Goodbye French Quarter, hello Spanish St. John

I have been slowly preparing myself to move back to my chosen neighborhood, Bayou St. John/aka MidCity/aka JazzFest Neighborhood/aka Fair Grinds area....

Since I was a crazy teen (roaming the Quarter barefoot and bookish), I have used the Esplanade corridor as my escape route OUT. On bike and on foot then, on scooter or on bike or car now, I invariably head towards City Park. Eyes towards the oak trees...
So, when I moved back to the Quarter a year ago, I knew I would enjoy it only for a short time. I would head back to the bayou, no matter what everyone else thought I would do. No question.

Can't really explain it. I love the Quarter, it's tightness and looseness happening concurrently. Love the light playing off the buildings at daybreak, at sweltering lunch and at magical dusk. I like that some friends (like my adopted kid sister) would come to see me more, just to hang for an hour or two.
I like my landlady who has carved a pretty great life on Saint Ann, with her 91 year old mother around the corner on Madison.
Love the burgers at the Nelly Deli. Love th gin and tonics at Harry's, with 2 dog biscuits for Maddie always. Three, if she insists.

I usually like the tourists who look at me curiously sometimes, sometimes with indifference (as I am clearly not there to serve their needs) sometimes with delight when they see a person not in obvious costume, just making her way home with dog and groceries. Wow, they mouth nudging their friend casually. Look. I think she lives around here.
Sometimes I grumble at those same tourists on a bad day. Sometimes I do it just to freak them out.
Fun.
I owe these blocks a lot; I was let loose for the last time as a teen by my mother in the French Quarter, about 1981, maybe 1982. After we moved into our tiny place that day across from Matassa's Grocery (and Bar back then), she looked at me with some amusement and said, "Well kid, welcome to the French Quarter." and went back to her office and started her own deserved emerging life, leaving me to (finally) figure out me on my own terms-albeit in her beloved Quarter.

Wait for the book being written now about those times. Let me just say, I was lucky to be a part of the last pre-World's Fair days there. So lucky.
But the Quarter is really my mother's world, and my stepfather's. They both have worked in walking distance of their home for the last 30 years, only leaving it on average once a week, sometimes not even that often. They are known (more so 15-20 years ago when they were a bit wild and building the legend of Jerry and June), but known by enough people that during Katrina, people came yelling for my mom over her wall assuming she was there. She was not and regrets that to this day.

I love the ability to do anything there. I love the gorgeousness. I love the mix of courteous blue collar workers. The some snobby, the more often genial residents and the never-ending parade of daily workers, full-time scammers and first-time gawkers.

I hate the number of bikes that are missing their front wheel first thing in the morning. I really am tired of the trash thrown on the street by people who delight in making ugliness.
Hate/love, that thin line.

I appreciate it, let's just say. Finally, I thank it for continuing to be there for me when I need it.

Holiday people

I really like July 4 weekend in the Quarter. Not only do we have relaxed summer people walking around (as opposed to those intense visitors who think they're supposed to drink to excess, throw up to excess and scream in excess since they are in the Quarter) we also get the older, more professional visitors for Essence Festival. I like the idea of this festival and know many people who go and spend the day at the exhibits, seminars and networking before even going to the music event in the evening. You see many different groups of friends just walking around on Thursday and lots of couples who are carrying lots of shopping bags and look very glad to be in our city. I am pleased to see that most businesses in the Quarter have stopped their ridiculous behavior from the first few years of this event (closing for the weekend), and instead seem to be welcoming these visitors, just as they have always welcomed JazzFest visitors. You can thank Marc Morial for putting his foot down on that subject long ago... the diversity on this weekend is pretty wonderful, much like it is on Bayou Classic weekend, Southern Decadence or Mardi Gras.

I spent the day packing my car for a cocktail party I am throwing in the Lower Garden District, but after this is over tonight, I will stay in the Quarter hanging out for the rest of the weekend. Come get a muffaletta and a Barq's and watch the river go by, or for the fireworks tomorrow night, so go sit at the new restaurant at the French Market (Galvez) and have a cool drink while you see the show. Best of all, just mingle with your fellow citizens in the public square that is your French Quarter.

