Mythic New Orleans: The past is prologue to the future
Editor's Column from LCV Summer 2010

New Orleans is a city that glows resplendent in the nostalgic hues of the past and misty, rosy dreams of the future. Where we fare least well is in the harsh light of the present tense, like a painted woman who overstayed the dim candlelight at the ball to be exposed to the bright beams of daybreak.

Our precarious perch on the edge of the river, lake, and gulf that sustain and threaten us — indeed on the edge of a continent to which we culturally but tenuously belong — has always encouraged a carpe diem, even more than the gentler laissez-faire attitude. That is to say, we live for the present for tomorrow we likely die. Perhaps the surest sign and confirmation of our vulnerability and peril is the deeply reverent, nostalgic, and mythographying television series Treme which I fear will serve as a prescient obituary for what is to come. Inspired by the consequence of our first near-fatal catastrophe, more man-made than natural, Treme has distilled characters, allusions, and situations that are uniquely New Orleans, but in literature there is no more sure sign of the end than a nostalgia for an ever-receding past of what once was and now may cease to be. There is not a heart in New Orleans, or for that matter across the nation, that is not clenched with the potential peril posed by the massive oil spill that casts the future even more than the present into doubt.

Glories of the Past
And there is much to lose, indeed. A city defined by music, food, and architecture, New Orleans’ musical pantheon is incantatory with the names inscribed in its past, names that beat out across time like the drums in Congo Square: les freres Bienville and Iberville, the Ursuline nuns and Marie Laveau, Jean Lafitte and Andy Jackson, Buddy Bolden and Nick LaRocca, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, and of more recent coinage, Louis Prima, Professor Longhair, James Booker, Danny Barker, les freres Neville, Irvin Mayfield, les docteurs John and Michael White, Trombone Shorty, and Kermit Ruffins.

Our cuisine is a unique recipe seasoned by our poly-cultural origins: African okra, Native-American sassafras, French sauces, German sausages, and South American coffee. It is cooked in hundred-year-old gumbo pots at our established eateries such as Antoine’s, Commander’s Palace, and Galatoire’s, embellished by chefs such as Paul Prudhomme, Leah Chase, and Emeril Lagasse, then updated and transmogrified by Greg Sonnier, Susan Spicer, Donald Link, and John Besh, to name just enough to do injustice to others equally deserving. So idiosyncratic is our cuisine that there are literally several dozen dishes indigenous to Louisiana not shared by a single other state’s cuisine.

Prelude to Decline
Unlike our music and cuisine, which though endlessly reinventive have managed also to be unique, our architecture died without funeral observances a century ago, victim to a desire of the moneyed classes to emulate the modernity of at first New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and later Houston, Atlanta, and Charlotte. Perhaps because it required greater capitalization, it depended less on the vitality of the indigenous culture to sustain it and succumbed to a nationalizing and even internationalizing ethos of the schools of architecture. Whereas Royal Street, St. Charles, and Esplanade Avenues could not be mistaken as belonging to any other American city, the CBD, as exemplified by Poydras Street, could be in any one of a dozen anonymous urban business districts, and much the same could be said for the suburban renderings of Lakeview, New Orleans East, and Metairie, these perhaps even more astonishing in that they were built and inhabited by New Orleanians who once were denizens of historic neighborhoods.

Is it also an augury that City Hall is entombed in a sterile architectural hulk located at the unluckily numbered and named 1300 Perdido Street? One does not have to be a victim of triskaidekaphobia to fear this symbolic heart of the city; nor is one surprised it is situated on a street that is Spanish for lost, wasted, or dissolute. I regret being obliged to quote the lyrics of the non-New Orleanian singer Joni Mitchel, but, they seem so apt in the present moment: “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone; they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Let’s all light a candle in the hope we finally learn from the past, so as to have a future cast in reality. But at a minimum, we can take solace in knowing we will endure forever in the more permanent and elevating medium of myth.

—Michael Sartisky, Ph.D., Editor-In-Chief