Updated September 2024

Driving across the intersection at Magazine and Napoleon Streets, I pass through a cloud of thousands of tiny soap bubbles floating across four street lanes from one side to the other. Then, as I turn the next corner, I stop for a pedestrian wearing a construction hard hat encrusted with small yellow rubber duckies—just another ordinary day in New Orleans.

From Beach to Bayou
I picked the dead of summer to move from the beach to the bayou—from the sandy shores of the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, California, where I could dip in the sea, to the shores of the Mississippi River in New Orleans, where one does not dare swim due to the strong currents and lurking alligators.

I traded mostly balmy temps for stifling heat and humidity and hand-massaged kale (not kidding) for cuisine that could send the healthiest person straight to the cardiac ward. But the Big Easy has loads of soul, great music, a festival every weekend, and very friendly total strangers who call me baby.

Ursulines Convent Garden.

Taking the City by Storm
Here in NOLA, the six-month hurricane season begins June 1 and lasts until November 30. When I relocated here in 208, the prediction included 14 named storms, six of which were forecasted to attain hurricane strength and two expected to be “major hurricanes.” Locals shrug it off like native Californians do about earthquakes.

Sign maker Simon Hardeveld is a NOLA icon whose signs are everywhere.

After battening down the hatches, some New Orleanians gather for hurricane parties as they track the storm, while others head out of town on “hurrications.” No wonder we have a popular drink, The Hurricane, a sweet and potent tropical rum cocktail with double the alcohol content of most drinks that can knock you out like a powerful storm. You’ll find them at Pat O’Brien’s (Pat O’s to locals) in the French Quarter, where I once came close to dancing barefoot on the table after consuming one.

Unlike the earthquakes of my native California, a hurricane offers you a little warning so there’s time to evacuate if needed or mandated. A neighbor recommended I empty the fridge and freezer so that the place won’t smell like a rotting dead body when I return after an extended power outage. She suggested I put any remaining items in a drawstring trash bag to keep things from melting and dripping. When I returned from my first hurricane experience after three weeks without power, I simply tossed the bags and aired out the fridge. That was the moment I became a bona fide New Orleanian.

Decorative tiles on many sidewalk corners identify the streets for those on foot.

Where’s ‘Dat Anyway?
Being geographically challenged, I knew that living where residents don’t navigate using north and south coordinates would not be a problem. Nobody here uses cardinal directions; they direct you to Uptown, Downtown, Riverside (Ol’ Man River, the Mississippi), or Lakeside (Lake Pontchartrain). Since NOLA is a bowl built on a swamp with 49% below sea level, the least flood-prone areas are on the edges of the bowl, either at the lake or the river (unless the flood walls and levees break).

Garden District Digs
My first New Orleans home was a shotgun single, a signature architectural style consisting of a long, narrow house–typically one room wide and three to five rooms deep–without hallways where one must pass through one room to get to another. The most famous legend is that the dwellings are called shotguns because one could “fire a shotgun through the house, and the blast will pass through the front door and out the back without hitting anything.” That would only be possible, of course, if nobody were inside at the time. Another folk tale is that shotguns were built narrowly because real estate tax was based on street frontage instead of square footage (this is false.) Most scholars contend that the design originated in West Africa and then migrated to the Caribbean before arriving in New Orleans in the early 1800s.

Along the Mardi Gras Parade Route 
On a tree-lined street in the Upper Garden District, my digs were not far from the river and a block off the Mardi Gras Magazine Street parade route. I soon discovered that New Orleans still has some strange archaic festival laws on the books. According to New Orleans Code Section 34-21, float riders must wear masks and are prohibited from throwing condoms or any insects, marine life, rodents, fowl, or other animals, dead or alive.

Festival revelers may not hurl Mardi Gras beads from a third-story window or tie their alligator to a fire hydrant, and no lizards or snakes are allowed within 200 yards of the parade.

Floats, Beads, King Cakes and Lots of Booze 

“An American,” Mark Twain once wrote, “has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi Gras in New Orleans.”

Mardi Gras isn’t a single day; it’s a two-month season. The Carnival celebrations begin in early January and continue until Mardi Gras Day usually at the end of February or early March. The krewes (social clubs that plan and stage parades and celebrations) and New Orleans marching bands launch the season by putting on several free parades and street parties. The festivities continue through “Fat Tuesday,” the culmination of the Carnival season. During this period, people will eat King Cakes–of which there are now about 70 varieties–don wild costumes, wear and throw beads, and drink copious amounts of alcohol on the streets because it’s legal to do so in NOLA.

