The wrong place for a city
By any rational geographic calculation, New Orleans should not exist. The city sits in a bowl-shaped depression between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, mostly below sea level, on land that is essentially a delta swamp held in place by levees, pumps, and optimism. Every hurricane season, the Gulf of Mexico reminds the city of this. Hurricanes Betsy in 1965, Camille in 1969, and Katrina in 2005 all demonstrated, with varying degrees of devastation, what happens when the engineering fails.
And yet. The French founded a settlement here in 1718 because the location was militarily and commercially vital: the Mississippi, the main artery of the continent, reached the Gulf here, which meant anyone controlling this spot controlled inland access to half of North America. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville chose the site despite being advised against it by his own engineers. The city has been making that same bet — against reason, in favor of position — ever since.
The result is the most geographically peculiar major city in the United States. Streets flood in summer rainstorms. Foundations shift on the soft ground. Bodies have been buried above ground since the colonial period because digging six feet down in this soil hits water. The St. Louis cemeteries — above-ground burial sites where families maintain whitewashed brick tombs — are not a Gothic affectation. They are a practical response to hydrology.
Three empires and what they left
New Orleans spent its first ninety years under three different flags — French, Spanish, briefly French again — before the United States acquired it in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase. This colonial history is not a footnote. It is the explanation for almost everything that makes New Orleans strange.
The French Quarter — the Vieux Carré, the old square — is not actually French architecture. The original French settlement burned twice, in 1788 and 1794, and what you see today on Bourbon Street and Royal Street and Chartres Street was built during the Spanish colonial period: two-story buildings with interior courtyards, wrought-iron balconies, and arcaded ground-floor shops. The wrought ironwork that defines the Quarter's visual character was made by free Black craftsmen working in a tradition that had as much to do with African metalworking as with European design.
The Spanish period also produced the legal concept of plaçage — a formalized system by which free women of color entered into long-term relationships with wealthy white men, with property rights and legal standing — and the Creole culture that grew from the mixing of African, French, Spanish, Caribbean, and Native American populations over several generations. Creole is not a race. It is a culture produced by sustained proximity and intermarriage under conditions that were never straightforward and sometimes brutal, and it produced a cuisine, a music, and a social world that has no real equivalent anywhere else in the United States.
After the Louisiana Purchase, the Americans who arrived — Protestant, English-speaking, commercially aggressive — found themselves in a city that had no particular interest in becoming like them. The Creole population referred to the newcomers as les Américains without affection. The Americans, for their part, built their own neighborhood upriver from the French Quarter: the Garden District, with Greek Revival mansions and wide lawns, as different from the French Quarter as they could make it. The city was effectively two cities for decades, and the division is still visible in the architecture.
Congo Square and what it means
On Sunday afternoons during the French and Spanish colonial periods, enslaved people in New Orleans were permitted to gather at a market square on the edge of the city to trade, socialize, and perform music. This was unusual — most of the American South prohibited enslaved people from congregating — and the permission, granted by Catholic colonial authorities who observed the Sabbath differently than Protestant slaveholders to the north, had consequences that changed the history of American music.
Congo Square, now part of Louis Armstrong Park just outside the French Quarter, was where African musical traditions survived in a form they did not survive elsewhere in the United States. The drumming, the call-and-response singing, the dances from Dahomey and Yorubaland and Kongo — these were performed here in public, in a city, within earshot of the European population. They survived. And they mixed with French and Spanish and Caribbean musical traditions in ways that produced, over generations, the music that eventually became jazz.
The park itself is easy to walk through quickly and not think much about. Don't do that. The statue of Louis Armstrong near the entrance is fine, but what you're standing on is more important than any statue. This is where something began that the rest of the world has been living in ever since.
Jazz, which is not what you think it is
Jazz was born in New Orleans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which is one of those facts that gets repeated so often it loses meaning. What it actually means: a group of musicians — Black, Creole, occasionally white, working in dance halls and brothels and funeral processions and social clubs — developed a form of improvised ensemble music that had no precedent and that would eventually become the foundation of almost all American popular music for the next century.
Buddy Bolden, whose band in the early 1900s is generally credited as the first jazz ensemble, played cornets loud enough to be heard across entire neighborhoods in New Orleans. Louis Armstrong grew up in the city, learned to play in a home for troubled boys on Perdido Street, and absorbed the tradition before taking it to Chicago and New York and, eventually, the world. Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver — all from New Orleans, all formed by the specific musical culture that Congo Square and the Catholic Sundays and the density of Storyville had produced.
Storyville — the legal red-light district that operated from 1897 to 1917, bounded by Iberville and St. Louis Streets, running from Basin Street to Robertson — was a concentrated employment market for musicians. The district was demolished to build the Iberville housing project, and then the housing project was demolished after Katrina. The blocks are mostly empty now, being redeveloped. There is not much to see. But the music that was made there while Storyville operated traveled with the musicians who moved north during and after World War I, and it never stopped traveling.
