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Easy
Streets
From
the stately to the sinister, the gourmet to the grotesque,
the city of New Orleans offers much more than Mardi Gras
By
James Yeara
Photos by Laura Murray
 New
Orleans is a 24-7 party town—like your freshman and sophomore
years of college distilled and tapped until the buzz and fun
is crammed into the narrow 18th-century streets of the Vieux
Carré—but New Orleans is more than the sum of its colorful
nicknames (the Big Easy, the Crescent City), sleazy tourists,
flashed nipples and swilled alcohol. When Mardi Gras’ official
colors of purple, gold and green are put away, New Orleans
is still a city with 300 years of history and culture. On
a whirlwind three-day visit in the middle of January, I trawled
the French Quarter, the Vieux Carré (literally, the “old quarter”),
finding music, food, and voodoo as pleasing as some would
find Bourbon Street Gone Crazy.
I stayed at a B&B on Delaronde Street in Algiers Point
(lots of very reasonable rooms in the area and a lot more
restful than being across the river), and walked three minutes
to the Canal Street Ferry that crosses the Mississippi River
every 15 minutes. The ferry takes you to the southwest edge
of the French Quarter, where you’ll find the Aquarium of the
Americas, complete with Imax theater and the floating Flamingo
Casino. You can be cultured and educated, or gamble and make
someone rich.
From there, you can walk the winding Moon Walk, named after
former Mayor Moon Landrieu, that follows the banks of the
Mississippi, catch the streetcar to Elysian Fields Avenue
near the eastern edge of the Vieux Carré, or stop anyplace
in between to stroll the 100-odd blocks of the oldest part
of New Orleans. There are Audubon Steamboat excursions from
a dock midway on the Moon Walk—to the west of the French Quarter,
just south of Tulane University, is the huge Audubon Park,
so not all the wildlife in New Orleans flashes for beads—but
I spent my three days strolling the Vieux Carré. I could have
spent months.
The Vieux Carré has preserved the colorful architecture and
cramped charm of its 18th- and 19th-century buildings, so
history buffs and the romantic can tour the French Quarter
and find treasure upon treasure: the Cabildo, the former Royal
Spanish capital building that marks the divide in the French
Quarter between the French founders and the subsequent Spanish
masters; Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop and the Old Absinthe House,
where American homegrown influence begins post-Louisiana Purchase;
Preservation Hall, which is easy to overlook, as its graying
timbers and clapboards are derelict; Tennessee Williams’ second-story
apartment on Dumaine Street, where I participated in a one-man
“Hey, Stella”-yelling contest, coming in first. Sadly, there
is no longer a streetcar named Desire—just a bus.
We caught a mule-drawn carriage (mules fare better than horses
in the New Orleans swelter, we were told) and did a half-hour
tour of the area. Our guide pointed out the obscure places
where duels were fought, and ghosts were rumored to haunt.
I was particularly fascinated by the curious upward-angled
iron works around all the poles leading to the balconies in
the French Quarter. “Romeo Catchers” they are called: Amorous
19th-century males had to be graceful, dexterous or very careful
to remain male when climbing to see the objects of their affections.
The French Market, crammed next to the river on the east edge
of the French Quarter, is three centuries old and the best
damned place to shop, mix and laugh in the city. Merchants
drive up early to reserve places inside a one-story warehouse;
the late-rising half set up on tables outside. Fresh food,
antiques, second-hand recyclables, arts and crafts are sold
in a hodgepodge of booths and tables that would later remind
me of the cemeteries. This is where humanity meets.
Jackson Square is smack downstage center of Vieux Carré, a
streetcar stop in the middle of the French Quarter. It’s an
18th-century parade ground/execution spot, just south of the
alley where duels were fought, Cajun-style—to the death. The
square is lined with shoppes and boutiques, but its main attraction
is the buskers: dancers with boom boxes, folksingers with
guitars and fiddles, artists who take appointments from patrons
to do chalk portraits against the black wrought-iron or brick
buildings of the square, living gold statues that bow ever
so slightly from their perches and smile with the precision
of practiced coquettes, and every manner of divination known
to man, woman, and goddess. There are tarot-card readers,
palmists, astrologers, past-life regressionists, Native American
shamans, voodoo diviners, and other psychics all with painted
signs and props to prove it. Betty—a sign promised that she
was an authentic Gypsy—gave me a palm reading that was surprisingly
accurate. She looked the part, and I wanted to believe.
 Shopping,
history, and architecture are great, but I also came to New
Orleans for the food and the voodoo. I skipped the obvious
restaurants like Emeril’s or Arnaud’s (budget was the main
concern) and avoided anything that smacked of multinational
chain, but it proved impossible not to find good food inexpensively.
From “po’ boys” (subs on french bread) to jambalaya to airy
beignets (sugar dough the consistency of air) and “king cakes”
(crack to those who love pastry). The two of us ate Cajun
or Creole fare and drank for under $30 a meal, and I like
to tip.
With local author Anne Rice’s occult franchise and the many
voodoo legends set in New Orleans, a walking tour of one of
the many aboveground cemeteries is a must. Touring the New
Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum and buying a gris-gris bag
for protection against demons, accountants, lawyers, ex-wives
and other evil entities are musts, too. Voodoo is in the great
American melting-pot tradition: It borrows from many religions,
cultures and countries, combining pagan beliefs with Catholicism,
minus the overhead of a central office. I went on a tour of
haunted New Orleans and Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1. There
are a half-dozen different companies offering tours twice
a day. All offer their tours before the dusk closing times,
and all give the same advice: Stay together. (It’s not out
of fear of ghosts or voodoo, but out of fear of the neighborhood
that borders the cemetery just north of Vieux Carré.)
St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is frighteningly confusing with its
painted white vaults, marble tombs and de facto ovens—some
of the lower-class vaults were one-person baking crematoriums,
which could only be opened a year and a day after a person
was buried, which, given the climate, resulted in a pile of
ashes which were conveniently pushed to the back of the vault
to make room for the new arrival. People were put in these
aboveground eternal houses in no order. Alien crop mazes are
easier to follow. Without the tours, a person could get seriously
lost. One white angel looks like another, though the guide
did point out the one where Peter Fonda had his improvised
acid trip in the film Easy Rider. The tours all show
off the local sights, making references to Rice’s books or
local luminaries therein interred, explain why aboveground
entombment flourished—it wasn’t strictly from the frequent
flooding of the Mississippi, but out of the Spanish custom
of aboveground body disposal—and show off the decaying cemetery.
There’s even a broken vault where the curious or morbid can
stoop over and see bones. (Bones look dark gray in a broken
vault.)
But the highlight of the tours, where all of them climax,
is what the tour guide told us was the second-most-visited
grave in America after Elvis: Marie Laveau, the Queen of New
Orleans Voodoo. Visitors to the white box of Laveau see numerous
Xs scratched on the walls, a plaque from the Roman Catholic
Church reading “Marie Laveau,” and numerous offerings—“Liquor,
food, or money. What everyone needs,” the guide told us. Elvis
couldn’t have said it better, and Laveau’s grave has as solemn
an air as New Orleans allows. I made my wish, made my marks
with my finger—the guide explains that some guides take photos
of people desecrating the grave by scratching—and left my
offerings. For my prayer to come true, I have to return to
see if my offerings have been accepted. As tourist traps go,
this is a winner.
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