Tag Archives: Louisiana

Road Vittles, Spring ’19

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Once upon a time, you either knew about a place like Davis Cafe or you didn’t. If you didn’t know it already, it wasn’t a place you were likely to stop if you were driving by — even if it weren’t on an obscure Montgomery, Alabama, side street, which it most definitely is.

The view from the outside.
But that was once upon a time. Now the challenge is sifting through too much information to capture a useful recommendation from the fire-hose gush that is the Internet.

I tasked Lilly to find a place for lunch before we left Montgomery. She came up with Davis Cafe. It’s a soul food meat-and-three. Or rather meat-and-two, but that hardly mattered, since the helpings were so ample and so wonderful.

I had the ribs, with black-eyed peas and yams, while Lilly had catfish with collard greens and macaroni, with corn bread for the both of us. Exceptionally good eating and good value as well. My kind of place. Like the gone but not hardly forgotten Mack’s Country Cooking in Nashville.
We didn’t have a bad meal in New Orleans, or even anything mediocre, which wasn’t much of a surprise. We visited a number of spots on Decatur St. in the Quarter, including the wonderful Coop’s Place, where I had rabbit and sausage jambalaya and an Abita beer; another spot where we had shrimp and crayfish and corn al fresco — better yet, on the second-floor balcony, and Lilly said it was her favorite meal of the trip; and a yet another place for beans and rice.

But my own favorite of the New Orleans visit was Li’l Dizzy’s Cafe on Esplanade Ave. in Treme for lunch the first day. It too was located using tech that didn’t exist the last time I was in town.

Li’l Dizzy’s lunch buffet might have been the thing, but we wanted to eat dinner that evening with some appetite, so we ordered off the menu. Had me a shrimp po’ boy to make up for the fact that when passing through Lafayette, Louisiana, the day before, Olde Tyme Grocery was closed for Sunday. Ten years later, my memory of the Old Tyme po’ boy hadn’t faded, and I wanted another. Li’l Dizzy’s po’ boy didn’t disappoint.

(We were hungry all the same in Lafayette, so we stopped at the absolutely nondescript, immigrant-run Charlie’s Seafood. It wasn’t Old Tyme, but it sure was a good place for fried seafood at a low cost.)

Two days out of three, breakfast in New Orleans meant the Cafe du Monde, because of course it did. One of the virtues of the Hotel Chateau was the five-minute walk to the cafe.

The cafe and its beignets are precisely the way I remember them from 30 and more years ago, or at least as I wanted to remember them. Light and sweet and as satisfying as waking up on a day off with more days off ahead.

We did learn, however, that the time to go was around 9, if breakfast is the goal. Earlier than that probably means a crowd of workers there for morning coffee. Later, by 10 or so, and there’s definitely a much larger tourist crowd. I don’t have anything against tourists, except when they all want the same thing as I do at the same time — a potential problem with any crowd.

So one morning we went to the Market Cafe instead, a simple restaurant in the French Market. Had a Southern, rather than specifically New Orleans, breakfast that day: biscuits and gravy, enjoyed while a three musicians played in the background.

The sort of breakfast you have if you’re going to go out and work on the farm all day, I told Lilly. Not too many people work on a farm anymore, but the breakfast hasn’t changed, which helps make us fat in the 21st century. On the other hand, we had a long day of walking ahead of us, so the breakfast geared us up for it.

Sorry to report that Miss Ruby’s is no more. It was a shoebox of a French Quarter restaurant on St. Philip St. that I remember fondly from 1989. Especially the pie. When I get my Tardis-like device to travel to my favorite restaurants, past or present, open or closed, I’m returning to Miss Ruby’s for pie.

Oddly enough, a good description of that long-lost restaurant is in the comments section of a book hawked by Amazon: Miss Ruby’s Southern Creole and Cajun Cuisine: The Cooking That Captured New Orleans (1991).

Reviewer Susan said: “I had the pleasure of many years ago (1980s), stumbling upon Miss Ruby’s restaurant while on a trip to New Orleans with an old boyfriend… Miss Ruby came to the door as we stood outside contemplating a place that looked more like her kitchen then a restaurant. She introduced herself with a big smile and welcomed us in. To this day I can recall what we ate, fried chicken, the sweetest green peas ever, lemonade to die for and I believe a German Forest Cake.”

Except for a few details (girlfriend instead of boyfriend, pie instead of cake), that was pretty much the Miss Ruby’s I encountered late in the ’80s.

In Nashville, we ate at somewhere old and somewhere new, though actually our best meals in town were homemade by my friends Stephanie and Wendall, with whom we stayed. But for restaurant food, we first went to the Elliston Place Soda Shop, which has been open since 1939 and looks the same as it did when I first went ca. 1980. The next day we ate lunch at the fairly new and highly aesthetic Butchertown Hall, open only since 2015.

