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| Preservation Hall All Stars |
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| Home devastated by Katrina; residents had to chop through the roof to get out; home isn't repaired since 2005 |
Welcome back. We left off on Saturday, after we attended the Blues Festival on Magazine Street. We caught the St. Charles Trolley back to our hotel, and it was after 9, so we decided to see what Bourbon Street looked like on a Saturday night. It was packed and rowdy.
Every bar and club was packed; the music was playing at top volume, and it varied from blues to rock to pop to electronic to soul to jazz and everything in between. We stopped into a garden bar area where a trio was playing Dixieland standards and had the big local drink, a "Hurricane" served in a "to go" plastic cup (so you can walk the streets with your drink; drinking is fine in the streets as long as no glass container):
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| Logic puzzle: Beignets are to Elephant Ears as Hurricanes are to......(correct answer-Hawaiian Punch and rum) |
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| Pleasant atmosphere and a more laid back crowd |
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| The park holds the world's largest collection of mature live oak trees, some older than 600 years in age. |
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| Popular place for weddings |
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| Lots of Bayous run through the park; the park was extensively damaged by Katrina and is undergoing restoration |
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| NOMA was auctioning off this modernistic playhouse. |
We decided to spend our time in the Sculpture Garden and the Botanical Garden.
The Sculpture Garden is on 5 beautifully landscaped acres and has dozens of sculptures. These were a few of our favorites:
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| Many real trees in New Orleans along the Mardi Gras Route have beads in them all year. This is a real tree but beads are sculptures. |
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| This sculpture is called "Window and Ladder-Too Late For Help" made in 2008 about Katrina |
The Gardens were wonderful to walk through; if we lived there we could spend hours sitting in the beauty and contemplating life. A perfect place to relax in a City known as "The Big Easy."
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| They have a train set up running through a series of New Orleans "neighborhoods" with model buildings built out of natural materials. |
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| Bamboo Trees |
We then took the Canal Street Trolly all the way down to the banks of the Mississippi.
Harrahs has built a very large casino on the river, and where the City has built a "River Walk" area with several parks. There are also several docks for riverboats and for the Algiers Ferry, which crosses the Mississippi from Canal Street to an area of New Orleans across the River known as Algiers. We decided to have lunch in Algiers so we took the ferry across.
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| No, we didn't take a riverboat this time, just a very ordinary car ferry, but a riverboat trip down the Mississippi is in our future! |
After our lunch, we walked around Algiers Pointe for a while; we liked the architecture and laid back feeling of the neighborhood; a much calmer atmosphere than across the River.
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| These are "shotgun" style houses; so called because they have no halls and if you fired a gun in the front door it could go straight through the back door. This allows breezes to go through the house. |
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| They built a walkway along the River called the "Jazz Walk of Fame"; at the beginning is a statue of Louis Armstrong, who was born in New Orleans, but not Algiers. It's a series of lamp posts named after jazz greats, and is actually a National Park. The park service puts out a brochure describing each jazz great, at http://www.nps.gov/jazz/upload/Jazz-Walk-of-Fame-Tour-PDF.pdf |
We took the ferry back and walked along the River Walk, which in many ways resembles the River Walk along the Detroit river. There is another park area with a sculpture garden, including an area set aside to remember the Holocaust, featuring a sculpture by Yaacov Agam.
A quick stop at the best record store in the French Quarter, the Louisiana Music Factory, and then off to the clubs.
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| Rather unassuming, but a great selection of local stuff |
On Monday, we decided to tour a plantation, something everyone said was worth doing. The No. 1 rated plantation tour was the Laura Plantation, a Creole operated plantation. We boarded a bus for the almost 2 hour ride out to the plantation area, driving through areas of New Orleans we had not seen yet, including some great views of Lake Pontchartrain, the second largest salt lake in the United States (actually, according to Wiki, it's an estuary and not a lake, but you knew that already), about 40 miles by 24 miles, but only 12 to 16 feet deep. We know the measurements, because our bus driver Brian, who clearly wants to be a stand up comic, must have told us this fact at least 6 times while we were on the bus ( he also had a laugh like a hyena desperate for oxygen, and a handful of sayings, like "let's do this like Brutus" that he repeated continuously for the two hours up and the two hours back. Brian was great fun for the first half hour). In any event, here is Lake Pontchartrain:
For a trip that started at 8:30 and dropped us back at the hotel at almost 2:30, we spent about an hour and a quarter at the Laura Plantation.
Now, we know that we tend to say in this blog that everything we see is terrific, great, beautiful, wonderful, even (gasp) awesome, but Laura Plantation was really something else. It was, what would the word be? Oh, yes, it was...... awful and a waste of our time. I only bring this up in case any of you ever use this blog as a travel guide, take our word on this one. Here are three obligatory pictures.
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They do talk about Creole culture, but they describe an early owner as "deciding that he [the slave] needed a lesson" when she [the owner] flays and brands a slave who tried to run away; they talk about the comfort of the slave quarters; they display a slave code of conduct that they claim the slaves appreciated, and, while we can't say we spent enough time in the gift shop to see them, we understand there are mammy dolls for sale there. Enough said.
