You know you're in Louisiana when . . . .

I didn't have all that much spare time on my quick trip to New Orleans. But I did have a rental car and a couple of free hours after I first arrived, and a few more the next morning before John's memorial. So I checked out a few of the old familiar places and saw that some things never change.

Like the drive-up daiquiri window, for instance. If you can get your beer in a ``go cup'' in the Quarter, it's not too far a reach to be able to drive by the Daiquiri Shop and get your daiquiri in your flavor of choice for the road . . . .

 

The Lucky Dog man still lives! If you read John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces, you knew that fictional New Orleans resident Ignatius P. Reilly took a job as a Lucky Dog man. One of my friends says that when all other job opportunites dry up, she'll head for New Orleans and take a job selling Lucky Dogs in the Quarter.

Here's  a genuine Lucky Dog man in the classic striped-shirt uniform in the Quarter, partially obscured by the street sign. I wonder how many of them get tired of people saying ``Hey Ignatius . . . '' to them. You'll note that the Lucky Dog cart is parked outside a restaurant offering the gourmet combination of daiquiris and pizza.

You really can get a po' boy sandwich filled with french-fried potatoes and gravy. You probably have to squint to read this menu, but trust me, that was one of the offerings at a little cafe near the Harvey Canal over on the West Bank. There are three ways to get a po-boy, ``dressed,'' which means with shredded lettuce, tomatoes and mayonnaise; ``heavy on the my-nez,'' with an extra slathering of industrial-strength Blue Plate mayonnaise; and ``nuttin' on it,'' which is just plain bread with whatever filling you choose. By the way, if you click on this or any other photo in this posting, it will pop up in a larger size so you can see more detail.

 

Everyone chows down what I used to call (back when I was editing the food section of the West Bank Guide) ``hearty man-pleasing meals.'' Every table at this little West Bank cafe was jammed at lunchtime, and folks were putting away jambalaya, po'boys, red beans and rice,  pork chops and mashed potatoes and there wasn't a salad--or an opened laptop--in sight. These guys probably all work for oil-field service companies or are involved in the construction of the $36 million Harvey Canal hurricane floodgates.

Plants grow leaves the size of a coffee table. This is a shot of a garden in Gretna, and the leaves were big enough that I could have set out place settings for four people on a single leaf.

The Roman Chewing Candy wagon is parked on front of one of the big houses on St. Charles Avenue.  When I lived in New Orleans, the candy was only 25 cents a stick, but inflation has even hit the very small world of Roman Chewing Candy. I think I remember this wagon's being pulled by a mule, but now, at least on this day, the animal's been replaced by a pickup truck.

The Quarter still offers what midwestern tourists consider raunch and sin.

Despite the damage from Katrina, many of the Louisiana Live Oaks (Quercus Virginiana) still stand and shade the stately homes along St. Charles Avenue. Every time I drive down St. Charles, I always hear that poem of Walt Whitman's in my head:

I saw in Louisiana a live oak growing

All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches

Without any companion it stood there uttering joyous leaves of green. . .

Here's a photo I shot through the front windshield as I was driving down Carrollton toward the riverbend. Many beautiful oaks still hang over the street  I don't recall seeing  moss on any of the trees this time. Spanish Moss (Tillandsia usneoides) is an epiphyte cousin of the bromeliads, and is very sensitive to air pollution. The moss on the trees along St. Charles was endangered long before Katrina, and I bet I'll have to go ``out the contree'' to see any at all.

Here's a typical Uptown New Orleans home on St. Charles, fronted with two stories of galleries, and a cast iron fence, and framed by one of the surviving oaks. Incidentally, the trees all belong to the Louisiana Live Oak Society. Trees, not people, are members of the society, and the ``president'' is the oldest surviving oak. Martha Washington, which is the largest oak in New Orleans, survived Katrina and still flourishes in Audubon Park, continuing to expand her 28-foot girth.

 

Commander's Palace with its turquoise and white striped awnings appeared to be alive and well. Some of John's colleagues took me there for a wonderful dinner after the memorial, and I found myself remembering so many special evenings from the past I'd spent there with John or other friends. Without a doubt, Commander's remains my favorite Louisiana restaurant, although I still lament the loss of LeRuth's across the river. Commander's is on Washington Street in the Garden District.

And meals at Commander's still finish with a flourish. Here's the creme brulee they brought me at the end of the meal, and I must say it's the most opulent presentation of creme brulee I've ever seen.  Yes, it was served in a soup plate! (And yes, I ate every single bite. I always say really good creme brulee is like licking angels' wings, and this was a particularly beautific version).

