Making music in New Orleans's French Quarter its beautiful

Making music in New Orleans's French Quarter

Making music in New Orleans's French Quarter:: New Orleans (Louisiana): Whatever is exotic, even sinful in the popular image of the South stems in large part from this port town at the mouth of the Mississippi River. In New Orleans, the jazz that grew up in its brothels and steamy saloons is still hot, and the Creole cooking brought from the West Indies by the old French and Spanish settlers even hotter. You'll find them both in the French Quarter. And if the elegant decadence of the antebellum aristocracy is at best a whispered legend handed down to a few strutting diehards, take a look at their granddaddies' splendid Greek Revival townhouses in the Garden District and you'll see what a proud world they inhabited. August 2005 saw around 80 percent of New Orleans submerged by floodwaters, following the damage to the defensive levees caused by Hurricane Katrina. However, much of what makes New Orleans unique was untouched (the French Quarter and the Garden District, is the oldest parts of New Orleans, are located on high ground,) and the spirit of the city remains intact.

Making music in New Orleans's

New Orleans is well known for its great Mardi Gras carnival (usually February or March), so successful that the city fathers are now turning every imaginable occasion- Halloween, St Patrick's Day, the arrival of spring or summer into another festival, however hot and humid it may get. The city loves parades, but if they haven't found an excuse for one when you're visiting, you'll still find a public party going on somewhere, and with all the trumpets and trombones blowing full blast, it won't be hard to find.

Mardi Gras

• Shrove Tuesday, the British call it, but people in the United States use the French and know it as 'Fat Tuesday,' a last hedonistic fling before Lenten austerity. It's New Orleans's great moment of madness, bringing thousands of revelers to be sure to book your hotel room well in advance for the parade of floats down St Charles Avenue, and others throughout the city. The King of Rex, the star of the main and most popular parade, is a local businessman, while the King of Bacchus, whose parade is two days earlier, is always a celebrity.
• Private masked balls start on Twelfth Night (January 6), and the parades start 11 days before Mardi Gras. Although Mardi Gras takes place in February or early March, the weather is usually delightfully balmy.

Making music in New Orleans's

French Quarter: Known locally as the Vieux Carré (Old Square), this is the historic heart of town, bounded by Canal and Rampart streets, Esplanade Avenue, and the Mississippi River. Great fires in 1788 and 1794 destroyed over 1,000 houses in the quarter, but rebuilding in the 19th century produced the two- and three-story houses with filigreed wrought-iron galleries that we see today.

Start at Jackson Square, where, around the statue of General Andrew Jackson, there is bustle all day long with magicians, balloon-vendors, and assorted eccentrics sporting strange costumes. Flanking the cathedral are two handsome relics of the colonial era- the Cabildo, originally a police station and later the City Hall, and the Presbytère, priests' the residence that became a courthouse. They are now part of
the Louisiana State Museum (tel: 504-568-6968; Http:// louisianastatemuseum.org). The Cabildo's exhibits tell the often the exciting history of trade on the Mississippi, while the Presbytère houses cultural displays that aptly illustrate the area's rich history through the use of photographs and maps.
St Louis Cathedral is an 1851 restoration of the 18th- century church of the French Catholic diocese, more famous for the duels in its garden than for its architecture. Around the square are the elegant rows of the Pontalba Buildings, with wrought-ironwork on the upper-story galleries.

Making music in New Orleans's

Walk down Dumaine Street past Madame John's Legacy, a preserved French colonial cottage, to Royal Street, one of the most gracious in the quarter, awash with high-class antiques shops. To the right, at 1132 Royal Street, the Gallier House (a combined ticket allows to visit also Hermann-Grima house on 820 Saint Louis Street; www.hgghh.org), named after its architect, James Gallier is open to the public. It has been restored to its original 1857 condition, and if you walk out on the wrought-iron balcony you get a view of the neighborhood's old tranquillity. This is an intellectual respite before venturing out to attack the hurly-burly of Bourbon Street's saloons.

If you want to save Bourbon Street till night, hop aboard one of the modern riverfront streetcars for a ride along the Mississippi. A Streetcar Named Desire, the play by Tennessee Williams, made this type of local transportation famous. Desire is, in fact, the name of a street a dozen or so blocks east of here, and that streetcar doesn't run anymore, but you can take a St Charles Avenue streetcar through the Garden District and back starting from Carondelet at Canal. Locals, as well as tourists, hop on and off these eco-friendly vehicles all day long.

Making music in New Orleans's

All that jazz

• Cotton is no longer king, but jazz has returned to its throne in New Orleans. The once disreputable music is now officially honored in Louis Armstrong Park on the edge of the French Quarter, and at the New Orleans Jazz National Historic Park; visit the Visitor Center (in the quarter, past Café du Monde) to find out who's playing where. The fabulous New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is one of the largest music festivals in the world (last weekend in April and the first weekend in May).
• Jazz began at the end of the 19th century when African-American marching bands played for every social event, especially funerals, and swung all the way home, stopping in at bars and dance halls along the way. Today the action is on Bourbon, Decatur, and Frenchmen streets, shaking that rhythm more loudly than ever.

Back in the quarter and close to the waterfront is the French Market. Here boutiques and souvenir shops segue into a covered produce and condiment market, alternating with many open-air restaurants providing the theme music of New Orleans- live jazz. The ever-popular 24-hour Café du Monde (www.cafedumonde.com) serves delicious café au lait and beignets (doughnuts), on a very Gallic terrace. The Riverwalk (www.riverwalkneworleans.com), on the site of the 1984 World's Fair (another side of Canal Street), is a fine mall complex right on the river.

Making music in New Orleans's

Garden District: Southwest of the French Quarter, bordered by Magazine Street and Louisiana, St Charles, and Jackson avenues, is the Garden District. This is where the new American cotton and sugar aristocracy built their townhouses after the Louisiana Purchase, while the Creoles stayed on in the Vieux Carré. Surrounded by gardens of magnolias, oaks, and palm trees, the mansions (most not open to the public) rival outlying plantation homes. There are some particularly fine examples along Prytania Street.
The district's golden era ended with the double blow of the Civil War and the elimination of the Mississippi steamboat trade by the railroads. Paddlesteamers still offer river tours, starting from the Canal Street docks. Most of the cruises take you past Chalmette National Historical Park (also an easy 10-mile/16km drive southeast on Route 46; www.nps.gov/jela/chalmette-battlefield.htm). Andrew Jackson's crushing victory here over the British in 1815 in the Battle of New Orleans came after a peace treaty had been signed, but it was enough to give him the national fame that won him the White House 14 years later.
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