Nashville Guru says: “Butchertown Hall gets its name from one of Germantown’s old nicknames ‘Butchertown,’ inspired by the numerous German immigrants who worked as butchers in the neighborhood. The first thing you notice when you walk through the Butchertown Hall doors is the appetizing smokey scent coming from the Grillworks Infierno 96 Grill (one of only three in the country). The high ceilings and natural light make the space feel large and open. A mossy rock wall separates the sleek bar and main dining area. There are community tables, two-top tables, four-top tables, and benches throughout the restaurant with seating for up to 130 people.”

It was Sunday, so the brunch menu was on the offing. I had the brisket and gravy — more gravy! — and it was tasty indeed. The place was a little loud, though, making conversation, which is what you want as much as the food during brunch, a little hard.

That there are newish restaurants in Nashville is no surprise. It’s a growing city. What surprised me walking around before and after eating at Butchertown Hall was that the entire Germantown neighborhood seemed new. New apartments, retail and restaurants, created ex nihilo in recent years (but naturally, according to demand). Now Germantown is a happening Nashville neighborhood. What was it 35 years ago? Nothing to speak of. As in, I don’t ever remember hearing anything about it when I lived in Nashville.

This and other Nashville growth nodes — that means you, Gulch — were the subjects of much old-person conversation during the time we were in Nashville. Old, as in me and my friends. Young Lilly put up with it.

Natchez &c.

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When we left New Orleans to drive to Natchez, Mississippi, on May 15, the uninspired route would be have been I-10 to Baton Rouge and then north on US 61. Instead I wanted to drive across Lake Pontchartrain, because I’ve seen that crossing on maps for years. Better yet, it’s no extra charge, since the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway collects no toll northbound.

The morning was bright and traffic light on the causeway. It’s actually two bridges, one each way, so you don’t face miles and miles of unavoidable oncoming traffic mere feet away. An enjoyable stretch of road under those conditions. Uneventful enough driving to ponder the engineering marvel that’s the causeway while still on it.

Before going, I wondered if there would be a few minutes on the causeway when we would be out of sight of land. I’d read claims to that effect. But the answer is no, not that I saw. I spotted the north shore of the lake in the distance before the south shore had completely vanished from my rear-view mirror. Once you get to the other side of the lake, you’re in Mandeville, Louisiana. I-12 from there connects with US 61 in Baton Rouge.

By early afternoon, we were in Natchez, Mississippi. The town has some good views of the Mississippi River from a park on the bluff.
The local gazebo.
It was too hot to wander around in the noonday sun for long. We decided not to tour one of the local antebellum homes, but rather spend the afternoon heading further north on the Natchez Trace Parkway to seek out antebellum ruins instead.

Lilly drove part of the way on the Trace and I played with my camera.

Others might find the driving dull, but I like driving the Trace for its lush greenery, and also its sparse traffic. No trucks at all.

We took a diversion off the Trace before going to Port Gibson and on to Jackson, along a winding country lane called Rodney Road. Go far enough on that road, and you’ll come to the Windsor Ruins.
I can’t remember where I read about the ruins, but the place has been filed under my Possible Minor Destinations for a good while. That’s such a sprawling, unorganized mental catalog of places that it’s a wonder that I ever remember to take the right detours at the right time.

We were the only ones there once another car left a minute or two after we arrived. Considering that the ruins used to be the heart of an enormous plantation, it’s remarkable how lonely the spot now feels. History has passed it by.

The view from the ruins.
“Windsor, built between 1859 and 1861, was the home of Smith Coffee Daniell II, a wealthy planter who had extensive properties in the Delta and in Arkansas,” the NPS says. “Completed in 1861, the home was the largest house built at that time [in Mississippi], the plantation once covering over 2,600 acres.

Curiously, Daniell died on April 12, 1861. The mansion survived the war, probably because the Union army used it as soon as the area had been captured, but it burned down by accident in 1890.

The fence is fairly new, added by the state, which now owns the site. Guess the state of Mississippi doesn’t want any of the 23 massive Corinthian columns coming down on any hapless visitors. They’re looking a little dodgy.

Garden District Walkabout, Including Lafayette Cemetery No. 1

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Someone once warned me about the condition of the sidewalks in the French Quarter, but on the whole, they weren’t that bad. For crumbling, occasionally hazardous sidewalks, the Quarter or even Treme couldn’t compare with the Garden District. Some stretches reminded me of Mexico City in that regard.

The houses in the Garden District clearly represent a concentration of wealth, so you’d think the sidewalks would be repaired. Maybe it’s that New Orleans is a trifle lax when it comes to infrastructure, but I don’t actually know that — the idea merely fits with the city’s reputation.

