The Spirit of the Crescent City

An autumn search for old New Orleans.

by

Cities have spirits. You can call it “atmosphere” or “vibe,” but it’s the feeling you get walking around a place and paying attention. In my view, no city in North America has a stronger spirit than New Orleans, Louisiana. It’s a place whose culture has had a deep and lasting effect on our country. Its people have endured great tragedy. Through it all, it’s a place that protects its unique identity.

Living in the Central Business District

New Orleans exists because of its position close to the mouth of the Mississippi River. The port city has always been a place where travelers mixed, and left behind traces of their own cultures. In a city anchored by the hospitality industry, the Windsor Court is one of the grande dames. The hotel opened in 1984 to host visitors to the Louisiana World Exposition, and it was our home base on a recent trip

“The founder was James Coleman,” says Isabella Marciante, marketing and communications manager for the hotel. “Born in New Orleans, he was an Oxford graduate, and he just loved everything about England. We’re a very French- and Spanish-inspired city. When he came back here, he wanted something sort of Anglophile.” Coleman’s 2019 obituary states that he was “the longest serving British honorary consul worldwide,” and that Queen Elizabeth II “made him one of few Americans appointed as both a member of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1986 and Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2015.”

The lobby is one of those sprawling, comfortable gathering spaces that used to be a fixture in luxury hotels. Its centerpiece is a model of Windsor Castle created in the 1820s by architect Sir Jeffry Wyatville to show King George IV how his proposed renovations would look.

The miniature castle is part of the hotel’s $10 million art collection, most of which came from Coleman himself, and includes paintings by Anthony van Dyck and Thomas Gainsborough. The rooms are spacious and well-appointed, but what really sets the Windsor Court apart is the staff’s confident professionalism. As New Orleans filmmaker Randy Mack explains, “They have a sort of casual vibe. They know how to cater to the elite, but it’s also chill — ‘don’t worry, we have this under control.’”

In a city filled with great food, the Windsor Court’s Grill Room is a top-tier option. From the Chateau Uenae Wagyu beef from Hokkaido, Japan, to the Loch Etive steelhead trout, every dish is exceptional. If you’re looking for a cocktail and conversation, the Polo Club Lounge is always busy on the weekends — especially if the New Orleans Saints are playing a home game in the nearby Superdome. If you’re seeking a unique Big Easy experience, try the traditional English afternoon tea at La Salon, where the beverage selection is as impeccable as the house-made scones.

The Windsor Court is located in the Central Business District, on the western edge of the French Quarter. New Orleans has had a lot of ups and downs in its 304-year history; in the 1980s, the area then known as the Warehouse District was in the midst of a down time. Then, in 1990, celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse left his post at Commander’s Palace in the Garden District and opened his own restaurant, Emeril’s, in the blighted neighborhood.

“When he opened that restaurant, they told him he was crazy,” says Marciante, “and it was going to fold, because you cannot get people to go to this neighborhood. Now, this is where there are so many restaurants and shopping and everything. It’s different from even a decade ago.”

Mother’s Restaurant, which opened in 1938, is one of the few places that has survived the decades Downtown. The cafeteria-style eatery claims to serve the world’s best ham. Joe Balderas, the general manager, says they source their ham from Chisesi Bros., a Louisiana company that has been in business for 112 years. “It’s the same company. They did change locations, because when Katrina came by, they were underwater. So now they’re in Jefferson [Parish], but it’s the same people. Everything’s still the same. We don’t like to change anything.”

“I think we have an obligation to protect the city, and I think that means protecting the environment, protecting the community, making sure that people are educated, and the infrastructure’s safe.” — Isabella Marciante, Windsor Court

Mother’s serves breakfast all day, and offers no-nonsense, definitive takes on classics of Cajun and Creole cuisine such as jambalaya, gumbo, and étoufée. The restaurant is the birthplace of the ‘debris,’ a roast beef po’ boy served in a distinctive gravy. “We braise the meat on the bone right here in the kitchen,” says Balderas.

New Orleans is a food-forward city that embraces all cuisines. Just around the corner from Mother’s on Tchapitoulous Street is Geisha Sushi Bistro, where the chefs take full advantage of the fresh seafood that comes into New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico. Geisha plays all the sushi hits well, and adds their own innovations such as the White Ninja, a spicy tuna, cucumber, and cilantro combo topped with slices of albacore and jalapeño, finished with wasabi cream and ponzu sauces.

