New Orleans: Jazz, Voodoo & the French Quarter

The four sides of the square are framed by some of the most significant architecture in the American South. Behind you, the triple spires of St. Louis Cathedral rise against the sky. Flanking the square are the Pontalba Buildings, built in the 1840s by Baroness Micaela Almonester de Pontalba — a New Orleans Creole heiress who survived being shot four times by her father-in-law and responded by coming home, building the first apartment buildings in America, and installing the cast-iron galleries that define French Quarter architecture to this day.

The iron fence surrounding the square is lined every day with artists displaying their work: portraits, jazz scenes, impressionist views of the Quarter. Beyond the fence, fortune tellers set up tarot card tables, buskers play saxophone and trumpet, and living statues hold their poses for spare change. This is not a recreation of old New Orleans — this is old New Orleans, essentially unchanged in character if not in detail.

Look past the cathedral toward the levee. The Mississippi is just beyond that earthen wall, a river so powerful that the entire city is built in a shallow bowl below its level. The French built the first levee here. Americans reinforced it. The Army Corps of Engineers maintains it today. The city exists because the levee holds — a fact that Hurricane Katrina made tragically clear in 2005, when the system failed and eighty percent of New Orleans flooded.

Stand here a moment longer. Hear the brass band that is almost certainly playing somewhere within earshot. This is where the city started, and this is where the tour begins.

Go inside if the doors are open, and they usually are. The interior is cool and dim after the Louisiana heat, painted in soft pastels that feel more Caribbean than European. The ceiling murals depict scenes from the life of St. Louis — King Louis IX of France, for whom the city and cathedral are named. The flagstone floor is worn smooth in the center aisle by generations of worshippers who walked in barefoot, as was the custom in the French and Spanish colonial periods. There are grooves worn into the stone by centuries of feet, and standing on them connects you to something very old.

The oldest altar in the cathedral is the side chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe, which survived every fire and every disaster that befell the earlier churches on this site. It is the oldest surviving altar in the United States. People still light candles here, and the intentions left in the prayer box include handwritten notes in English, Spanish, French, and Creole.

The mix of Catholic traditions at this cathedral reflects the city's layered colonial history: French devotion to particular saints, Spanish liturgical formality, and Creole syncretic practices that were never entirely separate from the African and Caribbean spiritual traditions that flourished alongside Catholicism in New Orleans. Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass here in 1987 before a crowd that packed Jackson Square — a moment the city still talks about.

The alley running alongside the cathedral on the left is Pere Antoine Alley, named for Father Antonio de Sedella, the beloved Capuchin monk who served as parish priest here for four decades and whose 1829 funeral drew the largest crowd the city had ever seen.

Café Du Monde opened in 1862, in the middle of the Civil War, and it has never closed. Not for holidays — it is open three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Not for the late-night hours — it operates twenty-four hours a day. Not even for Hurricane Katrina, after which it closed for a matter of weeks before reopening with the city's recovery. Sitting at a table here at two in the morning, surrounded by locals coming off late-night shifts and tourists who have lost track of time, is one of the defining New Orleans experiences. The night shift waitstaff have seen everything and are unimpressed by all of it, which is its own form of comfort.

The menu has three items: beignets, café au lait, and orange juice. The beignets are square fried doughnuts buried under a blizzard of powdered sugar. They arrive hot, the exterior crisp, the interior airy and almost custard-like. The powdered sugar does not stay on the beignet — it transfers immediately to your shirt, your lap, your face, and your travelling companion. This is not a design flaw. This is tradition. Experienced locals wear dark clothing and breathe carefully.

The café au lait is made with chicory, a root that was added to coffee during the Civil War when Union blockades cut off coffee supplies to Confederate New Orleans. Roasting and grinding chicory root created a coffee substitute, and then a coffee extender, and then a flavor enhancer so popular that New Orleanians kept using it after the war ended and coffee was plentiful again. The result is slightly bitter, earthy, and deeply satisfying — particularly when mixed with hot milk in the Louisiana style. Order one. Drink it slowly. Watch the Mississippi through the break in the levee and consider that people have been doing exactly this for more than a hundred and sixty years.

The convent's architecture is French Colonial Creole — thick brick walls, steeply pitched roof, dormers set into the roofline, and the tall casement windows that the city calls 'Creole windows,' designed to swing wide and catch the river breeze on an August afternoon when the heat is something you wear rather than feel. The building's orientation around an interior courtyard, the deep overhanging eaves, the way the structure breathes through its window arrangement — these are all adaptations to a subtropical climate that European architecture was never designed for. The convent is the oldest surviving example of this approach, which became the template for French Quarter architecture.

