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JASMINE AND FUNERALS
Garden Party
BY CARLY CARIOLI
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In June, on our last night in New Orleans, we ate a big meal and went for a long drive. From our hotel in the Warehouse District, a SoHo-in-training stretch of art galleries that began at the Mississippi and faded after several blocks into decrepit storefronts, we drove down Magazine Street, a long narrow estuary of bohemia sprouting coffee shops and record stores. We might as well have been in Athens, Georgia, or any other drowsy Southern college town that has learned to ivy its walls. Abruptly, it seemed, we found ourselves in the Garden District, which was like finding another century. Row after row of antebellum plantation houses rolled by, along with gnarled hundred-year-old oaks bearded in Spanish moss. The oaks formed canopies overhead, roots splitting the sidewalks below. We drove past red-blossomed and white-blossomed crepe myrtle, and magnolia and jasmine. Past blocks-long compounds heavy with sweet olive and azaleas and river birch, oleander and hibiscus and gardenia. Past sprawling mansions erected from a polyglot of Italianate and Greek-revival tropes, with columns and balconies trellised in cast-iron lattice. To go this way was to be yanked under the same rapture that clouded Mark Twain’s description of these streets, lines which the author even then must’ve known would be reprinted in guide books ad nauseum: "Mansions stand in the center of large grounds and rise, garlanded with roses, out of the midst of swelling masses of shining green foliage and many-colored blossoms." The beauty of New Orleans has always been tragic, oppressive, manipulative, and cruel. Which, of course, is no small part of its charm, and not so much a paradox as an eloquence — a poetry expressed more simply in the fact of a jazz funeral, or in the sight of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, than in the gothic melodramas of those, such as Trent Reznor and Anne Rice, who have fallen under the city’s spell. In 1816, when the population of New Orleans was around 23,000, the Mississippi broke through the levee walls north of the city at the McCarty Plantation and the floodwaters spilled as far as Bourbon Street. Eight hundred city residents died of yellow fever, and at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, wardens of the church asked for a temporary burial spot for the new dead until the flood receded. But as happened more than once in the history of New Orleans, destruction brought with it the seeds of renewal: the flood deposited a foot of rich alluvial topsoil in which, the area’s residents found, you could grow just about anything. Thus was the Garden District born. The tragedy of the past ten days does not permit us to imagine a future for New Orleans, and yet for better or for worse a future is inevitable. For any number of constituents — jazz enthusiasts, voodoo ghouls, Mardi Gras revelers — New Orleans was already sanctified. What remains of historic New Orleans after the biblical wrath of Katrina will be a new kind of American holy ground. The Washington Post reported last week that the Café du Monde is still standing, and that the Acme Oyster House "should have escaped" ruin. The RiverWalk, the mile-long mall that runs high along the Mississippi, is intact enough to have provided shelter to families turned away (perhaps luckily) from the Morial Convention Center. We know this is no consolation — on the contrary, it seems an abomination that the tourist traps should have escaped the brutality visited upon the poor and helpless in the Ninth Ward. And yet, if anything will bring people and money back to New Orleans, it is the lure of beignets and oysters — also, perhaps, the lure of the girls in the strip club across the street from the Acme, who at the beginning of the summer were enthusiastically working the poles to songs by Franz Ferdinand and Modest Mouse. Vice, and avarice, have sustained New Orleans for centuries, and may yet hold the best hope for her renewal.
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