Apparently, the deepest point of the Mississippi is located in New Orleans, off Algiers Point, and it's 60m deep. Obviously, that varies with silt movement, but it's deeper than I expected. Interesting.
I've moved on a bit further in my history book, and this guy, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, was the founder of New Orleans
. His brother was Insert Long Name Here de Iberville, who I mentioned a few entries back. Bienville granted himself big portions of land in New Orleans in the 1700s, when he was founding the city, and as well as a large part of the French Quarter, he also gave himself Algiers Point. He was a Canadian Frenchman but worked for the French crown in France.
Since there was so much Spanish settlement (or invasion) in the Caribbean, the French Quarter design mimics that style more so than French. The central church and square, with blocks radiating out from that gave both authority to church and rulers, and some idea of protection from invasion by natives. I guess. It's the style you see all over South America and the Caribbean. The French in France also assumed there was a wall around New Orleans, and were horrified to learn that the closest Bienville ever got to a wall was a one foot deep trench he made some people dig during some Chickasaw or Natchez invasion, which subsequently silted itself back up in a flood and everyone was too hot and lazy to dig again
.
It's an interesting book.
Today I got the ferry out from the riverbank at the end of Canal Street to Algiers Point. It was just lovely. Short and sweet and cooling, and the muddy, muddy river below. I had no concept of what was out there, I just wanted to cross the river, and this is where the ferry went. While crossing you get a great view of the city, since you kind of forget that there are loads of giant buildings there when wandering the little old French Quarter. It feels weird to call them "skyscrapers" because they're not completely massive, and they seem to be mostly hotels, but they are still bigger than anything in Ireland. You also get a concept of how wide the river actually is. And it's relatively contained now. This must have been terrifying in a pirogue.
Algiers Point has a big statue of Louis Armstrong, and then ... nothing. It is so. quiet. It's beautiful. It's just lovely houses and trees and shade, and a few cafes and shops, and I just loved it
. It's like a totally different place to the (relative) chaos of the city across the river. You should take a look at their Algiers Point Association website. They even have a page that gives you pronunciation guides for street names. HOW ADORABLE. I keep forgetting how to pronounce 'Marigny' or 'Metairie', so I really appreciate that sort of care and attention to detail. (It's 'mari-nee' and 'meh-tuh-ree'. Also, Decatur is not ' de-kuh-tour' with a nice French inflection, it's 'de-KAY-tur'. Now try 'Tchoupitoulas' by yourself...)
I sailed back across the river and finally got to do an aimless wander through the French Quarter while things were open. There's so much to see and do, it's hard to just pick something. I passed the house I visited last night, and there's a flamingo on the balcony and everything. It is so CUTE. It turns out that the TV show, Treme, also had a scene filmed in front of it in the pilot episode, and it was the introductory scene for the actor who also plays Daario Naharis on Game of Thrones (and Cal Morrison, Keira's dad, on Orphan Black)
. That is cool stuff to me.
I went to the Voodoo Museum next, which has lots of trinkets of maybe dubious relevance to the spirituality. It's more for tourists, but it was absorbing nonetheless. I found the connections between Voodoo and things like the Black Madonna of Częstochowa particularly interesting, because I had never thought of them before. A Polish Legion was sent by Napoleon to Haiti during a revolution in the late 1700s. It turned out they got on quite well with the Haitians, who were intrigued by their veneration of this painting. The Polish loved it because it was rumoured to be painted by St. Luke. The scars left on the painting by attacks and raids reminded the Haitians of the facial scars of a protective female loa in Voodoo spirituality, and thus the two were combined. There's all sorts of fascinating stories like that in there.
Next I went into a building called Madam John's Legacy. I didn't know it was there, and besides art and stuff, there wasn't a lot to see, but it was cool to be inside another French Quarter building. I have literally just found out that it was used in the films 'Interview with the Vampire' and '12 Years A Slave', so it's already more interesting. It's part of the Louisiana State Museum now, so entry is free, and I was mostly attracted by their air conditioning, I must admit. There is no Madam John either, it's a name derived from some work by some author for some reason
. WHO KNOWS.
Next stop was the French Market, which I had also not yet seen. It's not drastically different to any other city market, except that it's more like a European market, even though you're in America. I bought a nice hat there too because my whole entire head was burning in the heat. Then I got a Snoball, which is just a New Orleans name for a shaved ice covered in flavouring. It was refreshing, but I was starting to get hungry, really hungry, and I couldn't make up my mind on anything to eat.
I decided that the thing that appealed to me most was the menu from the place I went the first night here - Pier 424 - so I went there. I wanted frog legs. And if Randy and the other gator hunters could eat nutria rat, I could damn well eat frog legs. I also ordered some charbroiled oysters, because I was on a roll now.
