When you love a thing, it is impossible to describe that thing in a way that will impart a true sense of your love. At best, if you have a very good thesaurus, you can get a little poetic and bring that thing to life. But usually all you can manage is mumbling a few words like “awesome” and “so great” and repeat those a lot while explaining nothing, really.
And yet that is what I am about to attempt to do.
If you love New Orleans, then you probably know everything I’m going to say and you might get creeped out by the fact that it seems like I’m reading your every thought.
If you don’t love New Orleans, or have never made its acquaintance and therefore have no idea what it feels like to love or hate it, I’m never going to describe it in a way that does it justice.
Oh, sure, you will try to imagine it. You will pull out all your feelings about what it’s like to love a thing, and do your best to relate. You will exercise your empathy gene and use your imagination. But it isn’t going to work.
And yet I feel compelled to write this.
Because I love New Orleans.
The architecture is like nothing anywhere else.
Why do I love it so much?
This is the fundamental problem with love. It makes no sense. We don’t often love things that are good for us. We sometimes love things that have few objectively good qualities.
But love them we do, with that little jolt of happiness and that little thrill of joy.
Instead of telling you why I love New Orleans, let me tell you about a place I hate.
Florida.
More specifically, resort-town Florida. I’m sure there are quite lovely places elsewhere, but most of my Floridian experiences have been in that pit of commercial hell called Orlando.
I don’t go there on purpose, it’s just that so many people host events there, I guess because they think everyone wants to go to theme parks and can double up on their vacation time.
We were in Orlando for a conference just before we went to New Orleans. We stayed at a Universal resort called Cabana Bay, and visited Universal’s version of an outdoor theme-park-mall called City Walk.
For three days we were in a perfectly designed building, every color selected down to the grout between the bathroom tiles to fit with the retro theme of the hotel we were in.
It was clean. The hallways, the courtyards, the bathtubs, the blades of the ceiling fans.
The palm fronds were perfectly green and beautifully lush. The gardens were full of red flowers and white stones.
It was safe. There was security every five feet, ready to assist or direct. There were gates on every courtyard, lovely wrought iron ones that required a key to enter the building.
There was no confusion. You knew exactly how to get from one place to another and you did it at exactly the times that were prescribed in exactly the way that the arrows pointed.
There was food. You got to pick from a whole cafeteria of options. Bacon and eggs and pancakes, grilled cheese and sandwiches, pizza and pasta, Chinese food, sushi, seafood, soup, salad, fruit bowls, oatmeal, omelets, pastries, muffins, bagels.
There was a bowling alley. There were two pools and a lazy river. There were Minions.
Everything at the park, or the mall, or whatever you want to call City Walk was perfectly curated. The restaurants were all themed. The décor was designed and hung with precision, perfect replicas of sharks and guitars and trains or whatever fit the particular theme of the building you were in.
The bathrooms were clean, the shelves were neatly stocked with giant lollipops and fudge candy, the pathways were perfectly paved and wide open. There was appropriate music playing in different locations depending on whether you were relaxing on a bench near the lake or partying at the Hard Rock.
It was attractive. It was convenient. It was climate controlled.
And I hated everything about it.
Everything.
Well, except for that one cookie milkshake.
Literally the only photo I have from Florida. Well, also that other milkshake…
Then we come to New Orleans. And it’s swelteringly hot and humid and everything smells like garbage because it’s August and about 10,000% humidity. It’s so humid that it’s practically raining in your brain the whole time and it looks like you’re crying but really you’re just bleeding absinthe drips.
There are so many potholes in the sidewalks – which is being generous since they are more like craters – that you often have to decide between keeping your head up so you don’t get mugged and keeping your head down so you don’t fall into a pit and break six bones.
You know that book Goodnight Moon? New Orleans has one called Goodnight Pothole. The city is sinking, by as much as two inches per year in spots, which means it’s impossible to keep the streets from buckling.
People are drunk. People are high.
People are sleeping on the street. Literally, on the street. In the middle of the sidewalk. On benches. On steps. In doorways.
Bourbon Street, that bastion of tourist purgatory, is dirty and loud and the music is awful and discordant and you can’t walk down that block without being bashed in the skull by rap on top of country on top of rock. I can’t wait to escape to any other block so I can hear my two remaining brain cells rattle together.
