NOLA

I love cities that are of themselves: they have accepted who they are, they embrace themselves, and they make no apologies.

Enter New Orleans.

Our hotel was in the Warehouse District. Walk out the front door of the Hilton Garden Inn, and to your right is an interstate flyover. And some warehouses. To your left is a dive bar, with yummy po-boys and beans and rice, where you will share a lunch table with strangers.

Walk towards the river and you’ll find the convention center and the elongated but air-conditioned Riverwalk Mall. Walk away from the river and you’ll find buildings that, according to the flaking advertisements painted on their great masonry walls, housed durable goods in a past life. The behemoths have recently been resurrected and divided into homes for hipsters. Continue walking and you can look through the windows of art studios and galleries, and the posh World War II museum.

Walk from the hotel to the French Quarter. You’ll smile at your reflection in the glass storefronts of banks, offices, and restaurants that are only open for lunch Monday through Friday as you pass through the Central Business District. Museums, Harrah’s Casino, and signs pointing to the Aquarium greet you on Canal Street as you navigate the streetcar tracks. Fortune-tellers, street artists, musicians, and performers fill the streets around Jackson Square. Boutiques, galleries, restaurants, and coffee shops fill the first story windows of the streets of the French Quarter. Shuttered windows behind porches full of greenery mark the second-story residences. You will pass churches and a convent. The doors and windows of Bourbon Street open up at night, illuminated by the neon signs and the promise of entertainment. Later, music will spill out, either from karaoke or a cover band. (They say to go to Frenchmen Street for jazz.) Grocery stores sell food for the residents, and the permanent half of the French Market displays local produce and food stalls. Local “arts and crafts” fill the tables of the flea market in the back half.

You won’t really remember the smell of the city, because your nose goes a little numb. Fish, piss, river, beignets and coffee all schmooze together with the humidity.

Hop the Canal Street streetcar line. Ride it out of the city center, towards the SuperDome. Remember Hurricane Katrina, and realize that until now there has been no other reminder of her…

Note that only tourists use the public transportation. Also note that the timetables are whimsical suggestions, assuming that you can actually locate one. Tourists mustn’t have deadlines or people to meet. Those tourists must have somewhere else to be.

Continue to City Park. En route, see the boarded up storefronts, the well-maintained employment office, and the faces staring up at the tourists riding the streetcar. You may witness some New Orleans natives actually enter the car and sit near you, distant from the French Quarter. If you’re lucky, someone might hand you a poem to read while you pass the time screeching along the track. Once you reach the end of the line and enter the park, appreciate the groomed botanic gardens, the resident rooster, the misplaced Japanese Garden (at least the weather is authentic), and the soggy cacti. Enjoy the sculpture garden, and consider visiting the art museum.

Ride another streetcar down Saint Charles Street. The trees and cast iron balconies are draped in strings of plastic Mardi Gras beads. Tangles of them. Webs of them.

The Garden District does actually have a coffee shop and a restaurant. You can walk past both of them if you like, so that you can stop and stare at historic homes. Huge houses with iron lace curtains adorning the porches and doorways, with great cast iron fences, with stained glass windows, with gilt details, with mature trees and flowering bushes, with letter boxes and lion’s head door knockers. The corresponding grocery stores and luncheries are on Magazine Street. If you head that direction, you will pass through the neighboring neighborhoods, where people drive Fords and keep Mother Mary statues in their front yards. The houses are no less colorful and much less shuttered. You might be lucky enough to say hello to a man as he “walks” his half-paralyzed dog, or an elderly woman as she carefully tends her front gate. You may see a Victorian home peeled back as it ages, displaying the layers of roofing and siding and broken windows that frame the heavy old door. As you pass a decrepit old masonry building with fascinating detailing, you will realize that it is not abandoned when you turn the corner and spot the new Free School sign behind a freshly painted fence.

Cemetery walls enclose forgotten tombs where a pile of bricks that was once a wall and marker hugs the exposed steel vault, a mere foot away from an immaculate granite mausoleum fronted by a weeping angel that evokes a requiem and breaks your heart. Stillborn children and toddlers share gravesites with their great-great grandparents. The magnolia trees shade a piece of broken wall, where the mason’s initials have been exposed in the formerly hidden mortar.

New Orleans wears its dichotomies on its sleeve: the rich and poor living and socializing just a hair’s breadth apart, the clean and the dirty separated by a street corner, the tourist brushing the shoulder of a local, the impermanence and perseverance. Sailors, traders, soldiers, clergy, criminals. The spirits are still there to see and to hear. You can almost perceive the ghosts, as you tread the same paths and feel the same desires. Work hard, play hard, witness and partake in the spectacle. Live.

And then place your luggage in the back of a cab. The cabbie will check his log, and ask you to guess how long he has been waiting at the cab stand in front of the hotel…almost three hours. He is quite happy to take you to the airport, where you can enjoy a warm beer and wait for United to take you home.