Or it could be a weird municipal dynamic: the city can’t appear to put too much money into the roads and sidewalks of an affluent area like the Garden District. Bad optics. So the area’s infrastructure is a little rough. Maybe the residents don’t care much. The only people on foot in the district seemed to be tourists, singly or in tour groups.

Never mind, it’s a good place for a walk, if you pay attention, and even when the Southern sun begins to beat down, as it did late on the morning of May 14. Sometimes shade is there for the taking.

The trees part to reveal some fine houses.

My favorite among those I saw, though of course that was a small fraction of the area’s visual richness.
Our walk took us past some houses marked as historic, such as the Goldsmith-Godchaux House.
Alas, it seems to be noted more for its invisible (to us) interior than the exterior, though that’s nice enough. The plaque outside says: “Designed by noted nineteenth century architect Henry Howard in 1859. Significant for its painted interiors. Has more fresco wall decoration and stenciling than probably any other mid-nineteenth century residence in the South.”

It occurred to me, walking along and sweating, that the Garden District represents 19th-century urban sprawl. New development is often spoken of as if it’s kudzu, which grows willy-nilly and takes over the place. This is nonsense, since residential development follows demand, though infrastructure spending helps facilitate it (in the 20th century, that means you, Robert Moses).

In any case, the demand was there after New Orleans became part of the United States, since the new English-speaking population didn’t particularly want to live with the Creoles in the Vieux Carré. They probably considered the old city an old dump.

Who started subdividing the plantations that used to be the Garden District? I had to find out. A singularly interesting character named Barthélémy Lafon, a Frenchman who seems to have skipped out on the Revolution, coming to New Orleans in 1789.

According to 64 Parishes, “Barthélémy Lafon enjoyed a long and diverse career in Louisiana as an architect, builder, engineer, surveyor, cartographer, town planner, land speculator, publisher, and pirate.”

My italics. Though it seems like he was more of a rich-man sponsor of pirates than someone who went to sea in search of booty. Even pirates need seed capital.

Down on Magazine St., we walked by some interesting commercial structures, such this one at the corner of Magazine and Jackson.

As it says, the building is home to Koch & Wilson Architects, who (I found out) are restoration specialists. Good for them. A fine thing to be in New Orleans. Among other things, the firm restored the nearby St. Mary’s Assumption. Sadly, we couldn’t get in to see that.

On the first floor of the Koch and Wilson Architects building is a flag shop, a deli and a doughnut shop (and H&R Block, but never mind). How cool a tenant roster is that?
We stopped by for doughnuts, and coldbrew coffee for Lilly. The shop served large and pricey hipster doughnuts, something not especially distinctive to New Orleans, but who cares. They were good.

Walking down Magazine, you come across this curiosity.
I’d look that up, but I’d rather not know exactly what you’d see there. We all need a little mystery, even in the age of Google.

Down the other direction on Magazine is a joint after my own heart, but we didn’t stop in.
I couldn’t visit the Garden District without dropping in on Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. It was a more popular place than most cemeteries I’ve been to.

The collection of tombs is similar to that of Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1, a mix of maintained and crumbling examples.
The cemetery had better shade than Saint Louis, mostly in the form of sheltering magnolias, and wider avenues of the dead in some places.
Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 also has some collective tombs. This one says Jefferson Fire Company, 1852.
Here’s one for orphans.
Society for the Relief of Destitute Orphan Boys, 1894. If that isn’t Victorian nomenclature, I don’t know what is.

The National WW II Museum

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World War II was a big war, and it has an impressively big museum in New Orleans, the National WW II Museum, which we visited on May 14. The focus isn’t the whole — that’s too big — but rather the American part in the global conflict. A big enough subject.

All together, the museum includes five buildings of more than one story each, artifacts large and small, a vast number of words to read with the exhibits, and dozens of continuous video presentations.

The building reminded me a bit of the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building, but a different architect did the work, Bart Voorsanger.

The structure isn’t finished yet. Looks like the wing-like-thing (wing of victory?) is being added right now.

A museum of this scope is exhaustive and exhausting, but I’m getting old. It has a lot of ground to cover, of course, but more than that the museum needs heft to amplify the war’s increasingly dim echo as time passes. It’s mostly vanished from living memory.

The Second World War was my parents’ war, so when I was growing up, the echo was pretty loud, largely in the torrent of books and movies and TV shows dealing with the war. Some of my earliest memories of watching TV include Combat! and The Rat Patrol, to use examples of televised WWII fiction more and less serious. The details of the war might have faded some by the time I came along — it was years before I got Bugs Bunny’s joke about A cards at the end of “Falling Hare” — but the big picture was still clear.

Time passes, even the big picture fades. Just look at what has happened to the Great War. It’s all we can do that they shall not grow old.