 

'Gators remain an ubiquitous feature of the landscape. This one was found over across the river in Algiers Point, the location of  many of the carnival krewes' (clubs that sponsor parades during carnival season, running from Epiphany through Mardi Gras day) ``dens'' where they construct and store their floats. This alligator is outside Blaine Kern's studios and probably once was the primary feature of a Mardi Gras float). Kern is the major builder of floats for the commercial krewes like Endymion and Bacchus, and many of the smaller krewes rent Kern floats, too. 

 

The St. Charles streetcar is once again running down the neutral ground on St. Charles and Carrollton Avenues. We had one of the former St. Charles streetcars running on San Francisco Municipal Railroad's ``F Line,'' and every time I saw it, I got a case of the homesick blues. But now, four years after Katrina, the whole St. Charles line is finally running again and while things are very far from all right in New Orleans, for me, the streetcar is a huge sign of hope.

The oil, gas and chemical industries still reign supreme. I shot this plant along River Road in St. Charles Parish, which is two parishes (counties) up the river from Orleans Parish. Refining and chemical plants are big on the east bank of the Mississippi here, while the West Bank is more focused on the oil field service industries that serve the 4,000 oil and gas production platforms out in the Gulf of Mexico.

The sky fills with big heavy cumulus clouds every summer afternoon, and often you get a thunderstorm around 4 p.m. Back in our days of working for the West Bank Guide, we could almost guarantee a thunderstorm would knock all the power offline at deadline time (also 4 p.m.) every day.  I shot this photo from the room I had at the Westin Canal Place, right on Canal Street. That low building in the foreground is one of the big casinos, and, to be honest, I didn't see a lot of people coming and going from the casino.

 
You can tell folks in New Orleans you live in a shotgun with a camelback and everyone will know what you're talking about. Here's a bright pink example of this particular housing genre. A house is a shotgun if you could fire a shotgun through the front door and the buckshot would pass through every other room in the house on its way out the back door. A camelback has a second story in the back (allegedly to fool tax assessor, who taxed houses depending on the number of rooms they had. Apparently the tax assessor couldn't see, or pretended he couldn't see, the second story at the back). 

 

No, I didn't go see the remnants of the hurricane-caused devastation down in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, or out in Gentilly or down in the lower 9th. I didn't need to.

To the casual tourist, it may look like everything's all right in New Orleans, but when I went to the Hertz lot to pick up my rental car and they only had one person on duty and 12 cars to be picked up, it was easy to see how deep the city's economic malaise remains. And when I drove through the central business district at 5 p.m. and heard only silence and saw few people on the street, it was clear to me that New Orleans has a long long way to go before it comes back again.  When we arrived at Commander's at 6 p.m. and were the first guests in the dining room, and when the hallways of the New Orleans airport echoed from the sound of few footballs, I knew how bad things must have been, and what a long slow way back is is from what my friend Mark Folse calls ``the federal flood.'' And when I hear in my friends' voices and see in their faces the effects of the four long and very hard years that have passed since Aug. 29, 2005, I know recovery is still far away.

I'll be returning to New Orleans Nov. 21 and will spend the rest of the month there. This time I hope to get down to the Barataria Preserve in  Jean Lafitte National Park,  Bayou Segnette, and Grand Isle; and visit Galatoire's,  Angelo Brocato's, Audubon Park, Arnaud's,  the Moonwalk,  the Maple Leaf Bar and many of my other favorite places. And I'll also spend time with my New Orleans friends, something I simply could not do on my quick trip for the memorial.  I'll have my youngest with me, just home from a public-health stint fighting malaria in Malawi, and I will finally fill my long-ago promise to show her the Crescent City I love so much and other parts of Southwest Louisiana, the land of dreamy dreams . . . .

Comments

[Karen Tate]

Thank you for that walk down memory lane. I'm from New Orleans, gone 20+ years and it was a joy to see these sites again. Oh, I so miss the food!

Also, can you contact me off the blog. I couldn't find your email address. Contact me at karentate108@ca.rr.com Thank you.

[Hollyheartfree]

For just a very short visit you packed a great story and pictures in to share with the rest of us. Hoping your next visit is wonderful.

[Mary Ann Littlejohn]

Re: Roman Candy Man. My son's house on Octavia shares a property line with the RCM's barn. He assures me that there is still a mule there that wakes him up most mornings between 3am and 6am.