If it’s 2:00 a.m. and we’re at the Café du Monde taking a break from the all-night Bourbon Street party for a post-midnight snack of icing sugar-deluged beignets (fried Creole pastries) washed down with café au lait (me) and hot chocolate (him), there’s only one place in the world we could be: New Orleans’ French Quarter.
Bourbon Street is where the party never stops. It’s where we went each night after our days at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival when a group of us from around the United States gathered there for a 50th birthday celebration five years ago. It was the year of Katrina — before the hurricane.
This year is the first year since Katrina that Jazz Fest is back up to 12 stages.
On Bourbon Street, music from live bands — rock, jazz, blues, zydeco — spills from wall-to-wall clubs and pubs. People throng the street drinking large, lethal concoctions with names like Hurricane (sweet, blue and rum-based), many of them pre-blended as garish alcoholic slushies.
New Orleans is one of two cities in the United States (the other is Las Vegas) where it is legal to drink in the streets (from plastic cups, not bottles or cans, and if you are over 21). This makes it a party city year-round.
You can dance inside any venue for the price of a drink or on the curb if you don’t want anything more to drink. Every so often an upstairs balcony crammed with partygoers (‘3 drinks for the price of 1 on balcony’ is the usual lure) erupts into a chorus of “Show your ****, Show your ****.”
If a woman obliges, she’s showered with dozens of the shiny bead necklaces for which New Orleans is famous.
The outdoor Café du Monde has been going strong for more than a century. You can go there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, hang out, have beignets and coffee ($2.50) and people-watch. An advantage post-midnight is that while you’re part of a crowd, you don’t have to queue.
The French Quarter is where New Orleans started in 1718, built on reclaimed swamp by the French who at the time had laid claim to the whole of the state of Louisiana, named for King Louis XIV. In 1762 France’s Louis XV gave it to his cousin, King Charles III of Spain. It was later ceded back to France and finally sold by Napoleon to the US.
The upshot of this European backdrop, plus the city’s strong Caribbean and African heritage rooted in West Indian slaves of African decent, is what the locals like to call not a melting pot, but a gumbo as in: “a spicy mix of ingredients that compliment each other without losing their identity.”
What’s in a name? New Orleans has at least four.
Official — New Orleans.
Locals — or N’Awlins.
“The Crescent City” for where it pulses in a curve of the Mississippi.
“The Big Easy,” which dates back to a happening dance hall, ‘The Big Easy’, popular in the early 1900s.
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