New Orleans: a layering of clashing histories. Photos by Ian Campbell.
Before Katrina, when people asked me where I lived, I said "New Orleans," paused a beat, then added, "in the French Quarter." That was sort of like saying, " I live in Paris in the 19th century," because the French Quarter or, if you insist, "the Vieux Carre," is in both the geographical and the chronological sense a different place within the larger entity of New Orleans, which is not really part of America. The architecture isn't French either, it's Spanish, on the model of Cadiz, like a mini-Havana.
Traces of the old New Orleans survive.
And until the 1980s the city powers could care less: They nearly let the feds tear down that history to put up modern American buildings and a freeway. The only reason it didn't happen is our blessed sloth, combined with subtropical lassitude and corruption, with a soupcon of stupidity. (Or "humidity" as the locals call it). Oh and something else: sex. Many an uptown moneyed mogul, heir to a bloody banana boat fortune, a gushing oil patch, or a ruined plantation, liked to belong to an edge-of-the-French Quarter sporting club where the better madams of Storyville displayed fresh ingenues. Other wealthy uptown pater familias kept a boy or a damsel in a Quarter pad, a tradition that went back to the city's founding: an entire riverfront neighborhood was known in the 18th century as "the mistresses foubourg"; its neat jasmine smothered cottages housed aristocrats' "other" families. The pre-Katrina French Quarter of the late 20th century exhibited traces of this heritage still, though most of it was becoming as American as the Vegas strip and, thanks to Bourbon Street P.R. and "Girls Gone Wild," it was on its way to one-cliché freeze (and outlandishly prized real-estate).
