More About New Orleans
New Orleans is a city in southeastern Louisiana, on the Mississippi River, north of its entrance into the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans is the seat of, and coextensive with, Orleans Parish. Long known for its unique and vivid cultural blend, the city is now a major commercial and tourism center for the South and one of the busiest ports in the United States.
Known as "the Crescent City," because of the way it nestles between the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain and a dramatic horseshoe bend in the Mississippi River, there is a lot more than its tourist's image as a nonstop party town. At once sordid and sublime, it careers along under an infuriating doublethink. While having enormous amounts of fun, you're liable to be repeatedly struck by the divisions between rich and poor (and, more explicitly, between white and black). The mélange of cultures and races that built the city still gives it its heart; not ''easy,'' exactly, but quite unlike anywhere else in the States or the world.
Most visitors spend most time in the battered, charming old French Quarter (or Vieux Care), site of the original settlement. On its fringes, the funky Faubourg Marigny creeps northeast from Esplanade Avenue, while the Quarter's lakeside boundary, Rampart Street, marks the beginning of the historic, run-down African-American neighborhood of Tremé. A ferry ride across the river from the foot of Canal Street takes you to the suburban west bank and the residential district of old Algiers.
Back on the east bank, it's an easy journey upriver from the Central Business District to the rare-field Garden District, an area of gorgeous old mansions, some of them in delectable ruin. The Lower Garden District, creeping between the expressway and Jackson, is quite a different creature, its run-down old houses filled with impoverished artists and musicians. The best way to get to either neighborhood is on the streetcar along swanky St Charles Avenue, the Garden District's lakeside boundary; you can also approach it from Magazine Street, a six-mile stretch of galleries and antique stores that runs parallel to St Charles riverside. Entering the Garden District, you've crossed the official boundary into uptown, which spreads upriver to encompass Audubon Park and Zoo.
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