So the National WWII Museum starts off big, with a Douglas C-47 Skytrain hanging from the ceiling over the entrance and ticketing counter, which is in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion.
On the floor is a replica LCVP, built from original plans. This kind of boat is pretty much the reason the museum is in New Orleans.
As an acronym, LCVP is about as standard Army as you can get: “landing craft, vehicle, personnel.” Less formally, they’re Higgins boats, designed by Andrew Higgins and built en masse during the war by Higgins Industries of New Orleans.

Wiki describes the usefulness of the boats well: “The Higgins boat was used for many amphibious landings, including Operation Overlord on D-Day in Nazi German-occupied Normandy, and previously Operation Torch in North Africa, the Allied invasion of Sicily, Operation Shingle and Operation Avalanche in Italy, Operation Dragoon, as well as in the Pacific Theatre at the Battle of Guadalcanal, the Battle of Tarawa, the Battle of the Philippines, the Battle of Iwo Jima and the Battle of Okinawa.”

Pretty much a greatest hits of U.S. amphibious landings during the war. In its early days, beginning in 2000, the museum focused on D-Day exclusively, so what better place than the city where the Higgins boats were built?

Upstairs in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion is a floor devoted to the U.S. industrial production so critical to victory. As the museum notes, “By the time the Japanese surrendered in 1945… American manufacturers had turned out more than 96,000 bombers, 86,000 tanks, 2.4 million trucks, 6.5 million rifles, and billions of dollars’ worth of supplies to equip a truly global fighting force.”

A number of artifacts illustrate the Arsenal of Democracy, such as a jeep chassis.
Along with smaller items, such as the cigarettes, chocolate and gum that made a soldier’s lot slightly more bearable.
A machine to make dog tags.
They actually were an innovation just before WWI, at least as far as Americans were concerned. For millennia, many men went off to war and simply vanished. I remember, for instance, seeing at Gettysburg National Cemetery row upon row of stones marked UNKNOWN.

Also in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion is the D-Day exhibit. As the original crux of the museum, it’s very detailed, with artifacts, images, reading material and more. The rooms reminded me of the Musée du Débarquement Arromanches in Normandy, though that facility had the advantage of looking out on the remains of one of the artificial harbors used during the landing.

A copy of the Order of the Day, June 6, 1944, along with French currency presumably carried by soldiers. Notes, not coins.

Another building, Campaigns of Courage, highlights the course of the war in the European and Pacific theaters with artifacts, photos, movies, text and some elaborate diorama-like sections that visitors walk through.

In Europe, for example, the Seige of Bastogne, done to look like snowy woods, though without the freezing temps. In the Pacific, the Guadalcanal Campaign, done to look like a tropical rain forest, though without the venomous bugs. There’s only so much verisimilitude a museum can do.

It took quite a while to work our way through these exhibits and, as usual, I knew we were absorbing only a small fraction of what they had to offer. So it is with large museums.

About 20 minutes before the museum closed, we arrived at the U.S. Freedom Pavilion: The Boeing Center. On display are airplanes, as you’d expect. Hanging from the high ceiling.
The centerpiece of the display is My Gal Sal, a B-17E Flying Fortress, one of only three or four such warplanes still in existence.

You can ride up to the fourth floor and look down on the plane.
Heights don’t usually bother me from behind a secure railing, but looking down from above the plane, with it filling the void below me, made me a little unsettled.

My Gal Sal probably survived because bad weather forced it to land in the wilds of Greenland in 1942, and it couldn’t fly again. The crew survived, but the plane stayed on the ice, not to be salvaged until the 1990s and restored in the early 21st century.

The Cathedral-Basilica of Saint Louis, King of France

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We couldn’t very well wander by St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter without stopping for a closer look. In full, the Cathedral-Basilica of Saint Louis, King of France. The structure took its current form in 1850.
Facing toward the altar.

Looking back.
A most handsome interior, with stained glass depicting the life Louis IX, and paintings and statuary, including Joan of Arc. I was especially intrigued by the flags. More than you usually see in a church.

Hanging on the right, as you face the altar, are flags that have flown over New Orleans, and it looks like a completist assemblage: Castile and León, Bourbon France, Bourbon Spain, the Union Jack, the Republic of France, the flag of the United States in 1803, the Republic of West Florida, the state of Louisiana, the state flag of Confederate Louisiana, and the Stars and Bars.

On the left side are a modern U.S. flag, the Vatican flag, and flags of the dioceses of the metropolitan province of New Orleans. That includes the suffragan dioceses of Alexandria, Baton Rouge, Houma-Thibodaux, Lafayette, Lake Charles, and Shreveport, but I couldn’t say which are which.

The altar and above.
I visit a lot of churches these days. If a church building is unlocked, I’ll go in for a look. But that wasn’t a habit I had when I was young. Certainly not much before 1981, when I visited the cathedral for the first time. Wish I could remember the tinge of awe that I must have felt then.

