New Orleans: America’s capital of culture

05/12/2024

Ethan Attwood explores the music, culture and food of the famous New Orleans, Louisiana.

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Image by Ethan Attwood

By Ethan Attwood

There are more famous cities than New Orleans, with brighter lights, bigger shows, a more ancient history, a more iconic reputation. But what you find on Broadway can be found in the West End. What you find in the urban tropics of Los Angeles can be found in Sydney or Singapore. What you find in Las Vegas can be found in Monte Carlo or Rio de Janeiro. The reality is that there is no city in the world quite like New Orleans. And with apologies to Vegas, I believe it falls second to “The Big Easy” as America’s capital of Hedonism.

New Orleans is the largest city in Louisiana, a city becoming increasingly hip and liberal surrounded by a deeply red state. Pride flags and “HARRIS-WALZ” signs outnumber the Republican equivalents by ten-to-one. The famous Bourbon Street is the annual home to Mardi Gras, the legendary street party of intoxicants, loud music, costumes, parade floats and inhibitions. Even five months out, Mardi Gras’ famous beads adorn shop fronts and railings. Not that you have much time to ponder the future on Bourbon Street anyway; every second assaults your senses with a different track out of each bar, neon signs, promoters offering deals and discounts, and a constant stream of tourists ambling through the fracas, frozen daiquiri in hand. I couldn’t escape the feeling that this was Spain’s inspiration for the party resort of Magaluf.

As deliriously tacky and excessive as Bourbon Street is, the parallel boulevards of Royal and Chartres provide more of a quiet cultural prestige tuned to European tastes. Here you’ll find artisan cafes and emporiums with rare books, historical artefacts and curios from local craftspeople. While much of this creative bounty can be found in the French Quarter, the city’s beating heart, many artisans have relocated to the sleepy Garden District. The art scene in NOLA (an initialism for New Orleans, Louisiana) is booming, exemplified in the fantastic Ogden Museum of southern art and the city’s uptown sculpture park. A location this culturally rich will always ignite the imagination of creatives, people unnoticed in the Sun Belt’s smaller hamlets drawn to the epicentre of art and Voodoo. The latter, a fascinating tradition fusing West African theology, Catholicism, and Haitian Vodou, sets the thematic tone of the city through its colourful array of unsettling magical trinkets.

Perhaps nowhere is more appropriate to visit during the Halloween season, with NOLA’s famous and unique graveyards offering tours to the morbidly curious. Southern Louisiana’s high water table and the preponderance of flooding means the city’s elite have historically been buried above ground in haunting stone or marble mausoleums, some stretching back through centuries of ancestral lines. The most famous of these macabre behemoths is the future resting place of Nicholas Cage, a bizarre and dislocated nine-foot pyramid which, according to our tour guide, has been struck by lightning twice.

In contrast to NOLA’s reverence for death and its self-styling, since incorporation the city has a remarkably bloodless history, at least by European standards. Founded by the French in 1718, control of the city was thrice ceded peacefully, first to the Spanish in 1763, then briefly back to the French immediately prior to the Louisiana purchase in 1803. Napoleon’s famous deal expanded American territory by 828,000 square miles at a price of fifteen million dollars – or around $340 million today. This history is recorded at the beautiful Cabildo, the historic town centre assembly building which opens onto the city’s second most famous square. The first is the modest uptown locale of Congo Square, a historic space where enslaved and free minorities gathered to sing, dance and barter. This custom led to African musical traditions fusing with folk songs and hymns and giving rise to first the blues, and later jazz.

New Orleans’ Jazz Museum celebrates the art form perhaps most closely associated with liberation and free expression and of which many of the city’s most revered sons and daughters were foundational practitioners. New York owes much of its famous jazz scene to Louis Armstrong and Fats Domino, visionaries who cut their teeth in the smoky clubs of Frenchmen Street. This is where you’ll find a more sophisticated NOLA, with famous haunts such as The Spotted Cat and Snug Harbour featuring local celebrities almost every night. This is where you can hear a Dixieland band play ragtime over an Old Fashioned, or watch masters of the vibraphone improvise melodies that take just enough liberties with the classics without jeopardising their future status in jazz Heaven.

Speaking of Heaven, any discussion about New Orleans would be remiss not to mention the tantalising food scene. Whilst the fine dining establishments of New York and London owe much to their Scicillian and Parisian ancestors, Creole cuisine is quite unlike anything seen elsewhere. Must-tries include the hearty stew known as gumbo, the paella-adjacent dish jambalaya and the home-style comfort of red beans and rice. Tradition demands a kitchen-sink approach to the preparation of these dishes, most featuring at least prawns and andouille sausage, which is somewhere between bratwurst and chorizo. The regional sandwich called a “po’ boy”, sounds simple in principle but has fried shrimp, Cubano and “french dip” variants to keep things fresh after your fourth day in a row. Stereotypes of under-seasoned western dishes do not belong here and this fare is seriously spicy; the Afro-Caribbean influence is evident. Breakfast is often a coffee and chicory blend dubbed the New Orleans “cafe au lait” with beignets, a pastry similar to a light doughnut; customarily dusted, fresh from the fryer, with a shovelful of powdered sugar.

New Orleans’ location in the heart of the Mississippi River Delta gives it unique access to the bayou, the Creole term for the marshes of southern Louisiana. The mix of salt- and freshwater known as brackish swampland creates a fertile ecosystem home to alligators, catfish, raccoons, snakes, snapping turtles and herons, all of which can be seen up-close from one of the many boat tour operators accessible from the city by coach. New Orleans is one of the few cities in the US you don’t need a car to experience due to the historic network of streetcars (trams), some literally still in service from the 1920s with only minor refurbishments. As you may be expecting, this is far from a comfortable experience, with claustrophobic aisles and narrow wooden seats usually full to capacity, scarce and threadbare handholds causing embarrassing lurches into your fellow passengers upon the slightest acceleration, and doors you must force open manually. But hey, it’s authentic.

The flipside of New Orleans’ unique placement was made soberingly clear during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a disaster whose impact still pervades the city’s collective memory. While the storm claimed the lives of 1,392 people and caused $125 billion in damage, the resilience of NOLA’s people and architecture has preserved the city’s extraordinary soul. Many modern buildings including shopping centres, amusement parks and hospitals never recovered from the flooding that covered 80 percent of the city and peaked at thirty-two feet. However, you’ll still see the pastel-colour-shuttered cottages and townhouses enveloped with ornamented iron balconies of the 19th century French Quarter, and the charming uptown abodes with gleaming white columns and flags adorning the verandas. It is fitting that the central streets, most of which have French names with colloquial American pronunciations, still bear historic signs with their erstwhile Spanish equivalents. The confluence of architecture, fine art, food, music, nature and some of the friendliest people you’ll ever meet synthesise a cultural fusion unmatched anywhere in America, and maybe the world. If you love being alive, New Orleans belongs on your bucket list.