One of the stranger legends attached to this building involves the 'Casket Girls' — young women sent from France as prospective brides for the male colonists. They arrived carrying small wooden chests called cassettes, which contained their few possessions. Cassette became corrupted to 'casket,' and the fact that these women were housed in the upper floors of the convent, their whereabouts jealously guarded by the nuns, gave rise to the legend that the chests contained not clothing but vampires. New Orleans loves a vampire story, and this one has been embellished enthusiastically for three hundred years. The shuttered upper windows of the convent feature prominently in the darker versions of the tale.

The convent sheltered refugees and women during the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, when the Ursuline nuns reportedly prayed through the night for Jackson's victory and then opened their doors to the wounded afterward. The building passed from Catholic to state ownership in 1824 and has been an archive and museum ever since. Its survival through fires, floods, hurricanes, and centuries of Louisiana humidity is either a miracle or very good brickwork. Possibly both.

The transformation into the strip you see today happened in the 1940s, when the combination of soldiers on wartime leave, the loosening of wartime morality, and New Orleans's already permissive attitudes toward public pleasure created the tourist entertainment district that calcified into what Bourbon Street is now. The strip clubs, the open-air bars, the daiquiri shops with frozen drinks in flavors that have no relationship to actual fruit — this is postwar American tourism expressed in architecture, and once it embedded itself here it never left.

What makes Bourbon Street genuinely interesting is the legal framework around it. New Orleans has an open-container law that allows you to walk the streets with an alcoholic drink, provided it's in a plastic cup rather than a glass bottle. Bourbon Street between Canal Street and St. Ann Street is closed to vehicular traffic after midnight on weekends, and sometimes on weekend afternoons as well. You can walk down the middle of the street in the open road, drink in hand, music coming from every open door, the second-floor balconies — genuine nineteenth-century cast-iron galleries — overhead. There is nowhere else in America where this is the normal Friday night.

Look up past the neon at those balconies. The cast-iron railings, the wide overhanging eaves, the thick stucco walls — they date to the early nineteenth century, rebuilt after the fires of 1788 and 1794. Underneath the signage and the speaker stacks, this is eighteenth-century architecture doing its best in difficult circumstances.

Walk it once. Let Bourbon Street do its worst. Then turn off onto Royal or Chartres and remember that the French Quarter is much larger, much older, and far more interesting than this one noisy block of it.

The hall has never been renovated. The plaster on the walls is original, cracked, and faded. There is no air conditioning — the ceiling fan turns but the summer air in New Orleans defeats it without effort. There are no drinks, no food service, and limited seating: benches along the walls, floor space for everyone else, and a few cushions near the front that regular visitors claim early. On a hot August night, the temperature inside can exceed ninety degrees, and the bodies packed into the room add to it. None of this matters once the music starts.

The musicians are close enough to touch. The instruments are not amplified. When the trumpet player hits a high note, it fills the room physically — you feel it in your chest, in the back of your teeth, in the parts of your body you didn't know could receive sound. The ensemble typically includes trumpet, trombone, clarinet, piano, bass, and drums, and the genre they play is the original New Orleans jazz: not the smooth, cocktail-hour jazz that gets piped into hotel lobbies, but the raw, polyrhythmic, deeply African-influenced music that was born in Congo Square and the Storyville brothels and the second-line parades that followed jazz funerals through these very streets. You can hear that lineage in every measure.

Jazz was born in New Orleans from a collision of musical cultures that happened nowhere else on Earth: West African polyrhythm from the slaves who gathered in Congo Square, the harmonic sophistication of French and Italian opera that New Orleans audiences consumed voraciously, the blues inflection arriving from the Mississippi Delta, and the march rhythms of brass bands that had been playing funerals since the French colonial period. New Orleans jazz is what happens when all of those things fall into the same room and play together.

Shows run three times per night, each set approximately forty-five minutes. If someone in your group wants to hear 'When the Saints Go Marching In,' that will cost twenty-five dollars as a special request — a fee the hall introduced because they were tired of playing the same song every set. Buy tickets in advance.

The building is supposedly where the pirate Jean Lafitte ran his smuggling operation under the cover of a blacksmith shop in the early nineteenth century. Lafitte and his brother Pierre controlled a network of privateers operating in the Gulf of Mexico, raided Spanish shipping, and sold their plunder — including enslaved people captured from Spanish vessels — through a black market bazaar in the swamps south of the city called Barataria. The blacksmith shop story may be legend more than documented history, but the connection between Lafitte and this building has been told for two hundred years, and New Orleans accepts it as part of the record. In this city, a story told for two centuries earns its place in the facts.

What is historically verifiable is Lafitte's extraordinary role in the Battle of New Orleans. When the British fleet assembled in the Gulf in 1814 and sent emissaries to offer Lafitte a commission and a pardon in exchange for help navigating the bayous, Lafitte turned them down and offered his men, his cannons, and his detailed knowledge of the waterways to Andrew Jackson instead. Jackson, a man of firm moral positions, was not comfortable accepting assistance from a pirate. He accepted it anyway. Lafitte's crews manned artillery positions along the Rodriguez Canal and are credited with helping to break the British assault. Lafitte received his pardon from President Madison. He promptly returned to piracy, eventually disappearing somewhere in the Gulf around 1823. No one knows for certain where he died.