Various parades travel different routes throughout the city. Uptown, floats will roll down St. Charles Avenue and Magazine Street, where the hordes gather to watch from the “neutral ground,” or median, the grassy patch of land that separates two sides of the street. People stand shoulder to shoulder with outstretched arms to catch the “throws”–the ubiquitous Mardi Gras beads, objects and trinkets that the Krewes (float riders) toss from the floats.

The festivities may end on Fat Tuesday, but remnants of Mardi Gras endure all year. Beads in the official Mardi Gras colors of purple, gold, and green will remain strung for months along fences, hanging from trees, and wrapped around parking meters–just about anywhere and everywhere. One year, after the city pulled out 93,000 pounds of beads from storm drains in a five-block stretch of St. Charles Avenue, they installed “gutter buddies” to allow drainage but block debris. Some krewes have started to produce biodegradable beads and throws, but generally, Mardi Gras is far from eco-friendly.

Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler (Let the Good Times Roll)
Locals and tourists head to Magazine Street for restaurants, clothing boutiques, and upscale interior design shops. The six-mile-long street follows the curve of the Mississippi, beginning downtown at Canal Street in the French Quarter and running uptown through the Garden District to Audubon Park on the other end. The popular shopping street is lined with restaurants, upscale boutiques, and interior design shops.

The French Quarter
There is more to the Quarters, as locals refer to the French Quarter than tourist-infested Bourbon Street. Visitors can enjoy the lesser-traveled streets lined with shops, galleries, restaurants, bars, and coffee places, including the world-renowned Cafe du Monde for powder sugar-doused beignets and cafe au lait.

Someone has an opinion. Side of newspaper box outside Surrey’s on Magazine. They have a great breakfast.

The donuts at District are so big they come in individual boxes. Try to finish one.

Urban Roots Garden Center has a shop for indoor gardening as well.

Rising Waters Maybe, But No Rising Ground
NOLA is flat. However, it has two small artificially constructed hills, including Monkey Hill in the Audubon Zoo, which the WPA built in the 1930s to give local children “the experience of a hill.”

City Park.

You won’t be scrambling over any steep ground along the 1.8-mile path that winds through Audubon Park, a bucolic space for walking, jogging, or cycling as it wraps around a par 62 golf course, passes by some calm lagoons and weaves beneath century-old oak trees dripping with Spanish Moss.

At 43 feet above sea level, Laborde Mountain in the Couturie Forest in City Park is New Orleans’s highest elevation point. One of the oldest parks in the country, City Park’s 1300-acre green space contains numerous trails, including the three-quarter-mile Zemurray Trail on Big Lake. I’ve spent many hours wandering around the 60 outdoor sculptures sprinkled about the park’s five-acre Besthoff Sculpture Garden and strolling through the Botanical Gardens, which features excellent examples of regional garden styles incorporating native plants.

As part of the post-Katrina revitalization, the city built a few trails for biking and walking. One of those is Crescent Park, a 1.4-mile trail on the banks of the Mississippi River. It begins just outside the French Quarter and Marigny neighborhoods and continues east through the Bywater, an area known for its bohemian, artistic vibe.

While I look forward to getting to know the city’s various neighborhoods, I’m also very aware that The Bywater, like many other parts of the city, such as the Marigny and Treme, is one of the neighborhoods where gentrification has displaced its original poorer residents.

Typical of urban gentrification, the more affluent folks in NOLA rebounded from Katrina and, along with newcomers, benefitted from the flat post-hurricane real estate prices. In contrast, the less fortunate residents could not rebuild with the meager FEMA funds they received and are now locked out of their former neighborhoods where bloated housing prices have risen beyond their means.

When in NOLA…
In a short time, I’ve learned important things like a “dressed” sandwich is one served with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and loads of mayo (“mynez”); one doesn’t shop for groceries, instead “makes groceries”; an alligator pear is an avocado; and the grassy area between lanes on a boulevard is not the median but the “neutral ground.”

Street names may read French, but their pronunciation is uniquely New Orleansese. There are even variations in pronunciations depending on who is speaking. For example, the street Tchoupitoulas is pronounced a few different ways: Chop-ah-too-luss, Chop-ah-too-luh, and Shop-ah-too-liss.

I’m eager to learn all I can about the town, but first things first. I’d like to know why the city changed its baseball team’s name from the Zephers to the Baby Cakes. It’s a half-baked team whose manager’s surname is Cookie, and the owners paid a lot of dough to change the team name. Granted, the team does not have a stellar reputation, but still.

Photos: Robin Plaskoff Horton.