Azaleas, cats and Clay

It has been a glorious weekend here. Weather is in the 70s, sunny-and the widely unknown news for folks outside of the city-humidity is not an issue over late fall, winter and early spring. Our spring may not be one of surprise like snow-covered areas, but it is lovely nonetheless. Here, bougainvillea, azaleas, citrus trees, maple trees, magnolia trees are starting to bloom and pink, yellow, purple and orange seems to be everywhere.
I think the Quarter architecture also blooms in spring; it seems to know it's on show and that the Carnival season that keeps it going all night is done, so it can relax a bit.
With this season, I watch more tourists than other seasons stop in mid street or walk as in a trance toward something when they glimpse a door or a balcony or a slate roof that they find beautiful and unique.
I also have been stopping to admire unique things, and also have been thinking about some of those that I hear about:

The two elementary schools that exist here. One is a public school and one a Catholic. My friend Casey has shared his part of St. Louis Cathedral school where, from his next door apartment, he hears the Mother Superior ring her old school bell at the front gate. That bell calls the children inside and she probably hopes it calls to Casey to tsk about his late nights...
The public school is a good charter red schoolhouse, and has a very lively welcome every morning. Teachers stand on the street welcoming parents and children as they arrive. Sometimes kids run into the coffee house across the street for a hot chocolate or sometimes coffee before they come. Coffee is an all ages thing here...

The skill of locking a bike to something correctly, so you can come back to find both wheels still on. When I was a teenager, the well-organized Quarter bike thieves carefully chipped away at the concrete holding the poles down and then put the poles back in the hole as if they were solid. Once you locked a bike to one, they would simply lift the pole and take the bike. Now, they just take wheels like everywhere else.

Finding my friend Roger's old house on Saint Ann. One day, I realized I was looking at his old house and wondering how he would like the colors the new owners had chosen. Well, he might have winced a bit....

Discussing a new vegetarian restaurant with my neighbor. "Yes they deliver", answering the question after every Quarter restaurant discussion. Delivery is wide spread, from stores to restaurants to bars (at least ones I used to I know about)...

Realizing more and more how many empty or unused apartments are in the Pontalba. These are the country's oldest apartment buildings, designed and built by Baroness Pontalba and now owned by the State Museum on one side and the state on the other. Can I tell you that many nights I have looked up on both sides and seen a single light shining? one apartment. Even during Mardi Gras. Those apartments should be given to an appropriate mix of incomes and professions to maintain their activity, not allowed to be used by city officials on fireworks night or not at all.

Interestingly, the Square that they guard is so full of life and regular activity that is seems like it is in another country entirely. As I live half a block from it, I pass it many times a day and almost never find it empty. I mean I might have seen one or two times that no one was there.
Churchgoers, workers, tarot readers, painters, homeless, tourists, hawkers (like the guy dressed in sports mascot regalia being photographed for a commercial and handing out flyers), folk passing from lower to upper Chartres and the reverse, street cleaners, pigeons, dogs and, of course, the magical cats of the inner square.
As many regulars know, after hours the park around Andy Jackson is locked, and as soon as that happens and dusk falls, dozens of cats creep out and climb through the gates to mingle in their own version of the kegger. You see groups of cats wherever you look in there. They look back without fear or interest really, knowing you cannot invade their place. Spooky and lovely at the same time.

And the last thing that strikes me this week is: how few people know about Clay Shaw anymore. I know his story from aforementioned Roger and the debatable Oliver Stone version in the movie JFK; what matters is this plaque that remains from his friends in one of the loveliest buildings in my current neighborhood:


Whatever else this Quarter is, it certainly holds a lot of admirable stories.

Do you Vieux?

I sit typing while in my courtyard under the neighbor's balcony, while the first real rain since before Mardi Gras falls on the plants. I know that because I still have chalk remnants of the Mardi Gras sign I put on the ground..
I am about to get back to work on this blog and so, for me, start the next part of our life here in New Orleans.

What I mean by that is we here feel we are just coming out of our sorrow and shock and now are on the next wave of our city's rebirth.
Much is left to be done, but we know how what we have lost will stay with us, has stayed with us. Our friends lost to water and relocation are still our friends and we make new ones with those who come to help resettle; all of this is now much clearer, 3 years later, so we can sometimes even raise our eyes to other issues.
We also know now that we did not lose our center, our treasures, so can put our minds on play, and on new enterprises. Those new enterprises will be discussed here and my unease with some will also be displayed. Do send me an email if you have your own issues you want to discuss here...

