Some days I feel like this chap in the picture.  Other days, I feel like the whale.

I moved to New Orleans to live in a city that was the opposite of Boston.  Boy, I got what I wished for with that.  I feel like I went fishing and reeled in more than I can filet.  At least I have enough for a cook-out, a blubber boil, a stew pot, a trying out of the essence from the vast wealth of meat, there will be plenty left over for the sharks.  I find New Orleans overwhelming, not in a bad way.  I haven't had any bad days since I've moved here, just the impression that I have a lot to digest.

Sometimes I feel like the whale.  I am a wealth of experience and talents.  Isn't anyone.  I have made a satisfying life for myself wherever I have landed and planted.  There isn't any reason to think I can't make my mark here.  New Orleans is a city of opportunity, where chance marries fortune and they have beautiful babies full of promise.  ...and then they die, like we all do in the end.

New Orleans has been around a long time, for better and for worse.  Sometimes the city itself has been the whale and sometimes it has been the fisherman.  The name of this blog is Excelsior!  New Orleans!! for a reason.  From everything I see as I'm on patrol at all hours of the clock over all the calendar's pages, I see a city on the move, ever upward, one that doesn't cotton to shuteye.  I encounter a city where something is always happening and things are getting done, even if those things are not the most reputable.  New Orleans is not a technology-oriented metropolis.  It has little truck or traffic with notions of a new economy.  It is home to a creative class, heck, the whole city is nothing but a creative class.  Orleanians channel their energies not toward profit or dominating a niche market, unless that market is New Orleans itself.  Orleanians enjoy their surroundings, their lives, and their acquaintances.  This is a city in which no one is lonely and no one is bored.

I'm new here.  I may be wrong.  I may be the fisherman.  At least I can say I was here.  There's something to that.  Better a bad day spent on a New Orleans street than a good day of fishing.  You can put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Great moments in New Orleans science

While the temperature has dropped in New Orleans recently enough for people to wear winter coats (high 50s before the sun comes up) that's not the kind of freeze I'm discussing today.  These images come from friezes on either side of the former front door at Tulane Medical School.

This neighborhood, the foot of Tulane Avenue at Elk Place and pretty much up past South Claiborne till I don't know how far out, is a desert of anything interesting.  The old medical school building, while no prize, does has some interesting architectural details.  It's the same way with the abandoned Charity Hospital next door.  A lot of art deco at ground level, an imposing silhouette for the skyline, but the neighborhood is pretty much dead and there is no life to speak of.  The 70s era bunker that is Tulane Hospital isn't a peach of an attraction, eyeglass museum or no.

Here's the other side of the old med school doorway:

New Orleans, Excelsior!

George' Bank herring from off the coast of Canada...

George's Bank is located off the coast of New England.  It is a fabulously fertile fishing ground that gave the Commonwealth of Massachusetts one of its symbols, the Sacred Cod that hangs in the Statehouse.  Can a cold water fish really be at its best when dressed in Louisiana spices?  Some would say yes.  I like to think so.

I was born and raised in Connecticut, a small state many people confuse with a city in Ohio when I travel cross-country.  Whether they it is Cleveland or Cincinnati or whether they there really is a Connecticut, OH, I've never bothered to ask.  Ohio was once a part of Connecticut's Western Reserve, but that is a story for another day.

As I discussed yesterday, I have lived in a number of cities and I would like to spend today's post discussing why I feel New Orleans is best.

Good customer gets feather in cap

I went to Meyer the Hatter at lunch yesterday.  I have enough hats, so I wasn't in the market for another proper topper.  I just needed some new feathers for my fedoras.  The South's Largest Hat Shop has a box on the counter toward the back with a selection of feathers for sale at 35 cents each.  They are a three feather affair, wide in the back, more narrow in the middle, and the front feather is a little, flourish-y tendril in a contrasting color.

I went in and there were five other customers and three staff.  The customers were trying on hats and asking questions.  The youngest of the hatters asked me if I needed help and I replied, "No, I'm just here for feathers."  I pawed through the box, careful not to crimp the merchandise and picked two hand-bound feather confection as artful as a trout fly and as dashing as one of Fred Astaire's handkerchiefs.

When I made my way to the register, a hatter was waiting for me with a small paper bag.  "That will be 70 cents plus tax," he said.  I apologized for my "whopping purchase."  "You came in and you knew what you wanted, knew where it was, and bought it.  That kind of customer is a luxury we don't often have here.  Come back anytime," he replied.

Being right off Canal Street, I suppose the staff at Meyer's is used to gawkers who take up their time without spending any money.  The staff is gracious and attentive regardless though they aren't quick to make eye contact.  They've been around a long time and know that sales will be made for their specific niche products eventually.  The same was true of the curmudgeons at L.J. Piretti in Boston.  The same was true of Parade News at 68 State Street, New London, Connecticut, about the only shop of interest that sold sundries and magazines and cigars a block from the ferry and train station.

What?  No Magazine Street photo?  Pshaw.  Here you go:

We've got one more sign to go until this series crosses the street and doubles back.  Pshew!

New Orleans Eyeglass Museum

Not advertised.  Not a real tourist attraction.  Not much a museum either so much as a display of eyeglasses styles over the centuries and some vintage opthalmologic surgical instruments mounted behind glass.

Any guesses where this is?  

Toot Sweet New Orleans.

In case you couldn't make it to the Prytania Theater two weeks ago...



I can see the Rebirth Brass Band adding a new instrumentalist.  Or, the audience could have an instrument with which to play along rather than just their hands.

Maybe the sponsors can get it arranged to have some candy flutes available when Dr. John plays next Wednesday in Lafayette Square.

Rebirth Brass Band

Sorry folks.  No picture and not even a decent article for you to read.  Just got back from listening to the Rebirth Brass Band play in Lafayette Square.  A bass drum, a snare, a tuba, a sax, two trumpets, and a trombone.  Man, can they wail.  That's a lot of breath being expelled just over the course of one three-minute song stretched out to twelve or lucky thirteen or the blessed, winding denouement and final note at 14 minutes 25 and three quarter seconds.

I won't say my ears are ringing from my front row seat on the grass, but my blood is pumping.  Listening to New Orleans jazz is the most aerobic exercise I've had in years.  I feel healthier since I moved here.

We will resume our more usual format tomorrow.

Thanks for understanding,
WK

CBD, Canal Street, Tulane, etc.

Between Coliseum and  Camp Streets: Neutral Ground.

I was talking to a woman today and I asked, "Were all these tall buildings occupied six years ago?"

"No," she answered.  "They were empty when the levees broke."

"Who would build a skyscraper and abandon it?" I asked.

"These were built during the oil boom in the 70s.  When the 80s came, the companies moved out of town.  The last were gone in the early 90s at the latest."

That's a lot of architecture to just get up and abandon after building it.  It also explains why renovations aren't proceeding swiftly.  The buildings were empty to begin with.  They look like they were built in the 70s.  These would be unloved, ugly buildings even if they were humming with activity.

It makes me wonder:  A real estate market seemed so hot that developers erected these office towers but it left behind husks a mere ten or twenty years later.  So quickly that the Central Business District and O'Keefe Avenue and the area around Tulane Hospital seem like parts of a ghost town.  What went wrong?  What went so wrong that something new was abandoned so quickly.  What went wrong that the money moved to Houston, from what I understand.  Houston?  I wouldn't bring a dog to Houston let alone a corporate headquarters.  Maybe that's why I write a blog rather than run an oil company.  There are worse fates.