New Orleans was founded by the French in 1718, transferred to Spain in 1762, returned to France in 1800, sold to the United States in 1803, and shaped by the largest forced migration in American history into something that does not fit neatly into any of those categories. The city that exists as a result is architecturally French, legally Napoleonic in its property code, musically African and Caribbean in its foundational grammar, and American in the particular way that American cities absorb everything and then insist the result is original. It is also one of the most genuinely pleasurable places to spend a week anywhere on the continent.
The French Quarter is not the city’s best neighborhood but it is the oldest and the most legible to newcomers. The ironwork balconies are Spanish, not French — they were built during the Spanish colonial period after the two great fires of 1788 and 1794 destroyed most of the original French structures. Bourbon Street is correctly understood as a street that exists for a specific purpose and should be encountered once, briefly, and then left. Royal Street, one block over, has the antique shops and the street musicians and the architecture without the beads. Frenchmen Street in the Marigny neighborhood, a fifteen-minute walk from the Quarter, is where people who actually live in New Orleans go to hear music.
The food operates under different physics than anywhere else in America. A muffuletta from Central Grocery on Decatur Street — a round Sicilian sesame loaf loaded with Italian cold cuts and an olive salad that was invented in this building in 1906 — is a full meal and costs what a full meal should. A cup of café au lait and a paper bag of beignets at Café Du Monde at any hour of day or night has been unchanged in price, taste, and powdered sugar distribution since the café opened in 1862. Commander’s Palace in the Garden District, for people willing to spend money on a single meal, has been producing the city’s most technically accomplished Creole cuisine for long enough that it has influenced essentially every serious chef who has worked in Louisiana.
The Garden District is the neighborhood built by the American merchants who moved to New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase and were not welcome in the Creole society of the French Quarter. Their response was to build larger houses on a grid of streets named after Greek muses, across a neutral ground — a wide, tree-lined median — from the streetcar line that is the oldest continuously operating streetcar line in the world. Walk Magazine Street. The streetcar on St. Charles Avenue runs to Carrollton and costs the same as a city bus.
Jazz did not emerge from a single place or moment, but it emerged from New Orleans more specifically than it emerged from anywhere else. The Preservation Hall in the French Quarter books traditional jazz bands in a deliberately minimal venue — small room, wooden benches, no air conditioning, music starting at eight — that prioritizes the sound over the experience of consuming it. Congo Square in Armstrong Park, where enslaved Africans were permitted to gather and play music on Sundays under French law — a permission that existed nowhere else in North America — is where the thread begins, historically. Standing in the square with that history in mind makes the rest of the city’s music easier to understand.
Mardi Gras is February or early March depending on the year and is completely unlike what Bourbon Street implies year-round. The neighborhood parades — Zulu, Rex, the Krewe of Mid-City — roll through residential streets and are attended by locals with ladders and coolers and children in costumes. The throws — beads, doubloons, cups, stuffed animals — are caught from floats by people who have been coming to the same corner for twenty years. The tourist crowd thins considerably more than five blocks from Canal Street. Go five blocks further.