There's a lot more to
NEW ORLEANS
- the "Big Easy," the
"city that care forgot" -
than its tourist 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). Even so,
the city's vitality and
joie de
vivre are real, buffeted but not
beaten by the vagaries of
commercialism and poverty. The
melange 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.
New Orleans began life in 1718 as
a French-Canadian outpost, an
unlikely set of shacks on a
disease-ridden marsh. Its prime
location near the mouth of the Mississippi
River , however, led to rapid
development, and with the first mass
importation of African slaves
, as early as the 1720s, its unique
demography began to take shape.
Despite early resistance from its
francophone population, the city
benefited greatly from its period as
a Spanish colony between 1763
and 1800. By the end of the
eighteenth century, the port
was flourishing, the haunt of
smugglers, gamblers, prostitutes and
pirates. Newcomers included
Anglo-Americans escaping the
American Revolution and aristocrats
fleeing revolution in France. The
city also became a haven for
refugees - whites and free blacks,
along with their slaves - escaping
the slave revolts in Saint-Domingue.
As in the West Indies, the Spanish,
French and free people of color
associated and formed alliances to
create a distinctive Creole
culture with its own traditions and
ways of life, its own patois, and a
cuisine that drew influences from
Africa, Europe and the colonies. New
Orleans was already a many-textured
city when it experienced two
quick-fire changes of government,
passing back into French control in
1801 and then being sold to America
under the Louisiana Purchase two
years later. Unwelcome in the Creole
city - today's French Quarter - the
Americans who migrated here were
forced to settle in the areas now
known as the Central Business
District (or CBD ) and,
later, in the Garden District
. Canal Street, which divided the
old city from the expanding suburbs,
became known as "the neutral
ground" - the name still used
when referring to the median strip
between main roads in New Orleans.
Though much has been made of the
antipathy between Creoles and
Anglo-Americans, in truth economic
necessity forced them to live and
work together. They fought side by
side, too, in the 1815 Battle of
New Orleans , the final battle
of the War of 1812, which secured
American supremacy in the States.
The victorious general, Andrew
Jackson , became a national hero
- and eventually US president; his
ragbag volunteer army was made up of
Anglo-Americans, slaves, Creoles,
free men of color and Native
Americans, along with pirates
supplied by the notorious buccaneer Jean
Lafitte.
New Orleans' antebellum " golden
age " as a major port and
finance center for the
cotton-producing South was brought
to an abrupt end by the Civil War.
The economic blow wielded by the
lengthy Union occupation - which
effectively isolated the city from
its markets - was compounded by the
social and cultural ravages of Reconstruction
. This was particularly disastrous
for a city once famed for its large,
educated, free black population. As
the North industrialized and other
Southern cities grew, the fortunes
of New Orleans took a downturn.
Jazz exploded into the
bars and the bordellos around 1900,
and, along with the evolution of Mardi
Gras as a tourist attraction,
breathed new life into the city. And
although the Depression hit here as
hard as it did the rest of the
nation it also, spearheaded by a
number of local writers and artists,
heralded the resurgence of the French
Quarter , which had
disintegrated into a slum. Even so,
it was the less romantic duo of oil
and petrochemicals that
really saved the economy - until the
slump of the 1950s pushed New
Orleans well behind other US cities.
The oil crash of the early 1980s
gave it yet another battering, a
gloomy start for near on two decades
of high crime rates, crack deaths
and widespread corruption, but by
the end of the century the tide had
begun to turn, and the city now
finds itself in relatively stable
condition with a strengthening
economy based on tourism.