No matter. St. Louis Cathedral impresses even in my church-visiting middle age.

A Few New Orleans Statues, With Some Opinions

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As of May 2019, Gen. Andrew Jackson still rides his steed at Jackson Square in New Orleans, the dramatic centerpiece of a handsome public space.
The equestrian bronze, by notable 19th-century sculptor Clark Mills, has been there since 1856, when the Battle of New Orleans was still in living memory, at least among the old timers. I understand the monument is a target of removalists, so there might come a day when Jackson Square loses its man on horseback and becomes Something Else Square.

That’s New Orleans’ decision. Yet I’m not persuaded Jackson should go, for all his retroactively understood flaws. It’s one thing to remove monuments to those who actively sought disunion because they feared to lose their human property. Jackson and his men defeated an invading army on American soil near New Orleans. As president, he had no use for disunion, either. Just ask John C. Calhoun.

During our last day in New Orleans, Lilly and I visited the National WW II Museum, and to do so we got off the St. Charles streetcar at Lee Circle (as Google Maps calls it). Looking back at the circle, we saw an empty pedestal.

That’s odd, I said to Lilly. But I must have known at some time — I’d ridden on the St. Charles line decades earlier — that a statue of Robert E. Lee used to stand atop the pedestal. I’d forgotten. I don’t ever remember taking a close look at the Lee statue, since I haven’t always watched for monuments as much as I do now.

Just yesterday, it occurred to me to look up Lee Circle, and was reminded that removal activists were able to persuade New Orleans to take down Lee and three other monuments in 2017. Sic transit gloria mundi, Gen. Lee.

Of course, there are many ideas about a new statue to put on Lee’s former spot. Among this selection, the one I like best on prima facie examination is the relatively unknown J. Lawton Collins, a New Orleans native and important commander during WWII. He’s also appropriate because the museum devoted to that war is mere blocks away. Or if a strictly military option is out, Andrew Higgins, of Higgins boat fame, seems reasonable.

Here’s another statue that has gained the ire of removalists: Chief Justice of the United States Edward Douglass White Jr., who had a long and varied career but sided with the majority on the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson decision. (Most sources double that s in his middle name, but the statue does not.)

The chief justice stands on Royal St. in front of the major edifice housing the Louisiana Supreme Court, a building whose reputation has varied across the decades. We just happened to walk by.

Later I wondered, what’s the state supreme court doing in New Orleans and not Baton Rouge? Guess as far as the court is concerned, Baton Rouge is a johnny-come-lately capital, having that title only since 1846.

Chief Justice White would be a harder nut to crack for the removalists than Lee, simply because among the generally ahistoric American people, whipping up righteous outrage about someone as obscure as White would be a tall order. But it might happen.

In Louis Armstrong Park, where we had a pleasant stroll despite the increasing heat, there are plenty of statues that will probably last a good long time. Satchmo himself certainly deserves to.
Elizabeth Catlett did the bronze, which was dedicated in 1980.

Other metal jazzmen grace the park, such as a marching brass band by sculptor and New Orleans native Sheleen Jones-Adenle, erected in 2010.
Here’s a tripartite statue of foundational jazzman Charles ‘Buddy’ Bolden created by sculptor Kimberly Dummons, also from 2010. Such triple figures aren’t common, but not unknown.

In Congo Square, there’s a vivid sculptural relief by Nigerian-born artist Adéwálé Adénlé fittingly called “Congo Square,” another of the 2010 class of works in the park.

That hardly covers everything in Louis Armstrong Park. Whoever Mike is, he made good images of these and other sculptures there.

Next to the French Market, at St. Philip and Decatur Sts., is Maid of Orleans, a gift from France to New Orleans and erected in 1972.
A replica of the 1880 Emmanuel Frémiet equestrian statue of Joan of Arc in Place des Pyramids in Paris, the Maid used to be at the foot of Canal St., but when a casino was developed there, she moved to her present location in the Quarter.

One more: A seated statue of Francis Xavier Seelos.
Francis Xavier Seelos statueHow we came see that statue, during our walkabout in the Garden District, is slightly convoluted. But that’s never stopped me from pursuing a destination.

While relaxing at the Chateau Hotel during the second evening, I queued up “Pearl of the Quarter,” a dulcet song about a New Orleans long gone and which never quite was. One of its lines: “I met my baby by the shrine of the martyr.”

A flight of Steely Dan fancy, I’m sure, but if you Google around using that term and “New Orleans,” pretty soon you come across the National Shrine of Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos at St. Mary’s Assumption Church in New Orleans. Which just happened to be not too far from where we were going to go the next day.

