Why New Orleans Matters
2012; Wiley; Volume: 7; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1747-0803.2012.00712.x
ISSN1747-0803
Autores Tópico(s)Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies
ResumoThis year the American Academy of Pediatrics Cardiology session will once again meet in New Orleans. New Orleans has had a long and distinguished history of hosting the Academy of Pediatrics and its Cardiology section. I had the great opportunity to live in New Orleans for over 8 years and to become part of what I think is the most unique city in the United States. During that time, as Chairman of Pediatrics at the Ochsner Clinic, I had a chance to live through a devastating time that affected the city deeply, namely Hurricane Katrina. After Hurricane Katrina, there was a wonderful book written by Tom Piazza called “Why New Orleans Matters.” Given that the meeting is being held in New Orleans this year, I thought it would be appropriate in this editorial to reflect on some of the comments that Mr. Piazza makes in this wonderful little book. the past in New Orleans cohabits with the present to an extent not even approximated in any other North American city. Walking through the Tulane University campus, way uptown, you can see the old gymnasium where King Oliver's Creole jazz band, with the young Louis Armstrong on coronet, played for dances. If you are adventuresome, and you know where to go, you can find the houses of Jelly Roll Morton and Buddy Bolden and Papa Jack Laine and the rest of the earliest generations of jazz musicians. In the French Quarter, you can cut out of Jackson Square, ring by the Pontalba apartments, the oldest apartment buildings in North American, walk down narrow Pilot's Alley where John Lafitte used to hang out, between St. Louis Cathedral on your right and the huge bulk of the Cabildo on your left, at one time the seat of Spanish government in the territory and the place where the Louisiana Purchase was signed, and half a block down encounter a great bookstore in the house where William Faulkner wrote his first novel, “Soldier's Pay.” A few blocks away, Tennessee Williams lived and wrote amid scenes made famous by Walker Percy, George W. Cable, and other writers too numerous to mention. These elements of New Orleans possess an astonishing vitality that has spoken to people around the world and shape much of the best of what we think of still as American culture. Jazz music, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, Creole cooking, Mardi Gras, the architecture of the French Quarter, the literate traditions of Williams and Faulkner and Percy and Kate Chopin, the Mardi Gras Indians, whose chanted songs stretch back into the 19th century and whose rhythms helped form the basis of American popular music. It is not something that you find only in a tourist guide; “it is a reality lived by its inhabitants everyday, and as often as possible by those who love visiting.” Everyone who loves New Orleans learns to love it with its flaws. It may be hard for people who have never been to the crescent city to understand the passion and love people have for it, to understand why it's worth fighting for—why it matters. There would be so many things to explain, and so many of them are visible only between the lines. You would have to show them the St. Charles Avenue street car slowly rolling along its track in the morning haze under the avenue's great oak trees, pass some of the most beautiful houses in America, or a second line parade in which everyone following the brass band (and the brightly costumed members of this or that social aid and pleasure club), dance intricate steps through the streets of the neighborhood where they grew up, or you could show them a Mardi Gras Indian practice. You could bring them to Zydeco night at Rock “n” Bowl, where a live band plays for dancers up on the mezzanine level while people bowl happily a few feet away, or to Snug Harbor to hear Ellis Marsalis play piano or you can even sit them down at one of those cramped counters at Central Grocery and put half a muffuletta sandwich and a Barq's Root Beer in front of them, or give them a Pimm's cup at the Napoleon House or, best of all, some of the fried chicken at Willie Mae's Scotch House across from the Lafitte Project. Even then, the meaning is between the lines. New Orleans is not just a list of attractions or restaurants or ceremonies, no matter now sublime and settled. New Orleans is the interaction among all those things and countless more. It gains its character from the spirit that it summoned, like a hologram, in the midst of all these elements, and that comes ultimately from the people who live there—those who have chosen to live there, and those whose parents and grandparents and ancestors lived there. Conflict of interest: None.
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