There is graffiti on the side streets and there’s caution tape and orange cones around the worst of the holes.
A little entertainment with your graffiti. Never a lack of personality.
The bars and restaurants are an eclectic mix of tablecloth-shirt-and-tie establishments and quick-give-me-a-slice-of-pizza-before-I-pass-out joints, with everything in between. The décor is neither curated nor dusted.
The Absinthe House has football helmets hanging from the ceiling and they are covered with so much dust that you’re afraid to take your hand off your glass because a chunk of something might fall off into it.
Alcohol and fire disinfect most things anyway.
A lot of things smell damp and musty.
You’re pretty sure vampires are real.
And I love every single thing about it.
Everything.
The pots of gumbo and the shelves of voodoo spells. The alleyways and balconies and hidden courtyards. The music on every corner and the artists in Jackson Square. The horse drawn buggies and the street signs. The plants hanging from balconies and the skeletons and witches and angels and giraffes sitting on them. The palm readers and fortune tellers lining the street outside St. Louis Cathedral.
Any given balcony…
It’s just so…. real.
The resort is manufactured. Right down to the texture of the giant fake hammerhead shark on the ceiling in Margaritaville. It was all put there and engineered to dictate an experience.
Everything in New Orleans is there because it’s there. Because someone stuck a business card on the wall. Then someone else stuck a business card on the wall. And over years and years, the walls eventually got covered in business cards and people’s phone numbers and papers with little weird phrases that make you wonder what the heck was happening THAT night.
New Orleans is full of stories.
The resort is sterile. Devoid of either history or character.
It may be cute. It may be neat to look at. It may be fun to immerse yourself in a particular theme that you like, like Harry Potter World or Shrek’s swamp or whatever. But it isn’t interesting.
It’s purposeful overstimulation. You are bombarded with colors and lights and sounds and things happening and volcanoes erupting every hour on the half hour followed by a rousing rendition of Maragaritaville. You’re numbed by continuous sensory overload to the point that it hardly matters that one thing tastes the same as another and who cares if there’s watermelon sludge in your drink, because you’re singing Margaritaville and eating a volcano sized plate of something resembling nachos that has enough salt and fat to keep you scarfing it down like a starving machine.
In New Orleans you can certainly find a spectacle but you’re never going to see the same one every hour on the half hour. It’s just part of the fabric of the city and the people in it.
There’s the guy with a tuba walking down the street and dozens of people parading behind him, strolling and dancing, and the more he walks the more people peel off from whatever they were doing and follow.
He’s up there, the tuba guy. You can just make out his shiny instrument on the left.
There’s the group of kids banging on the bottom of empty cement buckets making a strangely melodic racket and you can’t help but walk in time to their beat.
There’s the guy dressed like a monk who wants to hand you a free beaded bracelet out of love and peace and then gets mad and shouts at you when you don’t return his generous gift with a generous gift of your money.
For every drag queen wailing out Whitney Houston who you want to pay to shut up there is a legitimate jazz band that you could listen to all day. For every Hurricane that gets poured into your glass like neon sludge there is a sublime craft cocktail donned with little pink flowers.
It is a city of contradictions and contrasts.
Actually…. this guy was pretty good.
In New Orleans you can be swept up in the moment and in the crowd.
In the resort you’re herded like cattle through security gates.
No amount of buffet options can match the culture of the food in New Orleans.
Let’s see….
Grilled cheese… or catfish po’ boy?
Potato chips… or red beans and rice?
Broccoli soup with saltines… or jambalaya with French bread?
A scoop of jello mush eggs from a giant chafing dish that’s been on the counter all morning… or a fresh andouille and cheese omelet?
Beignets or a bagel that comes in a plastic bag with the ingredients stamped on the side?
It’s not a fair comparison.
In case you spent more than three seconds answering those questions, this is exactly why it’s so hard to describe a thing you love.
Also, no real food should come with ingredients stamped on the side.
Besides which, you can eat 24 hours a day in New Orleans if you want to, and chances are you’re going to want to. In the resort? You’d better not be hungry after 11. Or you can hope to maybe find a nearby restaurant that will Door Dash to you in an hour.