As I mentioned in my last post, I decided to look for an interim apartment while struggling with finding proper financing for building my house (more on that LATER- much more).
I found the best answer for me in my old haunt of the French Quarter. Something in my price range, something in my type of walking, human-scaled village. Great landlady and space.

I am attaching a few pics of some of my favorite moments so far here on Saint Ann. I will say that being here in the old city, I am again taken by two things:

1. The many separate, but sometimes overlapping social circles found on these 120 blocks. Service people bars, wealthy lower Quarter parties, dog owner groups on the Riverwalk, underground and criminal elements, schoolchildren and their parents, business owners watching, thinking and talking obsessively to their customers and neighbors, late night groups, including the fascinating ghost tours and many more.

2. How other New Orleanians view with distaste, with pride and or with ignorance- this old city and how they use it, or refuse to use it. I have friends who cannot bring themselves to come in the Quarter, how others have made it to so much more since I have been here, and what people say to me when they find out I am in the Quarter. Is this village the perfect microcosm for studying urban life, gentrification, crime and small business?

stay tuned...

another day in the Quarter with the Disney cleaning service
barkus from home
fog on river while walking Maddie, the cartoon dog

On the river rather than the bayou...

(V, M and R in my courtyard on Barkus Sunday)
This starts my French Quarter journal, with pieces about the good, bad, ugly and splendid of this tiny village, written from my courtyard on Saint Ann (a street name which is almost always written out, when St. Peter is almost always written as abbreviation.) Ironically, my permanent home on Bayou St. John is on St. Peter street, between Hagan and Moss Street.


When I decided to abandon the FEMA trailer in November, I did it with the knowledge that going to rent an apartment would severely damage my ability to save more money and also divert my attention at times from our Hagan Ave work. Still, even I needed to find something a bit more calming and less dangerous, so started the search for a temporary place to live while I started to design my house.

I looked at three places before finding this on Craigslist. One of them near Hagan, and the other two kind of in Esplanade Ridge. They all had some things going for them; the one on N Johnson had a great extra lot as a side yard with room for the dogs of present tenants to roam and their chickens too. Maddie the dog would have had a great place, but just wasn't sure she would understand the chicken deal, and though the rent was cheap, my share of the utilities was not.
The second was a 2 bedroom on Broad Street. Not so much...
The third was actually a real possibility; on Gayoso off Saint Ann (hey just realized that), and was a charming little 2 room apartment. too bad it was on the street rather than one of the back apartments; I would have taken it right away.
Although, what kept occurring to me was I would be adding more complexities to my life to take on another neighborhood to worry about and to plan living in and around. So, when I saw the studio listing for the Quarter, I thought hard about it, as I had spent my youth in the Quarter and knew what it meant to be, even for a short time, there. But, the lack of neighborhood rebuilding and the proximity of the amenities, and the every day service worker world seemed like a good plan for me to use while I thought about MidCity.

So, when I looked at it, it was about what I needed, and believe it or not, about the same price or cheaper than everything else I had seen in much less fixed areas. I think that has to do with type of locals who own only one or two buildings in the Quarter, live in their buildings and with no damage, had no need to raise their rents to triple their pre-K levels, as the rest of the city had done.
So, saw this small studio. Actually about the same square footage as my FEMA trailer, but with high ceilings, 4 windows and a small courtyard for me right outside my door, it was worlds apart.
Also furnished and with a great landlady who had a dog, and was happy to welcome my dog to the building.

So, took it in mid-November, and as I have very few post-Katrina possessions, moved in my car in 3-4 trips of boxes and bags. The first night, I listened at dusk as the bells from St. Louis Cathedral bonged on the other side of my wall. I had just returned from my first trip to Italy and had spent my last night in Florence, and had listened to bells such as these while in my room on the square. As I sat with my books and shoes in piles on Saint Ann, my eyes filled with tears at being settled where I was wanted, where I could take stock and revive my New Orleans soul.