So we visited the shrine and its reliquary, which are separated from the nave of the church by a wall and a door — locked. We didn’t get to see the interior of the church as a result, which I understand is well worth seeing.

The seated statue is in the hallway outside the shrine itself, which includes a number of exhibits about Fr. Seelos, a Redemptorist from Bavaria, along with many relics and a more conventional standing statue of him at the end of the hall.

Fr. Seelos, for his part, was beatified by the church in 2000. He came to New Orleans as a missionary in the 1866.

“As pastor of the Church of St. Mary of the Assumption, he was… joyously available to his faithful and singularly concerned for the poorest and the most abandoned,” Seelos.org says.

“In God’s plan, however, his ministry in New Orleans was destined to be brief. In the month of September, exhausted from visiting and caring for the victims of yellow fever, he contracted the dreaded disease. After several weeks of patiently enduring his illness, he passed on to eternal life on October 4, 1867.”

Nicolas Cage, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans & the Young Cemetery Enthusiast

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Back again on Tuesday, after Memorial Day.

These days, you need to be part of an organized tour to legally visit Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans, though considering that city’s reputation, I expect people still slip in. But I wanted to do things the official way, so on the morning of May 13, Lilly and I were part of a Free Tours on Foot tour of the historic cemetery. That’s a pay-what-you-will organization whose tours I first enjoyed in Charleston, SC.

Actually, not free in this case, even if you’re a wanker who doesn’t tip the guide at the end of the tour, since the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans, owner of the cemetery, demands a $2 fee per person paid upfront. Not that onerous, and I hope that it all goes to maintenance of the place. (Also, I tipped our guide, since I’m not going to be that wanker.)

New Orleans cemeteries famously sport above-ground tombs, a feature I long believed stemmed from the region’s high water table. That seems to be a common notion, repeated in guidebooks in an earlier time, and on many web sites more recently.

Our guide, an earnest young man and New Orleans history buff, told us otherwise.
What he said was pretty much in line with how an interesting web site called Interesting Thing of the Day explains it: “Tour guides seldom mention that above-ground burial was a common practice in both France and Spain, where many of the early settlers were from. Even without the resurfacing coffins — which, by the way, were the exception rather than the rule — this practice may well have been adopted simply to keep with tradition. In any case, this method is still widely used today, even though the water table has dropped considerably over the past two centuries as nearby marshes and swamps were drained.

“In New Orleans… bodies are usually placed inside the walls of the tombs. Because of the hot, subtropical climate, the tomb then effectively becomes an oven, and the high heat causes the body to decompose rapidly in a process that has been compared to a slow cremation. Within about a year, only bones are left.

“Just as an oven would not be constructed to bake a single loaf of bread, the tombs in New Orleans cemeteries are used again and again. The specifics vary depending on the exact design of the tomb, but a typical scenario is that after a year, the bones of the departed are swept into an opening in the floor of the tomb, which is then ready for its next occupant. It is a common practice to bury all the members of a family — or multiple families — in the same tomb, with names and dates added to a plaque or headstone as necessary.”

Overall, Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 has the look and feel of a dense necropolis, with avenues of the dead running between the tombs.
Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 Some of the tombs — a good many — are well maintained. Others, not so much.

We saw a number of examples of tombs used by many occupants over the years, including those of mutual aid societies established in New Orleans in the 19th century. The most ornate of these is the New Orleans Italian Mutual Benevolent Society’s tomb.

Architect Pietro Gualdi designed the tomb in the mid-1850s and went as far as inscribing his name on it. The tomb’s 24 vaults were for the temporary use of the society’s members, with its basement serving as an ossuary. The guide said that Gualdi died of one of the diseases that killed a lot of people in 19th-century New Orleans, maybe malaria, and was one of the first people interred in his creation (Wiki asserts malaria for sure).

Another collective tomb: the Orleans Battalion of Artillery.

Its plaque says:

Within this burial memorial rest some of the gallant defenders of New Orleans, members of the battalion which fought in honor on the plains of Chalmette on January 8, 1815 against the British invaders.

Date of construction is unknown.

Restored in 1974

Naturally the tour went by one of the cemetery’s odder tombs — that commissioned by actor Nicolas Cage, presumably to bake his mortal remains when the time comes.
Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 Nicholas CageI’ve read he’s gotten a lot of flack for it. The tomb does look a little out of place, but then again, pyramids aren’t unknown in cemeteries — and why do all the tombs need to be rectangular? Also, the archdiocese clearly signed off on the thing, presumably persuaded by the actor’s payment of a generous fee.

In a century, tours will probably pass by the pyramid, by that time stained and a little crumbled, and explain that an eccentric movie actor had it built for himself in the early 21st century. Maybe the guide will have to explain what a movie was. And say that the actor supposedly believed in the power of voodoo to revive him, and in fact practiced voodoo himself.

