La Nouvelle Orleans ~ This City is in My Heart!

CHORUS:

Good morning America how are you?

Don't you know me I'm your native son,

I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,

I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

(The City of New Orleans, By Steve Goodman)

Why do I love New Orleans?  I’m surely a romantic and love to revisit the early history.  The story of Marie Laveau and her Voodoo power interests me.  There is a certain history of the black people written here as now where else.  Possibly the city compels me to return because after the American Indians, the French came and left their mark, I love the French from this time period.  Furthermore, I like that New Orleans is here and not in France.  I can go for visits.  Need I more reasons?  I have only to think of the bayous, the parishes, the food, and the people.  Let me not forget the blues, the street musicians, the tap dancers and the mighty Mississippi River.

Also, it seems to me the past clings more tightly to New Orleans.  Louisiana’s colorful beginnings gather from the French, Spanish, German, African, Irish, Acadian and Anglo Saxon heritages.  However, it does seem to me the French attitude was stamped on the city and remains to this day.

  

The arrival of Europeans to the Mississippi Delta apparently caused the decline of the original Indian population.  I would think war and disease took many lives and some moved on seeking better hunting grounds and less people.  There was evidence Chitimachan, Natchez, Caddo, Atakapa, Muskogean and Tunican Indians once lived in this area.  They hunted and fished, grew sunflowers, squash, maize and beans.*…


“La Nouvelle Orleans was founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste La Moyne, Sieur de Bienville and established New orleans as the capital of Louisiana and a fortress to control the wealth of the North American interior for the French.   Reclaimed from a swamp and centered around the Palace of Armes , now Jackson Square, New Orleans was originally confined to what is now called the French Quarter or Vieux Carre (Old Square)…"


The French and the Spanish first owned and settled this area.  The Louisiana Purchase gave the United States ownership of Louisiana from the Spanish in 1803.


During the Spanish occupation two fires destroyed the French Quarter.  The second rebuilding of the French Quarter was done in the romantic Spanish architecture of wrought iron balconies and courtyards.

New Orleans tugs at my heart pulling me back time and again to imagine myself wandering streets that know my name.  Searching for secret histories and making friends of ghosts.  I think of Quadroon’s, the grocery and mercantile merchants, pirates, maids, the gentry, trappers, river boat captain’s and grave diggers.    New Orleans is a lady who wants us to remember her as she was in the beginning, filled with a melting pot culture, and drenched in the excitement of a city brand new.

I sometimes dream of walking the streets of this city. I imagine these streets know my name.  I walk at night.  I walk beneath tall moss hung Oaks, and Magnolia flowered trees, showing white blossoms neon against the humid darkness.   And I am listening for whispers from the past.  I imagine for myself a very French apartment in the French Quarter.  The ceilings are high and airy and tall narrow window doors open so I can step through to my balcony.  Plants and shrubs have grown tall in the courtyard and provide a hideaway home.  I hear flowing water sounds from the courtyard fountain, soothing my soul, and putting me easily to sleep each evening.  Bliss.

"Laissez les bons temps rouler. 

Let the good times roll."

(Pronounced - lay-say lay bon ton roulay)

And there you have it, a bit of history, a bit of my love for a lady, the great French Lady.

"But the people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water. Neither can they conveniently have cellars or graves, the town being built upon "made ground"; so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others." –  Mark Twain

"About fifteen miles above New Orleans the river goes very slowly. It has broadened out there until it is almost a sea and the water is yellow with the mud of half a continent. Where the sun strikes it, it is golden." –  Frank Yerby

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_New_Orleans

http://intours.com

Gateway to New Orleans – I went back to my research and could not find the exact address for the Gateway information.