Through the Water
by Joshua Ellison · 11/16/09
New Orleans is a floating city. There isn’t much earth beneath the street before you reach water. Suspended in its basin, between the crooked embrace of the river and Lake Pontchartrain, leading out to the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans is always moving and adjusting, sinking and shifting. The sidewalks and streets have been stretched mercilessly; they tilt and crack and bulge from all the changes underneath.
So many different people have laid hands on this place—empires, immigrants, slaves, and their descendants. Their imprints are still everywhere, on an unforgiving terrain that pushes back against human intervention. It’s impossible to even know what direction the city is moving in, when you try to account for all the complicated equations of past and future, culture and environment.
When Umberto Eco visited New Orleans, he saw “one of the few places that American civilization had not remade, flattened, replaced.” Where most cities are functional and orderly, New Orleans is lyrical. Just read the street signs: there’s the counterflow of Piety and Desire, parallel streets in opposite directions. Humanity intersects with both Arts and Music. Race meets Religious not far from the river. It’s a place where the imagination can float, too.
Making sense of New Orleans is a constant negotiation between time and space, expansion and limitation. History moves in its ways, the landscape shifts too, and New Orleans is their fluid sum.
Most visits to New Orleans begin—and, too often, end—in the French Quarter. But just walking the main streets that delimit the neighborhood already suggests whole worlds beyond.
On one side is Esplanade Avenue, a wide boulevard with massive oak trees. Th is was the grand address of Creole New Orleans, the local aristocracy of French and Spanish descent. The houses are large, with luxurious details: white columns, intricate iron balconies, delicate woodwork. Near the Quarter, the homes are freshly painted and meticulously restored. As you travel further—towards the Claiborne Avenue overpass and on towards City Park—some stretches start to look haggard. The buildings sag and the elegant accents are faded and craggy. Along the way, you pass the house where the Impressionist master Edgar Degas spent a fertile period with his brother René and his extended Creole family.
Esplanade also becomes a natural ridge, a high ground, a barely perceptible elevation. When it rains, the water runs away, making it such a crucial artery. This is one of those places where history and geography meet, where the contours of the earth have made an enduring claim on the city’s social landscape.
On the opposite side of the Quarter is Canal Street, a busy merchant thoroughfare with streetcar tracks down the middle. Large department stores with names like Rubinstein’s and Adler’s and Stern’s dominate the street, though it’s now mostly immigrant-owned markets, camera shops, daiquiri bars, and souvenir stands. Just beyond here is the business district, with its middling skyscrapers, and then the historic Anglo-American neighborhoods that comprise “uptown.”