I made that last part up as an example of a story someone might tell in the future. After all, such stories occasionally cling to someone long after their death. Take the example of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen, whose tomb the tour visited last (she’s there with a number of other people, per cemetery custom).
Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 Marie LaveauMarie LaRoadside America: “Marie Laveau ran a New Orleans hairdressing salon during the day, but on her off-hours she was (supposedly) the Voodoo Queen, sought after for her potions and charms that would bring love or money to those willing to pay the price.

“Laveau died in 1881, but a tradition later developed that she could still grant favors from beyond the grave if believers either left offerings or scrawled three Xs on her tomb. This resulted in what was clearly the messiest grave in the U.S., and caused no end of headaches for local preservationists, who had to constantly clean and repair the tomb only to have it trashed again.

“They finally had enough and, on March 1, 2015, the cemetery was declared off-limits to all tourists except tour groups led by licensed tour guides.”

Marie Laveau’s grave is clean white these days, though if you look closely enough, you can see traces of those Xs drawn on the stone. As for Mme. Laveau’s skills in the voodoo arts, the guide suggested we take those stories with grains of salt. I will. New Orleans seems to have more than her share of such stories, yet we love her for it.

Usually members of a tour like this don’t have that many questions, but one young woman — college age, I think, on the tour with her mother — peppered the guide with an unusual number of questions that betrayed a strong interest in cemeteries and funerary practices.

The tour wound down at the Basin St. Station, a redevelopment between the cemetery and Louis Armstrong Park that has a New Orleans visitors center, exhibits and event space. A few of us stayed there to speak with the guide a little longer, and he and I and the young cemetery enthusiast started comparing notes about cemeteries worth visiting. I suggested Green-Wood in Brooklyn and Woodland in Dayton, though of course I can never remember its name. One suggestion of his — or hers — was Akaroa Cemetery in New Zealand, which I have to say does look pretty cool.

Formerly the Chateau Motor Hotel

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Recently I became re-acquainted with these fellows. Cement puti, I guess.

These figures as well.

They all can be found in the pleasant but hardly opulent courtyard of the Hotel Chateau in the French Quarter. The figures were there when I first visited New Orleans in 1981 and stayed at the hotel. They stood in the courtyard when I went back in 1989. They may only be ordinary stone, but they abide.

The hotel abides. Its history? The hotel web site page called History is remarkably free of any actual information on the subject. Enough to know that it’s an old place. This is the Vieux Carré, after all.

A little context. The first group of figures is one of a set that stand between a tall brick wall and a small swimming pool that’s the centerpiece of the courtyard.
The other figures decorate a small fountain near the courtyard entrance.

As far as I can tell, or remember, the hotel and its courtyard haven’t changed much in the nearly four decades since I first saw it. The walls looked old then, as they do now. The rooms seemed equally old, yet comfortable enough, then as now.

But memory across decades is always dodgy, and since my previous visits involved taking no pictures of the place, I can’t really say what it used to be like, except that the figures and pool were there.

It might astonish later generations, but none of the four of us took a camera on our three-day trip to New Orleans in 1981. For her part, Lilly did what people now do on such as trip: a running commentary to friends elsewhere, especially highlighting the food by transmitting images of it. Well, why not? If we’d had the same electronic gizmos, we would have done the same.

The view from the entrance of the courtyard.

The view from the second-story balcony. Our room was up there.

We could have stayed any number of places in New Orleans, or in the French Quarter, for that matter. I didn’t consider the Hotel Chateau overpriced, so that was a factor in deciding the stay there again. Its location at the corner of St. Phillip St. and Chartres St. is excellent, and that was a factor as well.
But the main reason we stayed there, beginning on May 12, was nostalgia. My own nostalgia for the place. Nostalgia might be derided as a kind of weepy foolishness, but I believe a dose of it now and then is a balm for the stress of the present, whatever that might be. A dose of personal nostalgia, that is, not the kind sold in stores.

Back in the 1980s, the property was called the Chateau Motor Hotel. I have a room service menu, dating from 1989, to prove it. I used it for note-taking on that trip. I might not have taken many pictures then (I had a camera the second time), but I filled four pages with notes about what we did.

This is only speculation, but at some point someone, maybe a new owner, decided that “motor” was déclassé, and the word was dumped. It’s entirely likely that in some earlier decade, say the 1950s, “motor” was added to the name because it sounded modern.

I don’t know why we stayed there the first time. One of my other companions had arranged the stay, maybe because another friend or relative had stayed there even earlier. It was a pre-Google, pre-Trip Advisor time. So our stay in 2019 originated in word-of-mouth very likely over 40 years old.

During that first visit, we spent at least one evening splashing around the pool — at its size, swimming wasn’t much of an option — and talking the banter and nonsense you find in a small group of friends. With one exception, I don’t remember any of it. I do remember a fairly involved discussion of the precise lyrics and larger meaning of “Across the Universe.”

