There are many, many wonderful things about New Orleans that I’ve discovered in my short time here.
Noise is noticeable here, because it’s rare. I’ve heard a single car alarm in 8 days and it was, well, alarming.
There are a handful of wide, median-planted parkways here that remind me of those ringing Chicago—Diversey, the Plaisance, and the grand western district boulevards. The grandest I’ve seen here are Napoleon and a stretch of Camp. But one particularly dramatic, if underappreciated intersection is up in Mid-City neighborhood at the intersection of Canal and Jefferson Davis Parkway. Both are wide, greened, and not particularly trafficked. A grassy berm runs through the center of each, bracketed by dead-straight lines of craggly live oak lined up like massive soldiers with afros canopying the roadways that run down the margins of Jefferson Davis. For their width, the roads are quiet here. Stately. What passes for tall homes in New Orleans line each side of the parkway. Some have seen better days, but it’s hard to imagine a more pleasant place to walk out onto each day from home.
Don’t call these linear oases medians, though. Down here they’re called the neutral ground. Historically, these wide boulevards divided the various ethnic quarters of the city, among whom there was no love lost—the French, the Spanish, the Americans. They were also the places where commerce among these merchandizing factions could be carried out easily, or at least ambivalently. Now, most neutral grounds mask a complicated system of drainage ditches and canals that try to soak up ground water, rain water and river water and defy nature by pumping it up and over levees to Lake Pontchartrain. New Orleans’ subway.
I have fallen head over heels and utterly in love with the live oak. I think it is the reason I most love walking in New Orleans. They are everywhere the way London planetrees are in New York, or chestnuts are in Paris. If it is not the official tree, it should be and it’d be hard to imagine a more handsome candidate. Handsome and yet zany. Each has a crown of contorted branches spiraling away from its trunk in unique directions. They belong in Oz or among the hobbits. If a tree could be animated, the live oak should be it.
**END ACID TRIP HERE**
There is an easiness in doing things here. It’s taken me awhile to begin to understand why things seem so much simpler here. Part of it is scale. Several people here—those that have moved from New York, anyway—describe New Orleans as a small town that has gotten even smaller since the storms. It’s worth putting in perspective that, depending on which of the competing voices you listen to, there are roughly 200,000 souls in the city right now, down from something north of 400,000 before the storms. That’s 2.5% of New York City’s population. It’s about the number of people that live in Astoria. You get home from work in 15 minutes, with traffic. Visiting friends can take as little as 5 minutes in car. (People in Park Slope may not appreciate how important this can be.)
There’s also no pretension here, at least not that I’ve been able to detect. One bar I was in, typically, had a mix of folks in suits, some young hip cats, one rotund biker cum bandana, and some restaurant workers just coming off a shift somewhere. There was a drunk in the corner whom I suspect was going to be sleeping outdoors that night—as he probably did most nights. If a few guys in tuxes showed up I doubt anyone would have remarked. For all of New York’s permissiveness and its prideful position at the avant-garde, it is also fussy, cliquey and picky about whom it thinks is hip or revered. I’ve found none of that here.
In the fancy coffee shop I was in a few afternoons ago, the proprietor himself was waiting on customers, one of whom was the grease monkey from the repair shop across the way—also an owner of his shop, from what I could tell from the familiar, easy conversation they struck up with each other. This is an incredible town for small businesses. I’m told chains and franchises do exist but I have not come across them, yet. I’m not sure why they haven’t gotten a toehold here yet, at least outside the tourist quarter. There is none of the discourse on the suburbanization of the city like what is heard right now in New York with neighborhood institutions closing up left and right in favor of banks, drug stores, and Barnes & Nobles. It will be interesting to see how rebuilding, repatriating, and reinvesting will change custom in the neighborhoods here.
There are also little, endearing things that make it a treat to wander around lost: a series of streets named for (you eventually realize) all nine muses: Cleo, Urania, Calliope, Melpomene, Euterpe, Erato, Tepsicore, Thalia and Polyhymnia. Another, I’m told, is a series of Napoleonic battles. My European history sucks so I can’t remember if that’s Jena, Cadiz, Bordeaux and Valence or not.
But there is also a good deal wrong here. Let’s leave aside, for the moment, that half the city is gone.
I haven’t seen any of the crime that has been so spectacularly covered in the national press. Not that isn’t here, nor that it isn’t a great concern to everyone here, well-heeled and scraping by alike, but it hasn’t been something I’ve encountered.
Far more troubling is the sense of neglect in not only those places that were scraped off of the map, but also those that are largely functioning again, despite woeful infrastructure. There is ONE well-paved road in New Orleans. I haven’t found it or driven on it, yet. But I heard the d.j. on one of the local stations talk about it this morning. I sent her an e-mail to ask about it.
I’m going to take a guess and say that one-third of the intersections in the City are missing their street signs. Not just one or two from a couple of the corners, but entire intersections, some of them major, without any identifying marks. It leaves outsiders feeling very lost. Thankfully, New Orleans is a grid of sorts—irregular because of it’s historical development in the footprints of long narrow plantations that radiated away from the curving Mississippi—but a type of grid nonetheless. That fact, and a decent sense of direction, are the only things that made me feel reasonably confident about driving by myself here. If New Orleans is intent on keeping visitors in the principal tourist areas, this is one way to ensure it.
Virtually every traffic signal is missing one or all of the visors over the red, yellow or green lenses.
There are no mailboxes. All them were apparently removed after the hurricanes and have not been replaced. (Now you know why none of you received any postcards.)
The cops apparently can be rented for weddings. I was walking from the house to the local commercial strip on Magazine Street the other night and heard a siren wailing several blocks away—continuously for several. I noticed it not just because it may have been the first one I was conscious of at all in NOLA, but because it seemed to go on for so long without moving about the neighborhood. (You know how you can tell where cop cars are going based on the familiar Doppler effect—where the siren seems to change pitch as it approaches and then recedes.) Slowly, it became gradually louder. I looked down a long street in the general direction of the noise to see flashing blue lights turn up several blocks away. A police car inched closer, full blare, and eventually pulled up into the block I was standing in. Behind it followed two shiny white stretch limos and a minibus full of penguined passengers. A second police car with strobing lights brought up the rear. All told, the 5 vehicles extended the entire block. I finally realized I was standing in front of a church. The cops stationed their vehicles at either end to prevent cars from passing through the block while the wedding was in process. I asked the cop at the front, now out of his car and helping to divert traffic around the block, what determined whether someone got the perk of a police escort and the consideration of a closed street. “You gotta pay da money,” he responded automatically, as if the answer could not be more plain. What kind of message does that send? That if you’re rich enough, the police can work for you? But if you’re poor, maybe not? That struck me as particularly pernicious in a town struggling to assert its law and order bona fides. If I were in charge, that’d probably be the first thing I’d change. And I’m sure it’s the first thing I’d get fired for doing.
In a town with unpaved, unsigned roads controlled by denuded traffic lights and patrolled by uniformed, armed wedding ushers, the Department of Parks & Parkways somehow finds it necessary to pay a contractor—a group of three people, actually—to rove around Juliet’s neighborhood in search of tree stumps to grind down with a fancy remote-controlled, tractor-treaded tree stump grinder the size of a small SUV. Fancypants. It’s a lovely service, actually. But that tree stump in the vest-pocket park next to her house could have stayed there another 50 years without being a problem at all. In a city with far more dire needs, this is the last one I’d be funding with scant resources.
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