleans is one of my favorite cities on the planet and the only one I make a point of visiting on a regular basis. Eight or ten years ago, I was looking for a long-weekend March getaway to someplace warm after a particularly punishing northern winter, and I stumbled across a low airfare to NOLA. Perfect, I thought, after checking the weather report. Sunny, 70s, and not crazy humid yet. I had been there for a couple of conferences, one before Katrina (or The Storm, as the locals call it) and one after, but those had both been in June, when the air is already thick and sticky. I flew down with no plan but food, music, and shirtsleeves.
The night I arrived, I found a piece of a newspaper on the bar of my hotel that advertised the Stella-yelling contest to be held on Jackson Square in the heart of the French Quarter the next day. It was the closing event of the weeklong Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, and it’s exactly what it says on the can: 25 first-to-sign-up contestants (no fee to enter), three yells each, judging, prizes for the winners. The idea is to take your shot at emulating Marlon Brando’s iconic wailing as Stanley Kowalski in Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which was both written and set in New Orleans.
A big crowd gathers, with children and dogs and neighbors greeting one another—and of course the signature portable booze—and it’s just typical NOLA bonkers. There is always some kind of party going on in town, whether it’s a parade or a festival or random tourists and suburbanites screaming at an actress in a slip on a balcony, and whatever’s happening is almost always quirky, unique, elaborate, melodious, slightly drunk, and/or colorful. If you walk into the Quarter and can’t locate the party, you can either look for it or wait for it to come to you. You will almost certainly be successful either way.
That whole initial Stella experience worked out so well for me—there was a also a Road Food Festival a couple of blocks away, providing my first taste of alligator (meh)—that I started coming back at the same time every year. The last time I attended the contest, I got chatting with a newly engaged young man from the Midwest who had brought his sweetheart down to New Orleans to propose (NOLA is crazy romantic if you dress for the weather and stay off Bourbon Street); he entered the contest and won, and the bride-to-be and I cheered him on. “See you next year!” we told each other as we parted after his victory.
It was March 2019. I didn’t go back to New Orleans for four years, and this year I didn’t make it to the contest. I hope they’re OK.
But the point I’m working my way toward making—and I knew when I started typing that I would have to do several newsletters about NOLA, because I can’t begin to do it justice in just one entry—is that this is a city that richly rewards a sparse agenda paired with an open mind, a sense of adventure, and some really good walking shoes. Start with recommendations or Google results, and fill in with pure exploration. Go where people you know had some bons temps, but laissez them rouler wherever else you may find them—don’t go only where other people suggest you go. And for going farther afield than around the Quarter, you will be well served by getting Le Pass in ticket or app form.
If you read my newsletter about Brooklyn, you know that I’m a huge fan of getting around unfamiliar cities by scoring a short-term transit pass as soon as I get into town. They’re usually inexpensive, and they increasingly live virtually on your phone instead of in your purse or wallet or back pocket in paper pass form, vulnerable to theft, laundry, escape, and coffee or absinthe spills.
I was on foot when I explored past Frenchmen Street, the locus of jazz clubs beyond the Quarter in Marigny, and discovered the house with Alice outgrowing it pictured at top. The café recommended to me was inexplicably closed, so I whipped out my phone and hit up Yelp for an alternate nearby recommendation. I found Alice on my way there, the most arresting artistic adornment in a neighborhood full of beautiful and quirky homes.
I gave my feet a rest a couple of days later, using the 7-day Jazzy Pass I had purchased for my phone to ride through town on the St. Charles streetcar, which goes from Canal Street through the Garden District, a very gracious Old-South-looking neighborhood bordering on Audubon Park, home of the Audubon Zoo. I took advantage of a cool and cloudy day to enjoy the park and stroll around the zoo. It was late in the day and attendance was sparse, so I had the jaguar pictured above all to myself for a few minutes. I met a nice dog in the park and had a longish chat with her nice owner about canine behavior, and I stopped along the streetcar line for a cocktail at swanky The Columns and to explore the boutiques along Magazine Street in the Lower Garden District.
The Jazzy Pass is the New Orleans Rapid Transit Authority's transit pass, and it’s available in 1-, 3-, 7-, and 31-day denominations. It lets you ride all the city buses and streetcars, though not the Jefferson Parish Transit (JET) buses that go out to the suburbs and airport. NORTA has only just recently launched Le Pass, which is the app version of the Jazzy Pass. You upload the app to your smartphone, choose which length of pass you want, buy it, and then you just show the pass on the screen of your phone to the driver when you board. The app also has scheduling and route information, so the $15 I paid for a 7-day pass pretty much put the city in my pocket. I love riding the streetcars (I have buses at home, but streetcars feel very European to me). The Canal Street ones are merely slow, but the St. Charles ones have the added attraction of being quite elderly and sounding as if they will shake themselves to pieces at any moment.
I do have to admit, if I’m completely honest, that my most recent visit gave me some concerns about the health of the city. I think the pandemic and drug crises hit New Orleans hard, and it’s struggling to recover. Sure, it’s a Southern city with substantial poverty and homelessness, and the French Quarter has always been an anything-goes kind of place where you might see behavior of questionable legality or wisdom at all hours of the day and particularly of the night. There have also been warnings about keeping your wits and wallet about you since I can remember, because any populated area that contains both poverty (and/or drug use) and tourists is going to have opportunistic petty thievery. And given what goes on at Mardi Gras, don’t even get me started about sexual harassment. Thank heavens I’m getting too old for that now.
But I am now passing into a new vulnerable demographic, Pasty Wandering Middle-Aged Lady With Money To Spend, and it’s like I’ve got a target on my forehead. Not only panhandlers but super-insistent and nosey salesmen lurking in doorways pick me out from half a block away as someone unlikely to reply to a hyperfriendly greeting with “Piss off!” One of them on Royal Street pushed a sample packet into my hand and tried to take me down verbally like a lion tripping a slow gazelle; when I finally extricated myself and took off, I could hear him calling “Honey? Honey!” until I was into the next block. This never used to happen.
Other changes are visible and audible around the Quarter too, like the ubiquitous scent of weed, the roaring flocks of motorbikes in the street drowning out the music in the clubs, and the sheer number of lost souls behaving strangely, slumped in doorways, or simply passed out flat on the sidewalk. I also noticed many more “for sale” signs than usual in the Quarter, hung on both residential and business properties. I fear times have been hard for this beautiful city and its welcoming people.
Despite all that, it is still overflowing with music, art, food, and joyful weirdness in a way that makes it unique in this country and probably in the world. I hope better times are ahead. But whether you take ghost and cemetery tours, hit the jazz clubs till the wee hours, or shop for a new hat, painting, or Creole cookbook, you’ll always encounter some surprising new sound or sight or smell around the next corner. And that’s what calls me back.
And oh yeah … I have some specific things to say about food, booze, and restaurants. Next time.