‘N.Y. state of mind’ in New Orleans
By: Arnold Bornstein
Just about everybody told us New Orleans is a great place to visit and how much they loved it. We got back a week ago from our first trip there and while we had a very good time, we didn’t love it, and I’m wondering if thoughts about a state of mind, public relations, and growing up and living in the New York area have something to do with it.
New Orleans is a fun city, and staying as we did in the French Quarter at a hotel on Bourbon Street which is like a lengthy, boisterous, open-air disco that never seems to close you get much of the flavor of what the city is supposed to be. We happened to be there during the college Spring Break, which added to the uproar.
The city of some 497,000 has the nation’s third largest lake on one side and the banks of the Mississippi River on the other side and seemingly likes the nickname of "The City that Care Forgot." The tourist bureau emphasizes that the good times roll constantly, particularly in the 70-block French Quarter, which was the city’s original settlement, and which today is a mix of diverse neighborhoods, music-blaring bars and bistros, souvenir shops, restaurants, street performers, strip joints and French-Spanish architecture with ornamented balconies.
There’s much more than the French Quarter, of course, with a central business district that contains a Harrah’s Casino and major hotels and stores as well as Canal Street, which reminds you of a major Manhattan thoroughfare. Historic landmarks are abundant, as are the amenities and sites and residential areas that you would expect in any major city.
Being used to Manhattan, I tried to focus on what distinguishes New Orleans as a major tourist city. The emphasis apparently is on its Old World charm, a laid-back and fun-loving atmosphere and tourist stops that range from jazz spots to cemeteries and voodoo sites.
And yet, I got the impression that many of the college kids (and adults) on Bourbon Street or South Beach in Florida and elsewhere, for that matter seemed to be working hard to answer the old line, "Are we having fun yet?" For all of us frequently join the quest for the sometimes elusive good times, in contrast to our everyday toil.
One recalls the lyrics of the musical, "Cabaret": "What good is sitting…alone in your room. Come, hear the music play. Life is a cabaret, ole chum…come to the cabaret." One also recalls Billy Joel’s lyrics in "New York State of Mind." It’s about a wandering New Yorker and yearning for home: "Some folks like to get away, take a holiday, from the neighborhood." But he concludes: "I’m just taking a Greyhound on the Hudson River Line, ’cause I’m in a New York state of mind."
In other words, wherever we wander, to what degree is the pursuit of leisure a state of mind and a product of Chamber of Commerce and tourist bureau public relations? Also, does living in the New York area give you a been-there, done-that view of other cities?
At any rate, the Mardi Gras and the Super Bowl were considerably before our arrival, but we sampled the Cajun and Creole cooking (spiced and fried), jambalaya (shellfish or chicken with rice and vegetables), turtle soup, crawfish, beignets (square doughnuts without holes and covered with powder sugar), cafe au lait (half-strong chicory coffee and half-hot milk), and a po-boy and a muffuletta (both sandwiches).
Each night we strolled along Bourbon Street, which is a lot different from Applegarth Road in Monroe, Railroad Avenue in Jamesburg and Main Street in Cranbury. On Bourbon Street, strollers are allowed to walk along with their alcoholic drinks provided that they are in plastic cups and not glass. Booming music, live and recorded, literally blasts out at you on both sides, guys on the balconies of hotels or bars are shouting and trying to make contact with women passersby, and there are various spectacles of humanity that your imagination could visualize.
There’s a bar and restaurant off Bourbon Street called Pat O’Brien’s, which is renowned for a drink called the Hurricane. The 28-ounce, ice-filled mixture consists of citric fruit flavors and an overpowering shot of dark rum. We sipped ours slowly, but our two good friends truly felt its aftermath.
Burial in New Orleans cemeteries is mostly above ground in stacked mausoleum-style because of problems with water levels.
Jazz is perpetuated in a place called Preservation Hall, which could be labeled a wooden "fire trap," but in which old and new jazz musicians play to a rotating, mostly standing crowd packed into a small room. At the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, you can hear Armstrong’s (a New Orleans native) music playing softly over the public sound system.
We also toured the Garden District, with lovely homes and gardens and where novelist Anne Rice, who writes about vampires, lives. In fact, we took a vampire-ghost-voodoo tour and our guide told us many stories, including the vampire-like Carter brothers in the 1930s. However, a New Orleans reporter researched the story in newspaper archives and indicated it was fabricated nonsense.
In any case, myth and reality mingle in every great city. The New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, Visitors Bureau and Visitors Information Center can all rest easy in "The Big Easy" (New Orleans’ nickname). New Orleans is truly a fun city.
I also like, however, what writer Gertrude Stein reportedly said: "There’s only New York. Every place else is Cleveland."
We haven’t been to Cleveland yet.