When Lilly and I were sitting in the courtyard reading late one afternoon during this stay, two young men and a woman came to splash around in the pool. They were probably a little older than we were in the early ’80s, but not much. Their own banter and nonsense soon started.

Southern Loop ’19

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Just back from a driving trip whose mileage I didn’t bother to keep track of, but it was in the thousands. Actually, only part driving. Lilly and I flew separately from Chicago to Dallas earlier this month so she could take possession of her new car — an ’05 Mazda 3 that her uncle Jay gave her, provided we could drive it from north Texas to northern Illinois. The car rattled and occasionally made other odd noises, but soldiered on all the way.

The uninspired thing to do that would have been to drive straight through, which normally would take two days by breaking the trip in Missouri, such as at the Munger Moss.

Despite being a driving trip, that would be a pedestrian way to do it. Instead I took a week off so we could take a more interesting route. We left Dallas on May 11, heading south to the vicinity of Schulenburg, Texas, to visit some of the Painted Churches, which were built by late 19th-century German and Czech congregations who gave them richly artistic interiors — all the more interesting because much of it is vernacular art.

Rain came day most of that first day on the road, but we didn’t encounter any more until yesterday in Nashville. In between the days were sunny and often hot. Everyone we talked to about the weather reported a wet spring, however, and the Southern landscape looked lush, from Texas into the Deep South and up through Tennessee.

We spent the first night in Houston. I didn’t plan it this way, but our time in Houston focused on water features: the Waterwall near the Galleria Mall that first evening (the rain was over) and Buffalo Bayou and the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern during the next morning.

The next day we drove to New Orleans, a city I haven’t visited in 30 years, and one new to Lilly, and spent two days and three nights.

We ate very well. We saw excellent live music. We rode streetcars and walked the streets of the French Quarter, Treme and the Garden District. We toured one cemetery formally and one informally, and we visited the National WW II Museum.

On May 15, we drove to suburban Jackson, Mississippi, by way of the city of Natchez and the Natchez Trace to visit our cousin Jay and his wife Kelly, who hospitably put us up for the night.

The next day we passed through Philadelphia, Mississippi, my father’s home town, stopping for a short visit — Lilly had never been there — and then went to Montgomery, Alabama, where we spent the night.

On the morning of May 17, we saw the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, both only open since last year, and the very different Alabama State Capitol, because I visit capitols when I can.

Leaving Montgomery in the early afternoon, we had enough time to visit the Ave Marie Grotto, not far north of Birmingham, and then spent the night of May 17 in Decatur, Alabama. The next morning I took a short walkabout near the Tennessee River and along Bank St., named for a handsome bank building there dating from the 1830s.

By that afternoon, we were in Nashville to visit some of my dear old friends, including one I hadn’t seen or enjoyed the fine company of since 1990. Today we did the long drive from Nashville to greater Chicago — I used to do it fairly often — arriving this evening.

Mostly, things went smoothly. Even traffic wasn’t that bad most of the time in the cities we passed through.

But while driving along Rodney Road in rural Mississippi outside Port Gibson and not far from the mighty river of that name, we suddenly came to this.
That’s stagnant algae-filled water, completely covering the road. For as far as we could see into the distance. Who knows how deep it is. So we backtracked on Rodney to the main road at that point, which happened to be the Natchez Trace.

Audubon Zoo, 1989

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One of the places you can visit riding the St. Charles Streetcar Line in New Orleans, if you’ve a mind to, is Audubon Park. That’s what we did May 1989, even though it was (of course) hot and sticky that day. The park is home to the Audubon Zoo. Just the thing when you’ve had enough, for the moment, of the human-oriented diversions of the French Quarter.

These days there are about 2,000 animals in residence. It probably wasn’t much different then, spread out on 58 acres between St. Charles and the Mississippi, with a good many open-air exhibits. I don’t specifically remember Monkey Hill, but the story about that rise — built by the WPA — is that it was used to show local children what a hill looked like.

That wouldn’t have made much of an impression on me, considering that I came a place with hills. One time my friend Tom and I took a visitor from the East Coast to a substantial hill in Austin, and walked up it, just for the purpose of curing her of the notion that “Texas is flat.”

We took an amble through the zoo, seeing the likes of ostriches.

Audubon Zoo 1989-1And rhinos. Or is that a hippo out of the water? I can’t quite tell just looking at the picture. Not visible here, but I’m pretty sure we saw a number of gators lurking around these waters.

Audubon Zoo 1989-2Then there was this fellow.

Audubon Zoo gorilla 1989As far as I can tell, that’s not Casey the gorilla, who seems to be locally known but who didn’t arrive at the zoo until long after we’d been there.