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Overview: New Orleans, Louisiana — Overview for travelers

Sightseeing & Attractions: New Orleans, Louisiana — Sightseeing & Attractions

History

New Orleans is a large metropolitan city, an international port and a “melting pot” of many races and cultures. It is also a remarkable collection of historic neighborhoods, many of them as separate and distinctive as if they were separate townships or small villages. In 1889, Charles Dudley Warner, writing in Harper’s Magazine, concluded: “New Orleans is either the most cosmopolitan of all provincial cities… or the most provincial of all cosmopolitan cities.” New Orleans essentially is an “island.” (It may well be the only “inland island” in the United States). It is squeezed between the Mississippi River and the nation’s seventh largest lake (Pontchartrain), surrounded on all sides by a giant oak-cypress swamp. Napoleon Bonaparte referred to it as the Isle d’Orleans. Early French settlers called it “leflotant,” the floating land.

As such, Island Orleans was both isolated and insulated from the mainland for almost 250 years. Thus, it was able to develop, without threat of dissimulation, its own unique cultural innovations: jazz, Creole cuisine, Mardi Gras, above ground burial sites (“cities of the dead”), cultural rites (including the famous jazz funerals) that resisted the homogenization that depersonalized many American cities in the 20th Century. Until World War II, few Orleanians ever left their city – or cared to. Being Islanders, they had little choice. The first Metropolitan bridge was not built until 1958. The first causeway to span the Lake, 24 miles long, was not completed until 1957. The semi-tropical, ever-green climate and geography both isolated and insulated them, and the port, with its world-wide reach, guaranteed a pleasant level of prosperity.

Native Orleanians grew up in separate sections, or faubourgs (French for suburbs). These neighborhoods were, in effect, individual hamlets. Since 90% of the area originally was swamp or water, they were scattered sites, built where “ridges” or natural levees offered elevation above the recurrent floods. This city, “built where God never intended a city to be built,” grew up on patches of separated high ground. Most American cities expanded outward, a continuum, from a central core of solid rock or solid ground. They were able to leap rivers or climb hills and their neighborhoods were contiguous, attached and part of a municipal whole. Where other great cities radiated outward, in effect, exploited, New Orleans gathered itself inward, literally long before they were annexed into the City itself.

Until 1890, the area was a collective of disconnected suburbs – neighborhoods without neighbors. In many cases they were divided by language. The original French Creoles spoke French and disdained the “Americans” who arrived 90 years later. The Germans, Irish, Italians, West Indians added to the “unbelievable babble of a dozen languages and scores of dialects in the city’s marketplaces.” At various times, ten separate townships were created, independent of the City. To further the confusion, the City actually subdivided itself into three separate cities of Municipalities (1835-1852). The Creoles and the “Americans” created separate governments, Uptown and Downtown, separated by Canal Street’s famous “neutral ground.”

Other distinct townships (Lafayette, Jefferson City, Freeport) were eventually incorporated by 1870. But the individualistic character of these separate districts, and their many well-developed neighborhoods has been preserved and retained. A comprehensive study, “Neighborhood Profiles in Change” (1979), revealed an astonishing 71 separate and definable neighborhoods within the 363 square miles that comprise the city limits (25% of which is still unreclaimed swamp). Some are as small as 10 x 10 city blocks, enclaves like Black Pearl. Some are as large as 50 acres (sprawling Carrollton). The attachment to neighborhood remains so strong that many third and fourth generation residents take pride in living in their “grandfather’s house.” In addition, many neighborhoods (some dating back to 1800) have maintained much historical character, with ten now listed as National Historic Districts. The Uptown Historic District is the second largest in the USA with over 10,700 structures. The largest downtown Historic District, Esplanade Ridge, lies just below the French Quarter, home of the “last Creole aristocrats.”

The Cajuns and the Creoles

Most colonials in the 18th century were French. They dominated New Orleans cultural and social life for more than 100 years, long before the ‘Americans’ arrived in any number. Most Creoles called themselves ‘French’, spoke French, and considered themselves the only true natives. Their mixed-race offspring, the gens de couleur libres (free people of color), were also called Creoles.

The late-coming Anglo- Saxons, arriving after the Louisiana Purchase (1803), were considered”foreigners” and called”Les Americaines.” In Lafcadio Hearn’s ‘Creole Sketches’, he mentions that some French Creoles residing in the old French Quarter wondered why ‘anyone would care to cross Canal Street.’
Uptown was contemptuously known as ‘The American Side,’ alien territory. Until the Civil War, the proud Creoles educated their children in France, spoke the French language, and centered their lives on their closely-knit families and their cultural nexus, the grand French Opera House. They called themselves ‘la creme de la creme.’
They were out numbered and isolated, trapped in part by their stubborn insistence on the French language, culture and traditions. Creole men shunned manual labor as uncivilized. Many refused to speak English or socialize with those who did. As a result, the ingrown, aristocratic French Creole was submerged economically by Anglo-Saxon industry and drive.

But one should not despair. The Creole temperament lives on. Creole, as a meaningful term, survives in many ways, an unmistakable part of New Orleans in its food, its music, its architecture, its French Quarter. Creole no longer is a specific race or breed. Essentially, it defines that rather special New Orleans attitude toward life-‘joie de vivre, laissez-faire, bon appetit!’ In this sense, spiritually, all New Orleanians are Creoles, mes amis. One thing must be understood. Creoles are not Cajuns, and Cajuns are not Creoles. Cajuns always are French in descent, and Creoles usually are. But there the similarity ends.

From the beginning, when New Orleans was founded in 1718, Creoles were strictly cosmopolitan city dwellers; Cajuns, on the other hand, were rustic, self-sufficient country folk. They lived along the bayous and amid the swamps of South Louisiana for two centuries, isolated, clannish, devoutly Catholic, French speaking and happily removed from city society. They were hunters and trappers and fishermen, farmers, boat builders, breeders of quarter horses who worked hard weekdays and weekends celebrating life with their fais do-do’s.’Laissez les bons temps rouler’ (Let the good times roll) has always been a part of their basic philosophy.

One thing must be understood. Creoles are not Cajuns, and Cajuns are not Creoles; Cajuns always are French in descent, and Creoles usually are, but there the similarity ends.

Today, nearly one million people of Cajun or mixed Cajun blood live in Louisiana. Cajun and Creole food both rely heavily on a variety of herbs and spices. The Cajuns, in particular, like their food hot and spicy. Cajun restaurants and Cajun music have acquired a national prestige the Cajuns never aspired to. Americans seem quite fascinated with their homespun culture Cajun musicians, chefs, painters, quiltmakers and folklorists are emerging, it seems, from the country’s cultural closet.