"That’s terrific,” said the lady from the New Orleans Visitors’ Bureau (NOVB), when I phoned to say I’d be writing an article about her city. “We’ll work out an itinerary for you and recommend some great restaurants. It’s our pleasure.”
A week before I left, I still hadn’t heard anything – so I emailed. “Don’t worry,” she replied. “We’ll have the itinerary wrapped up before you leave.” But she never contacted me again, and that experience sums up my feelings about this mad, laid-back, shabby, extraordinary, still disastrous city.
So if the NOVB won’t do its job, let me do it for it and urge you to visit. Here are my first impressions of the French quarter – the city’s cultural heart – on a damp, misty night in January.
The clouds were low, blocking out the surrounding high-rises. I felt as if I were walking into a cross between 19th-century Paris and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. There were people everywhere, enjoying themselves in the street, many of them carrying oversized cocktails in plastic cups. Snatches of jazz, of course, coming from courtyards, from clubs, played by buskers – brilliantly – at every corner. A profusion of wrought-iron balconies. Gas lamps burning above the doorways. Old-fashioned shops full of things you don’t need but will probably buy: masks, voodoo products, bad art, antiques, hot sauces, even sexually explicit cakes. Quirky wooden houses that suddenly give way to mansions, such as the Supreme Court Building, taking up a whole block.
Inevitably, I found myself in Jackson Square, named after the US president who beat off the British in 1812. There are tarot-card readers everywhere. A magician performs the cup-and-ball trick. Crowds stream in and out of the bars and restaurants. More jazz. Two black kids are tap-dancing on manhole covers. A woman passes me – rolls of fat squeezed into Lycra – wearing a feathered mask. I sneeze and an old guy taps me on the shoulder. “God bless you, buddy.” The square is grassy. It’s a nice place to be.
If this all sounds a bit muddled, that’s how New Orleans is. It overwhelms the senses. You go for the sights, sounds, smells and tastes – and they don’t disappoint.
I had my first taste of real jazz at the famous Preservation Hall on St Peter Street. This small, shabby room has been in business since 1961 and as someone who had no real love of jazz before I came to New Orleans, I urge you to buy a ticket on the internet before you take off. With a combined age of about 400 (there were six of them), the band went through a series of classics, playing with the warmth and nonchalance I thought only existed in Woody Allen films. I was converted. The next night I went uptown to the Maple Leaf bar in Carrollton-Riverbend. Here I heard another NO institution, the Rebirth Brass Band. They were so loud I was still hearing them three days later.
The food is delicious – but trust me, it will kill you. Everything is fried. The two biggest delicacies in Louisiana are “pralines” and “beignets”, the first being fried sugar, the second fried dough coated in sugar for extra heart trauma. Beignets are served under a green and white striped awning at the Café du Monde on Jackson Square; people will queue for more than an hour each morning just for the experience. Tip: go late at night when you can walk straight in. Or better still, don’t go at all.
Queues are endemic all over the city. Everyone has their favourite bar or restaurant and the lines are long. A few recommendations: fried oysters at Stanley’s, fried chicken at Willy Mae’s in the heart of Tremé, an area considered so dangerous that punters arrive and leave by taxi. Impossibly good croissants at Le Croissant d’Or in Ursulines Avenue. Pretty much everything at the Orleans Grapevine, a friendly bistro near St Louis cathedral. This is also a city of cocktails. My favourites were the whiskey-based Sazerac, the slightly sinister Hand Grenade Martini and, inappropriately named, the double-rum Hurricane.
It’s nearly 10 years since Katrina blew in, killing 1,836 people and causing $84 billion worth of damage. It’s a miracle that the city has managed to fight its way back to life – but even so, the memory isn’t far away. Travel up I10 and you’ll pass the skeletal remains of an amusement park, still rusting away. There’s an abandoned hotel with the curtains still flapping in what’s left of the windows. Everywhere there are bare patches of land where there should be buildings and you feel you only have to scratch the surface to find enduring poverty.
We toured – discreetly – the Lower 9th Ward, which was the worst hit. (There are organised tours but you might feel more comfortable in a taxi or rental car.) The reconstruction is remarkable but perhaps not for all the right reasons.
A foundation called “Make it Right”, set up by the actor Brad Pitt, has built around 100 new houses for families who lost everything to Katrina. Designed by world-famous architects, they are eco-friendly, elevated 5ft off the ground with solar panels and metal roofs – and in crazy shapes and colours. I was reminded of that old cartoon The Jetsons. It may be wrong to question philanthropy but I couldn’t help but wonder if fabulous design was the answer to poverty. New Orleans is still a victim and you’d have thought that, after a whole decade, the most powerful country in the world could have done more.
Where to stay? Curiously, New Orleans has some of the most shocking hotels I have ever seen – the Hilton, the Sheraton and the Marriott are fairly close to each other and seem to be vying to win the Ugliest High-Rise Ever Built award. Someone should take them down and start again. We stayed at Loft 523 on Gravier Street just outside the French quarter, so away from the noise and crowds. I loved the big, reasonably priced rooms with polished concrete floors and minimal decoration.
One last word of advice. Don’t do the swamp tour – and certainly not in the winter when the alligators don’t do it either. Perhaps I’m being harsh, but I walked around a couple of cemeteries and saw more life. New Orleans isn’t a place you go for tourism. You just go there for fun.
Photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/andycastro/5481464118/">andy castro</a> / <a href="http://foter.com/">Foter</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a>
Buy on Amazon