Tremé Neighbourhood

Tremé is the oldest African-American neighbourhood in the United States — a community that has existed since the late 18th century, when free people of colour in colonial New Orleans established homes, businesses, and cultural institutions in the area just north of the French Quarter. The neighbourhood is the birthplace of jazz, the home of brass band culture, and the origin point of the second-line parades that are New Orleans' most distinctive communal celebration.

The second line is Tremé's greatest cultural export — a tradition where a brass band (the 'main line') leads a parade through the neighbourhood streets, and everyone who joins the procession behind them (the 'second line') dances, twirls parasols, and waves handkerchiefs in a celebration that blurs the line between funeral, festival, and spontaneous street party. Second-line parades happen most Sundays from September through June, organised by the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs that have been the backbone of Black community life in New Orleans since the 19th century.

The neighbourhood suffered enormously from urban renewal in the 1960s and 70s — the construction of Interstate 10 destroyed the live oak trees along North Claiborne Avenue that had been Tremé's main gathering space, and the construction of Louis Armstrong Park displaced families who had lived in the area for generations. The HBO series 'Treme' brought national attention to the neighbourhood's post-Katrina recovery, and the real Tremé today is a mix of historic Creole cottages, newer construction, and the ongoing tension between preservation and gentrification that defines every historically Black neighbourhood in urban America.