The food is the culture
New Orleans is one of the few American cities where the local cuisine is genuinely a matter of civic identity and not just local pride. People here argue about gumbo the way Neapolitans argue about pizza: with intensity, with specificity, and with the understanding that the arguments are themselves part of the tradition.
Gumbo comes from the Bantu word for okra, and it reflects the city's layered history in a bowl: West African technique (the okra thickening, the dark roux), French ingredients (the filé powder, the trinity of onion, celery, and bell pepper instead of the French mirepoix of onion, carrot, and celery), Native American knowledge (filé is made from dried sassafras leaves, which the Choctaw used as a thickener), and Creole synthesis. Every family has a gumbo recipe. Most families believe their gumbo recipe is the correct one.
Beignets at Café Du Monde in Jackson Square are worth eating, though the line is frequently long and the experience has become somewhat performative. The coffee — café au lait, half coffee and half hot chicory milk — is better than the beignets. Chicory in coffee is a French and particularly Louisiana Creole tradition that dates to the Civil War blockade, when coffee was scarce and chicory root was used to extend it. The taste stuck. Locals prefer it.
The po'boy — the sandwich that is the city's fast food, served on Leidenheimer bread in a crust that shatters when you bite it — is available everywhere and ranges enormously in quality. The best are at small neighborhood spots and are not expensive. The roast beef debris version, with the drippings mixed into the shredded meat, is the one to get.
Katrina and the city it made
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall east of New Orleans with winds of 125 miles per hour. The storm itself, damaging as it was, did not destroy the city. What destroyed the city was the failure of the federal levee system that surrounded it. Within hours of landfall, the levees broke at seventeen points around the city, and eighty percent of New Orleans flooded. In some neighborhoods, the water reached roof level. Roughly 1,800 people died. More than a million people were displaced.
The Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly Black neighborhood on the east side of the city, was among the hardest hit and the slowest to recover. If you walk through the Lower Ninth Ward now, you see a neighborhood that is still sparse compared to what it was — empty lots where houses stood, new construction mixed with remaining gaps, the Musicians' Village built by Habitat for Humanity, a population that never fully returned. The city's population before Katrina was approximately 485,000. It has recovered to around 380,000 and has plateaued there.
What Katrina also did — and this is something the city will tell you itself, if you let it — is clarify what New Orleans actually was. The national media covered the disaster in ways that often reinforced existing stereotypes about the city and its predominantly Black population. The recovery was uneven in ways that followed existing lines of race and wealth. And yet the city came back, and the culture came back, and the music came back, and the food came back, and New Orleans is still, two decades later, the most distinctive city in the United States.
The parade and what it means
The second line parade — a New Orleans tradition that predates jazz and may predate the United States — begins with a Social Aid and Pleasure Club, which is an institution rooted in the African American community of New Orleans that provided mutual aid, insurance, and community for people excluded from formal institutions. The clubs still exist and still organize second line parades, most Sundays from fall through spring, through various neighborhoods.
A second line works like this: the first line is the brass band and the official participants. The second line is everyone else who joins in, following the music through the streets, dancing, waving white handkerchiefs. The route runs through neighborhoods. People come out of houses and bars and stand on stoops and join for a block and then drift back. The parade is not a performance for an audience. It is a community moving through its own streets with music.
If you can find a second line and follow it for twenty minutes, it will tell you more about New Orleans than any museum or tour. The city's particular relationship with public space, with music, with collective celebration — it's all there, on a Sunday afternoon, on a residential street in Central City or Tremé or the Seventh Ward.
The thing to carry with you
Here is the thing that makes New Orleans make sense: it is the only city in the United States that was built by people who genuinely did not expect to survive. The French colonists who waded into this swamp in 1718 knew the land was wrong for it. The enslaved people who built the city knew they were building something they did not own. The Creole families who forged a culture between European law and African memory knew their position was always contingent. The jazz musicians who played for pocket change in the brothels of Storyville were not building for posterity. New Orleans has been, from the beginning, a city that lives in the present tense — intensely, deliberately, with the understanding that the water could rise at any moment.
This is why the city celebrates the way it does. Mardi Gras is not hedonism as a lifestyle choice. It is a city-wide acknowledgment that life is short and the levees might not hold and the food is excellent and the music is always somewhere nearby and you might as well dance. The jazz funeral — brass band playing dirges to the cemetery and jazz on the way out — is not theater. It is a coherent philosophy about mortality and community and the proper relationship between the two.
Once you understand that, everything else in New Orleans stops being colorful and starts being true. The buildings are held together with optimism. The food carries four centuries of forced mixing that produced something extraordinary despite everything. The music began in a place where people were not supposed to survive and did anyway. You're walking through the result.