Inside the bar, the walls are painted purple and the room is lit almost entirely by candles. There is no live music. There is no background soundtrack. There is only the low murmur of conversation, the sound of ice in glasses, and the sensation of sitting inside a building that has been pouring drinks for approximately three centuries.

The result is a dense, labyrinthine landscape that in aerial photographs looks uncannily like a miniature city — complete with lanes, addresses, architectural hierarchy, and the full social stratification of nineteenth-century New Orleans rendered in stone. The grandest tombs belong to the oldest and wealthiest Creole families: the Almonester family, the Bore family, the Gravier family. The large communal tombs near the center were built by fraternal and benevolent societies — the Italian Society, the Portuguese Society, the French Society — to give their members a dignified burial regardless of individual means. The oven vaults stacked along the perimeter walls, resembling bread ovens in a kitchen, served the same purpose for those whose families could not afford a dedicated tomb.

The tomb that draws more visitors than any other is the low, flat-roofed Greek Revival vault attributed to Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, who died in 1881. Laveau was a real and documented historical figure: a free woman of color, a licensed hairdresser by trade, a practicing Catholic, and the most powerful Voodoo practitioner in nineteenth-century New Orleans. She conducted ceremonies in her home and in public spaces, sold gris-gris charms, and wielded documented influence over clients that included judges, politicians, and wealthy white Creoles who came to her privately. The tradition of marking three X's on her tomb and leaving offerings — coins, rum, cigars, flowers, Mardi Gras beads — in exchange for a petition became so widespread and so physically damaging that it was a primary reason for the access restrictions that now require guided entry.

The stories inside these walls are among the most layered in a city that is made entirely of layers.

New Orleans was different — not more humane in its practice of slavery, which was brutal by any measure, but different in its legal inheritance from France and Spain, and different in the practical tolerance that a trading city developed toward cultural complexity. The gatherings at Congo Square continued from roughly 1740 through the American period, well into the 1840s. Every Sunday, hundreds of enslaved and free Black people gathered here. The music they played was polyrhythmic African drumming — djembe patterns from Senegambia, rhythmic structures from the Congo, Yoruba call-and-response singing. The dances were ring dances descended from West African religious ceremony. European visitors who witnessed these Sunday gatherings wrote accounts describing music unlike anything they had encountered, rhythmically complex in ways that European music simply was not.

Those traditions survived. When they collided, in the late nineteenth century, with the blues arriving from the Mississippi Delta, the brass band traditions of French military music, the harmonic vocabulary of French and Italian opera, and the improvisational habits of Caribbean musical forms, the result was jazz. New Orleans jazz. American music. Every form of popular music that followed — blues, R&B, rock and roll, soul, funk, hip-hop — traces its rhythmic heartbeat back to this square.

Louis Armstrong was born two blocks from here in 1901. His statue stands inside the park gates, trumpet raised, grinning at the city that made him. The Mahalia Jackson Theater anchors the park's far end. This neighborhood produced more foundational American music than any other neighborhood on Earth. Stand here a moment. The drums that sounded on this ground every Sunday for a hundred years never fully stopped — they just changed their instrument and kept going.

The result is a neighborhood of extraordinary extravagance. The American merchants who made fortunes in cotton, sugar, and banking during the antebellum decades built mansions that were intended to outshine anything in the French Quarter. Greek Revival columns twenty feet tall, Italianate towers, Victorian turrets and wraparound verandas draped in wisteria. The live oaks on the streets — some of them more than two hundred years old, their branches spreading thirty meters in every direction — create canopies of green that make the Garden District feel like a different climate from the rest of the city.

The St. Charles streetcar that will take you through this neighborhood has been running since 1835, making it the oldest continuously operating streetcar line in the world. The current Perley Thomas cars, built in the 1920s, are original — not reproductions, not restorations, but the actual cars that have been maintained in service for a hundred years. They clatter and sway on tracks that have not moved since the line was electrified in 1893, and riding one is as authentically New Orleans as a beignet or a brass band.

Commander's Palace restaurant, on the corner of Washington Avenue and Coliseum Street, is the neighborhood's most celebrated institution — a turquoise Victorian mansion that has been defining Creole fine dining since 1880 and that launched the careers of Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, and a generation of American chefs. Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, directly across the street, was used by Anne Rice as a setting in Interview with the Vampire and is free to enter during daylight hours.

New Orleans is one of those cities that gets more interesting the longer you stay. The French Quarter is the introduction. The Garden District is the deeper story. Take the streetcar, watch the oaks go by, and let the city keep surprising you.