The frog legs... eh, no thanks. They're just mostly like chicken wings, but longer and with bendy bones and weird sinews
. And you have an awareness that you're eating a frog, which was unnerving. There was one leg I could not eat at all because it was just too bendy and frog-like. There are no toes or webbing, thankfully, but I've done it now and I've no need to do it again in the near future. I saved the charbroiled oysters for when I'd finished the frog legs, so unfortunately they were a bit cooler than they should have been, but they were delicious.
I've already mentioned that Madam John's Legacy is part of the Louisiana State Museum. Two more parts are in the buildings to the left and right of the cathedral in Jackson Square. One is called the Cabildo, the other the Presbytère. The Cabildo houses old stuff, the Presbytère houses the Mardi Gras exhibit and the Katrina And Beyond hurricane exhibit. I bought tickets to both and had to really rush my way through just to see everything. It was getting close to closing time when I got there, which meant that there were smaller crowds, but more time pressure.
The Cabildo was really interesting, and had things like one of the four death masks of Napoleon, a dixie $10 bill (from the French 'dix', for ten, which is where the term 'dixie' probably came from), and a very effective looking sugar water fly trap that I want.
The Mardi Gras exhibit was of least interest to me, but I've already told you most of the things I know about that in another entry
. This exhibit had a whole room full of elaborate Mardi Gras invitations, Mardi Gras Rex (king) outfits, and the doors to the actual toilets were designed like portaloos.
I have a morbid curiosity about Katrina, so the hurricane exhibit was the main one I wanted to see. A lot of this was like the Titanic visitors centre in Belfast, except current. There are news reports on loops, stories recorded from survivors, relics like clothes, banners and teddies that were found in the flood, interactive exhibits that explained how the levees failed, and a whole ceiling of glass bottles and hands that was actually an art installation. I didn't have time to take photos of anything except that, so if you'd like to see some (and can survive the popups) look at the photos on TripAdvisor.
Before coming here, and watching loads of documentaries and reading loads of books, I had been at a remove from the enormity of the tragedy. I didn't realise that the flooding happened days after the storm
. I didn't realise that there had been a mass evacuation, but that those left behind were the poorest and least able to defend themselves. I didn't realise that there was so much failure by the authorities in the aftermath, like the overcrowding of the Superdome and the refusal to get people out, or allow people in. I didn't realise that ordinary volunteers who had made their way down to the city were actually prevented by those in authority in New Orleans from helping the victims.
It was unforgivable really. The levee's failure caused the storm-swollen river to flood into places like the 9th Ward. It wasn't that people weren't aware that the levees were damaged - they actually cut back money on building proper levees, and they knew it. The levees were never going to hold. Perhaps some nutria rats even undermined them. It was a bad, bad, bad situation. And then it was immediately followed by Hurricane Rita. And then nobody would let anyone else do anything about it
.
That's the bit that gets me most. Everyone in authority had so much ego and attention all of a sudden, that they stopped everyone else from doing anything. At some point, this kid stole a school bus and drove a whole pile of people out of the Superdome and away to safety and food and sanitation in another city, and he was arrested. Nobody was arrested for stranding all those people in the Superdome and leaving them there with nothing. Nobody was arrested for building faulty levees.
It is incomprehensible, and entirely reprehensible.
I imagine the city is different since Katrina. I never knew it beforehand. It's still a part of daily life, but when you see how drastically different the effects on the poor and the rich were, it make it all the worse. Sure, money didn't stop you having storm damage or flooding, but it affected the area you got to live in, and the funding and care the authorities took of that area. And while ordinary Americans cared, it's like the government just abandoned it. It doesn't feel like an American city, and that is the charm of New Orleans. It shouldn't be its downfall too.
...
Moving on, I decided to do a ghost tour to celebrate my last night in the city. This was a bit weird because I hadn't really been touristy up until now, even though I totally was
. But being part of a big group with stickers, being purposely led to establishments in which to spend your money... it all felt a little backward from my independence of the previous days. I made friends with a nice girl from New York, who had the amazing talent of putting a french braid in her hair while watching a guy tell ghost stories. With the heat and humidity, I was seriously impressed.
I kept a list of all the things we went to and saw, and I grew gradually more and more skeptical as the tour went on, and the really gullible people began to take "creepy" pictures. At the end, everyone dispersed, and it was just the guide, myself and New York girl, and a couple (an American girl and an Irish guy). We all had a drink and agreed on our skepticism, but that it was entertainment nonetheless, which satisfied me.
The group was massive, and there was one little kid in it who we all had to think was cute. He was actually fine, but his parents were annoying. There were also some adults under the age of 21, so they couldn't even go into the majority of the bars we visited along the way (it was not a Pub Crawl Ghost Tour. It just turns out that ghosts are apparently lured by alcohol. Or something.)
Big Wheels and Banshees
Tuesday, June 07, 2016
Algiers Point, Louisiana, United States
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2025-02-13
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Una
2016-08-03
I like the oysters but no courage for the frog legs! Not sure about the ghost tour either!