We got back, had a wonderful lunch on Bourbon, and spent the rest of the day soaking in the French Quarter.
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| Red Fish Grill; a cool place right on Bourbon and obviously not crowded at 2:30 on a Monday afternoon |
To end our trip, we spent the night at Preservation Hall which we'll discuss in a minute.
So what about the music? We think you can't find a more eclectic and talented group of musicians anywhere we have visited so far. Most of the places we went to have no cover and a minimal drink requirement, and they may have two or three bands a night. The good places are packed, so we stood a lot, and a lot of the places encourage dancing, even those that are packed to the rafters with people standing up. It's hard not to dance because the music is so rhythmic and upbeat. Besides all of the buskers we saw (including an older guy looking for a tip who walked along beside us on a fairly deserted street at night singing Sam Cook in a gorgeous voice; he asked where we were from and when I said Michigan he immediately, without hesitation, launched into the Temps- the laugh alone was worth the buck), we saw well over a dozen acts in different clubs over the four nights we really spent in clubs. Here are some of the highlights:
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| Rockin Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters at the Magazine Street Blues Festival |
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| Linnzi Zaorski at d.b.a. on Frenchmen |
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| A stock photo of Linnzi since I couldn't get a decent picture with my Blackberry |
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| St. Louis Slim (we think) at the Spotted Cat on Frenchmen. Best "Funky Roots Music" in the City and packed to beyond capacity at any time at night. |
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| Dueling Piano Guys on Bourbon; same shtick as in Austin- the older talent plays early when the older people are out and give big tips; they bring out the studmuffin eyecandy for the younger crowd after Midnight |
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| Sexy Brass NO Band at Vaso on Frenchmen |
And then, on the last night, was Preservation Hall, where a group of the Preservation Hall All Stars were playing under the name "St. Peters Street Playboys" (Preservation Hall is on St. Peters Street). Preservation Hall is an historic hall; it's like playing at Carnegie Hall; it is not, by any means, phsically like Carnegie Hall.
The line to get in starts at around 6:30 even though doors don't open until 8. We were lucky in choosing to go there on a Monday night; we got in line at 7:30 and were able to grab the last couple of floor cushions for the first set, although we were able to move to the first row of benches for the second set.
It is a very small room with no stage, no drinks, no lavatories, and three small church pews that will seat about 30 people. There are two rows of cushions on the floor in front of the pews that will seat another 16 or so, and then standing room behind the pews for perhaps another 30 or 40.
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| The first row of cushions is right in front of the chairs; if you aren't careful you can get hit by a slide trombone! |
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| The chair with the tag is one of five "reserved seats" in the room; they go for five times the normal cost of admission and apparently are good for only one of the three sets played since the occupants seemed to rotate every set. |
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| Will Smith on Trumpet; we are embarassed that we can't remember the trombone player's name but he led the group and obviously had tremendous gravitas and respect as a trombone player |
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| I'm not kidding about how close the first row of cushions is, and we were in the second row immediately behind them! |
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| This is Clint Maedgen; Alan saw him at the Austin City Limits show too; he's cupping his hand like a megaphone Clint Maedgen is one of Alan's favorites and it was just luck that he was playing that night. Listen to him sing "I'll Fly Away" on the Letterman Show- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOJQ0FTBFeY Needless to say, our time in Preservation Hall was a highlight of the trip and probably of the trips; it is the only time Alan can recall Ruth saying, in over 35 years "let's stay for another set." We'd like to leave New Orleans on this note, but it wouldn't be right not to talk about Katrina for a moment. We toured the 9th Ward, an area hard hit by Katrina, on Jason's tour bus; we were hesitant to do so because it would seem to commercialize a disaster, but in the end it was a good thing to do because it gave us a much deeper understanding of this man made disaster. It touched everyone down there, and smacked a lot of them very hard. Whole neighborhoods in the 9th Ward were wiped out completely when large barges crashed over the levees and floated into the homes. But true to their spirit, they are rebuilding; Brad Pit has a project going; there are other efforts. This city won't wash away This city won't ever drown Blood in the water and hell to pay Sky turned gray when the pain rained down  Markings show an agency inspected the home; the 0s mean no pets found and no people found Doesn't matter, let come what may I ain't ever going to leave this town This city won't wash away This city wont' ever drown.  Water breached over this Levee wall Ain't the river or the wind to blame As everybody around here knows. Nothing holding back Pontchartrain Except a prayer and a promise's ghost  Brad Pitt Sponsored Home This town's digging our graves In solid marble above the ground Maybe our bones will wash away This city won't ever drown  This city won't ever die Just as long as our heart be strong Like a second line stepping high Raising hell as we roll along Gentilly to Vieux Carre Lower 9, Central City, Uptown Singing Jockamo fee nane This city won't ever drown.  Don't matter cause there ain't no way I'm ever going to leave this town. This city won't wash away, This city won't ever drown. |
Steve Earl.
Goodbye, New Orleans; we hope to visit you again soon.
Next Up- from the Big Easy to the Big Apple- Manhattan and Hyde Park!!!