You can’t compare the old world architecture and inherent culture of the city to the homogenized plastic manufactured theme of a “steampunk” restaurant.
It’s so forced and artificial. New Orleans is organic. The place is alive because of the people who made it that way. Not because of some executives in a room who thought “let’s do retro with pale blue and orange curtains” and called themselves clever.
You can’t workshop this one, folks. No “bookshop set” can rival the paradise that is the second hand book culture of New Orleans.
I’m not saying New Orleans the best place on earth. I’m just saying that whenever I’m there I feel alive. Nothing about that resort made me feel that way. It made me feel depressed and insignificant. I was merely another guest, another room key, someone else churned out after frozen pizza and a trip to the gift shop.
It’s where imagination goes to die. Where you are spoon fed what you’re supposed to think and feel and there is no room for interpretation. This is retro! Look, an Etch-a-Sketch!
Come sit with this movie character! Buy a $22 photo!
It’s all least common denominator consumer culture.
It reminds me of the pointlessness of everything. The fact that life is such drudgery that we have to fill our empty souls with action figures and superheroes.
But in New Orleans I feel energized. It is life at its most absolute, not an escape from it. It is the revulsion and the beauty of it. People get up and walk and bike and drive and go to work and come home and drink too much and sleep on sidewalks and sometimes shove you and sometimes say good morning.
In between there is a story, a history, a narrative that gives the place its identity. And there is muffuletta. You can probably find one somewhere else, but it is not a real muffuletta. The same way you can try the beignets at your local pub but they are only going to be grievous imitations.
One might be missing. It used to be where that little bare spot is. There’s no telling who ate it.
We went to Café Beignet, as we always do, because no matter how poetic I get or how well I use a thesaurus, the fact is that beignets are at least half the reason I love New Orleans.
I find Café Beignet so charming. I love the décor, I love the tiny black and white tiles on the floor, I love the art and the horrifically uncomfortable tables with these three inch high railings around them that you can’t lean on and can barely eat from but you do because it’s Café Beignet. I love the tiny sparrows that hop around your feet waiting for you to drop a crumb.
Come on. How is that comfortable? But how is it not also ridiculously cute?
I love that it’s hot enough to fry an egg on top of your egg but the doors are still wide open so you can walk in off the sidewalk.
I love that everything is on the ground. There are no high rises, no elevators unless you’re in some of the hotels and even those only go up three or four floors.
There are barely even steps to walk up, just these big, open doors with no sense that you’re “going someplace” only that you’re already there.
One minute you’re on the sidewalk, the next you’re eating a beignet.
I love that the streets are narrow and mostly one way. It’s not busy and high speed, and you don’t get a face full of exhaust when you sit outside.
I hated everything about the resort because I hate those kinds of places period, so it wasn’t anything special about that one. I just hate that sterile, controlled environment. You pick my foods, you pick my transportation, you pick my activities, you pick the times of day I will eat and the times of day I will swim. You pick the emotion you want me to feel and the information you want me to know. There is nothing to discover, only consume.
I haven’t told you about the resort to disparage it or anyone who enjoys it, only to present a contrast so that my love for New Orleans will stand out in brighter, starker relief.
The resort is not for me. New Orleans isn’t for everyone.
I was talking with one of the local bartenders about the city, trying to explain this mashup of emotion, and she said something that resonated. She said that you don’t choose New Orleans, it chooses you. It is a city that gets in your soul and calls to you and brings you in. And you just know that you’re in the right place.
When I’m in New Orleans I feel like I need to shower four times a day and quite possibly that I’m about to have my wallet stolen or my neck bitten. I feel despair for the state of humanity and the condition to which it can succumb. I feel joy for the heights of creativity and the depths of kindness we can attain. I feel like there is no more perfect day on earth than one that includes a glass of absinthe on fire with a little jazz in the background.
Legit. And yes, they all do wear shirts and ties even though it’s 10,000% humidity.
I feel like part of a story that has been unfolding for decades and centuries and that I’m helping to write with every beignet.
And I feel like I’m in the right place.
Photo: Another reason to love New Orleans — bubble machines on random buildings. What is happier than walking down the street and suddenly seeing bubbles floating around you?