New Orleans is America’s most intriguing city. There as elsewhere, waves of newcomers have arrived bled by warfare, economic ruin, or flight from discrimination. But where else than at the mouth of the Mississippi River does a divided America separate only by geography? Millions relax together each year in the Big Easy. No place else feels so authentically different from America.
It’s the home of jazz, the archetype for culinary travel, a magnet for creative types born to the womb or bred to the lure: John James Audubon, Jon Batiste, Truman Capote, Kate Chopin, Edgar Degas, Ellen de Generis, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams.
Where else sends off the deceased with a brass band that might play Nearer My God to Thee on its way to burial grounds, but return Dixieland-style performing When the Saints Go Marching In? Or at Mardi Gras parades where krewes toss Moon Pies?
Where else does a city rename its airport for a reform school kid? In 2001 the city added a prefix sharp as a cornet riff to New Orleans International: “Louis Armstrong” on the anniversary of Satchmo’s 100th birthday.
How did this come to pass?
Waves of European and African settlers built the city, some already having attempted settlements elsewhere in the New World. Hardship marked their migrations that caused many deaths before one group after another was welcomed by the small French community that had formed after the explorers Jacques Cartier in the 16th century and René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle in 1682 made sweeping claims of French dominion over La Louisiane. Germans straggled in after an attempted settlement in Biloxi in 1721.
But when England defeated France in the mid-18th century’s Seven Years’ War, French migrants from the Province of Acadia who had already fled for better lives to the Canadian Maritimes found themselves on the losing side. British Canada expelled them. Many relocated to Saint-Domingue (today’s Hispaniola), which was a rich French colony. However, after Toussaint L’Ouverture defeated Napoleon’s army and achieved independence for Haiti in 1803, France, in revolutionary turmoil, accepted Jefferson’s offer of $15 million for the 530 million-acre Louisiana Purchase.
Acadians became Cajuns. They held political power.
They welcomed a surge of white slaveowners with their enslaved Africans and freedmen of color to turn New Orleans into a great American port. Political unrest throughout Central Europe during the 1840s sent Jews to the city. Irish fled the potato famine. The city welcomed Venezuelan revolutionaries fearful that a weakened Spain in Cuba might be anxious about a next Haitian revolution that would end slavery there, which many Louisianans favored.
According to the New Orleans Historic Collection, “New Orleans grew from less than 10,000 in 1800 to over 150,000 by 1860. In the 1840s, New Orleans was second only to New York City in the number of immigrants, and by 1850 more than 50 percent of New Orleans’ population was foreign-born.” They contributed mightily to the city’s cosmopolitan culture. Germans introduced their Octoberfest, breweries that replaced expensive French wines with affordable Old World brews, their Deutsche Haus cultural center; Jews, their love for merchant commerce and learning.
The Irish introduced ubiquitous neighborhood pubs and a roisterous St. Patrick’s Day Parade on high ground beside the big bend of the river through the city named the Irish Channel, where it became the enclave of the working class from everywhere. By the 1960s, Blacks occupied the district that has since become well-off and popular with residents and visitors alike.
Joined by the looming Mississippi
No feature more fully defined life than a silt-risen river looming almost six feet above the city it rims, protected by a system of diversions, dredging, and levees viewed warily. Even in good weather, the river menaces its urban floodplain where no one lives unaware of the Great Flood of 1927 that caused 500 deaths, left more than 700,000 homeless, and economic loss estimated up to $17 billion.
Yet the city or its environs has overflowed seven more times since then, most recently in 2005 when flooding from Hurricane Katrina caused some 1,800 deaths, millions left homeless along the Gulf Coast and in the city, and economic loss estimates that topped $150 billion.
While New Orleans may be ancestral for only a few of America’s nearly 340 million, our visits tap roots that, once experienced, branch our own attachments.
French Impressionist Degas painted a successful city for his countrymen when he visited his mother, whose family had fled Haiti, for five months late in 1872. His paintings were a sensation in France.
New Orleans became a worldwide destination for leisure travel in 1884 when the World’s Industrial & Cotton Centennial Exposition opened and has remained so.
The destination marketing organization, New Orleans & Company, says, “[I]ts heart will always keep a French beat. French words such as Lagniappe (meaning something extra, a bonus) and expressions such as laissez les bon temps rouler (let the good times roll) are entrenched in our speech. Many street names are French — Bienville, Iberville, and streets of course, Bourbon — and we live on French bread in our po-boys. . . [T]he French influence on our cooking is vast. We celebrate Bastille Day like natives and made Mardi Gras our own.”
New Orleans’ “striking competitive advantage”
So writes Nathaniel Rich in The New York Times about the great advantage earned for tourism by its people who don’t accept climate change passively. It’s resilience bred to the bone. State and city plans draw on scientific research from more than a century.
He writes that the genius of the Coastal Master Plan, Louisiana’s grand unified theory of coastal restoration, land creation and retreat, developed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. . . is its honesty.”
He tells of “irreversible tipping points” already documented in a Tulane University study. Of a Times-Picayune headline” that blared, ‘We’re Screwed.”
He accepts that every hurricane is existential, that flooding will become annual, and comparisons between the lives of cities and the lives of humans, except that the city will survive as an island 35 miles out in a surrounding Gulf of Mexico.
“Other major American cities don’t talk like this. Other cities don’t live like this. But one morning, not very long from now, they will. On that morning, everyone will be a New Orleanian.” For 15 years he has been one. He writes:
In New Orleans, “You become your own disaster planner, insurance adjuster, land surveyor and roofer. You know how many feet your neighborhood is above or below sea level, which storm drain on the block must be cleared by hand before the rain starts, which door sill needs to be bolstered with a rolled-up towel and where water is most likely to pool, with what appalling consequences. . .
“Most New Orleanians. . . have three plans: one if the storm lands to the east, one if to the west and a third if the evacuation lasts longer than a week. We don’t wait for a tropical storm to form. We track every depression and cyclone advisory with grim scrutiny. There are storm shutters on every window, a hammer in the attic, candles and matches and gallons of bottled water in the pantry. Local news organizations track how many of the city’s drainage pumps, steam and combustion turbine generators and frequency changers are operational at any given time. We are as prepared as anyone can be with the certain knowledge that one day a storm will come for which no preparations will be sufficient. . . But it does not mean blindly submitting to fate. . .“
These are the creative people of America’s most creative city. These are the people every visitor wants to meet. New Orleans & Company doesn’t yet think so.