The restaurants that make up the city’s rich culinary heritage were hit hard during the pandemic, and many are still struggling. Marciante says the hardships have given her a new perspective on the city’s unique status.

“My dad was a chef; his dad was a chef,” she says. “My mom was a bartender. It’s something I always took for granted. I knew that tourism and hospitality are very important, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that I realized: This is everything. Tourism is the rock that we stand on. It’s our bread and butter. I think we have an obligation to protect the city, and I think that means protecting the environment, protecting the community, making sure that people are educated, and the infrastructure’s safe. We all have an obligation to it.”

Ignatius J. Riley

In an unassuming alcove on Canal Street stands a life-sized, bronze statue of a pudgy man in a deerstalker cap. This is Ignatius J. Riley, the fictional hero of A Confederacy of Dunces, a darkly comedic novel written by John Kennedy Toole. In the book, Riley is an over-educated layabout who is forced to get a job. His extensive knowledge of Medieval history and literature serves only to alienate him from the modern world of 1960s New Orleans. Only his college friend, a beatnik named Myrna Minkoff, understands him.

Toole wrote the novel several years before he died at age 31 in 1969. Louisiana author Walker Percy was instrumental in finally getting it published in 1980, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year. The book’s vivid descriptions of Big Easy life still strike a chord with the city’s residents.

“The architecture here, Spanish and French, makes it good for filming. This whole place is like being on a movie set. You turn the corner, and you’re somewhere completelydifferent.”

— Jeff Pope

“I landed here at 10 p.m., August 29, 2014,” says actor Charlie Talbert. “You remember when you get out of your car in the heat of New Orleans and cicadas are flying around and you’ve got the rest of your future in front of you.”

Originally from the Midwest, Talbert came to New Orleans from Hollywood, looking for roles in the city’s then-burgeoning film scene. “The thing about living in New Orleans is that these people have been through some real stuff,” he says. “To see people come from anguish and just thrive, it really affects you in some way. So you’re trying to give a little back to them. I got a chance to play Ignatius Riley in A Confederacy at Dunces at the Tennessee Williams Festival in 2019. … I had never read or heard of the book until I came to New Orleans. I realized the history of the book is a story itself. [Toole’s] mother finding the carbon copy of the manuscript, him being rejected, him taking his own life in Mississippi. It’s a lore that there’s beauty within everybody here, and I think they grasped onto that, and I have a lot of respect for that. I think it’s not so much the character that’s special, it’s the story of how that character got out to the world.”

Beginning around 2010, many big film and television productions cropped up in New Orleans and Louisiana. Jeff Pope, an actor and native Memphian, moved to the city around that time. He and Talbert hang out at Mojo Coffee, a hub for film folk, where they can often be found sipping coffee and playing backgammon.

“The architecture here, Spanish and French, makes it good for filming,” says Pope. “This whole place is like being on a movie set. You turn the corner, and you’re somewhere completely different.”

Pope and Talbert can both be seen in the new AMC series Interview with the Vampire, based on the iconic horror novel series by New Orleans native Anne Rice. As for a film adaptation of A Confederacy of Dunces, don’t look for it any time soon, says Pope. “John Belushi was going to play [Riley], then he died. Then it was John Candy, then Chris Farley. That project is cursed.”

Talbert says that choosing New Orleans instead of Hollywood meant trading “large roles in small projects for smaller roles in large projects. … There’s so much culture here that you can’t help but learn something new every 15 seconds. And I’m not much of a drinker. So, living in New Orleans, it’s like, what are you doing here, guy?”

Talbert’s in luck: Many of the classic and craft cocktail bars now offer creative mocktail creations alongside the potent potables. Just down Magazine Street from Mojo Coffee House, tucked in between the vintage clothing shops, Peaches Records, and the upscale boutiques, is Saffron, an Indian restaurant that serves some of the best mocktails in the city, such as the Nahin Paloma, a mixture of pomegranate, grapefruit, lemon, lime, soda, and pink Himalayan salt. It’s proof (at zero proof) that New Orleans’ notoriously boozy culture is changing with the times.

Jazz and History

If there is a single place where the spirit of the city lives, it’s Preservation Hall in the heart of the French Quarter. Jazz began in the streets of New Orleans in the late nineteenth century. In the 1920s, Louis Armstrong, arguably the most important figure in American popular music, was instrumental in bringing the sound to the masses. By the late 1950s, Armstrong had fled the pervasive racism of the Jim Crow South and resettled in Brooklyn.

New Orleans jazz players started to thumb their noses at the segregation laws by playing integrated shows in an alley next to an art gallery on St. Peter Street. In 1961, Ken Grayson Mills and Barbara Reid took over the gallery and renamed it Preservation Hall. Allan Jaffe, a tuba player from Pennsylvania, gathered a crack band that quickly became famous.

“This is really a civil rights monument as well as a musical monument,” says Greg Lucas, executive director of the Preservation Hall Foundation. “When they took over the hall in 1961, they kind of flouted the segregation laws and just said, ‘We’re doing this, arrest us.’ Well, they got arrested, but eventually, Preservation Hall became the most storied and famous venue for the integration of jazz.”

New Orleans Jazz Fest also has its roots here. “Jazz Fest used to be in Armstrong Park right up here where Congress Square is,” says Lucas. “Allan Jaffe helped [musician and promoter] George Wein get it started, so Jazz Fest is really in the Preservation Hall history as well.”

Today, you can hear the music in an authentic venue the way it’s supposed to be heard — without any amplification. Sixty musicians rotate in and out of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, playing up close and personal with the crowds who line up before the doors open every day at 5 p.m. “We don’t sell alcohol. The only income is from ticket sales and merchandise,” says Lucas.

Walter Harris is one of the musicians the Preservation Hall Foundation kept on the payroll during the pandemic. He can be seen in the 2018 documentary about the band A Tuba to Cuba. He says that even though much of the music they play is a century old, “I feel very connected, because some of them are marches and a lot of them are spirituals. You have a spiritual connection, plus you have this connection from when we know that guys were actually marching in the fields during war time, playing these songs to keep their spirits up.

“There’s a real tradition here of, instead of learning something in a classroom, you learn through experiences and day-to-day living,” says Mack. “That’s how we learn history in New Orleans — everyone’s passing on these stories. It keeps us connected to the city’s past, and the deeper you get into the past of where you live, the more you want to protect.”

— Randy Mack

“These songs really have essence, and anything that we play, we take a part of it,” he continues. “Being a musician is totally vibration. When you’re using vibration and you’re delivering vibration, you have to feel it to deliver it. You’re taking part in the song, feeling the song. We very much live in those songs.”

Amid the tourist spots of Bourbon Street and the happy chaos of the French Market, the spirit of the French Quarter lives on at Muriel’s Jackson Square. Located in a building said to be haunted, the fine dining restaurant on the vieux carré is led by executive chef Erik Veney. The deep menu includes such delicacies as turtle soup au sherry (they’ll ask if you want more sherry added, but it’s fine as-is) and pain perdu bread pudding. Their fixed-price menu is a good way to get the most out of the meal without breaking the bank, and the ambiance is unparalleled.

Present-day New Orleans music can be heard in the venues that crowd Frenchman Street, and at the Saturn Bar, a 60-year-old music hall on St. Claude. Here, folks like filmmaker Randy Mack gather to catch the freshest acts. It’s the vibrant connection to the past that keeps him in New Orleans.

“Most cities in America seem to have historically protected a two-block area of downtown,” says Mack. “New Orleans has got the exact opposite of that. It’s like everything’s protected except our downtown. That’s why you only have tall buildings around the Central Business District. That’s why there’s no proliferation of fast-food and Starbucks and stuff here. That’s why the city is so mom-and-pop — old fashioned in the best way.”

For a real taste of old New Orleans, take a ride on a river ferry across the Mississippi to Algiers, the community where Louis Armstrong was born. “It’s the same architecture as the Quarter, but it’s untrammeled by 200 years of tourism,” says Mack.

Algiers was largely spared the destruction of Katrina. Even though you’re in sight of bustling Jackson Square, you can still have a quiet breakfast at the charming Tout de Suite café. A stroll on the levee reveals the best views of the city.

“There’s a real tradition here of, instead of learning something in a classroom, you learn through experiences and day-to-day living,” says Mack. “That’s how we learn history in New Orleans — everyone’s passing on these stories. It keeps us connected to the city’s past, and the deeper you get into the past of where you live, the more you want to protect. The erasure of the past in the rest of America is one of the problems with people’s lack of commitment to their own communities. It all goes hand in hand. It’s a virtuous cycle here which is constantly under attack, of course, but it’s still holding together.”