New Orleans: Recreation
Sightseeing
Visitors can tour New Orleans by bus, boat, seaplane, streetcar, or horse-drawn carriage, whether seeking a general-interest excursion or a specialized trip. Points of interest include Cajun country; picturesque homes, plantations, and gardens; and historic sites. Self-guided driving and walking tours are also available in the city.
Part of Jean Lafitte National Historic Park, New Orleans' French Quarter is one of America's most famous neighborhoods. Park rangers offer free walking tours that begin at the park information center. A living slice of history, the French Quarter's Vieux Carre is home to people from all walks of life. Its intriguing architecture is mainly Spanish, dating from the late 1700s after two fires destroyed nearly all of the city's French buildings. Visits to the French Quarter usually begin in Jackson Square, originally a municipal drill field and parade ground known as the "Place d'Armes." Painters and musicians hone their arts in the square while pigeons flock around the famed equestrian statue of General Andrew Jackson. The square is dominated by St. Louis Cathedral, built in 1794 and remodeled in 1850. Next door, the Cabildo, the one-time Spanish government building where Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase agreement was signed, houses French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's death mask and a collection of folk art.
A section of the Mississippi River levee adjacent to Jackson Square serves as a promenade. Renamed the Moon Walk when renovated, it offers a scenic view of the river. The Woldenburg Riverfront Park, stretching from Canal Street to the Moonwalk, gives direct access to the Mississippi River. Elsewhere in the French Quarter landmarks such as the Old Ursuline Convent—the oldest recorded building in the Mississippi Valley and now restored as Archbishop Antoine Blanc Memorial—and Preservation Hall—the city's most famous jazz club where pioneers of the idiom still perform nightly—join with antique shops, confectioneries, Bourbon Street jazz clubs, world-famous restaurants, historic homes, art galleries, sidewalk cafes, and outdoor markets to make the French Quarter New Orleans's top tourism drawing card.
The Audubon Nature Institute comprises several attractions throughout New Orleans. Its Audubon Zoo displays more than 2,000 animals in natural habitats, and the spectacular Aquarium of the Americas displays exhibits of 530 species of fish, birds and reptiles. Adjacent to the Aquarium is the Entergy IMAX Theater. The Louisiana Nature Center is an 86-acre forest and wetland, featuring trails, interpretive galleries, exhibits, and a planetarium. The Audubon Insectarium is scheduled to open in fall 2005. The "largest free-standing museum in the country devoted to 900,000 + known species of insects and their relatives," the museum will encompass 23,000 square feet of exhibit space at the U.S. Customs House in New Orleans.
New Orleans's varied neighborhoods, central business district, and surrounding areas provide a wide range of other attractions as well. City Park, one of the largest municipal parks in the country, showcases an 18-foot sundial, a carousel, a children's story land, and a miniature train, as well as points of historic interest. Six Flags New Orleans theme park provides roller coasters and New Orleans-themed entertainment for families. Construction began on the fortifications at Fort Pike Commemorative Area in 1818 and the buildings were used in various capacities until after the Civil War; now a 125-acre park surrounds the fort. Six Flags New Orleans theme park provides roller coasters and New Orleans-themed entertainment for families.
In the business district, sights include the K & B Plaza at Lee Circle, featuring a 5-acre sculpture garden; the International Trade Mart, which offers spectacular views of the New Orleans area from its 31st and 33rd floors; and the Civic Center, which anchors a complex of state and city buildings around an attractive plaza. Creole cottages and shotgun houses dominate the scene in many New Orleans neighborhoods. Both have a murky ancestry. The Creole cottage, two rooms wide and two or more rooms deep under a generous pitched roof with a front overhang or gallery, is thought to have evolved from various European and Caribbean forms. The shotgun house is one room wide and two, three or four rooms deep under a continuous gable roof. As legend has it, the name was suggested by the fact that because the rooms and doors line up, one can fire a shotgun through the house without hitting anything.
Among the area's picturesque and historic sights is the Longue Vue House and Gardens, a Greek Revival mansion
Because the high water table restricts burials in New Orleans to above-ground edifices, the city's old cemeteries (called "cities of the dead") are often sought out for their unusual beauty. There are 42 cemeteries in the metropolitan New Orleans area. Metairie Cemetery is thought by many to be the most beautiful as well as the most unique cemetery, not only in New Orleans, but anywhere in the world, featuring architecture styles from around the world.
Crossing 24 miles of open water between Jefferson and St. Tammany parishes, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway is the world's longest overwater highway bridge; other drives along area waterfronts and bayou country afford scenic views as well. The Louisiana Nature Center, the Michoud NASA facility, Fairgrounds and Jefferson Downs racetracks, the Pitot House Museum, and the Chalmette National Historical Park are among the many other points of interest in and around New Orleans.
Arts and Culture
New Orleans enjoys an extensive cultural life. The New Orleans Cultural Center with its Municipal Auditorium and Theater of Performing Arts hosts ballets, operas, and concerts. Broadway productions are staged at the Saenger Performing Arts Center, while Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre offers community theater on two stages housed in historic architecture. University theaters, dinner theaters, the Contemporary Arts Center, and other area stages also mount various performing arts productions. With a repertoire that ranges from classical to popular music, the New Orleans Philharmonic performs in the Orpheum Theater. The New Orleans Opera Association, a resident company, features renowned guest soloists in its full productions, while concerts by chamber groups spotlight music for smaller groups. Various university and church organizations also offer musical performances in the New Orleans area, while at nightspots around the city listeners can find rhythm and blues, rock and roll, reggae, Cajun, and country music performed by national and local talent.
But music in New Orleans means just one thing to many residents and visitors: jazz. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries African American musicians evolved a style of music that fused African American rhythms and improvisatory methods with European musical styles and the syncopated St. Louis-based piano music known as ragtime. This blend formed the basis for a musical idiom heard in Storyville—New Orleans's brothel district—as well as in parades and at parties, picnics, and funerals. Gradually the new style of musical expression, called jazz, began to take hold outside the city's African American community; the first jazz recording was made in 1917 by a white New Orleans group called the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Many consider jazz to have come of age with the trumpet genius of Louis Armstrong, a New Orleans native whose music is familiar worldwide and whose statue graces New Orleans's Armstrong Park. Traditional straight-ahead jazz such as Armstrong played is the predominant style heard in present-day New Orleans nightclubs, on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, and elsewhere across the birthplace of jazz.
The importance of jazz to New Orleans can be seen in the jazz exhibit at the Louisiana State Museum system's Old U.S. Mint facility, which also features a Mardi Gras Carnival exhibit. The state museum system, which maintains several facilities, also presents folk art and traveling exhibitions. The Confederate Museum, the oldest museum in New Orleans, preserves Civil War flags, uniforms, weapons, currency, and other mementos. Jackson Barracks houses a large number of military artifacts, Kenner Historical Museum features various Jefferson Parish items of interest, and Historic New Orleans Collection exhibits imaginative displays in the eighteenth-century home of the collection's founder.
At the Voodoo Museum in the French Quarter, occult displays and a Witchcraft Shop merge a part of old and modern New Orleans. Marie Laveau's grave in St. Louis Cemetery #1 is visited and meticulously maintained by legions of followers, who still place offerings there, including food or various symbols of Voodoo. One ritual that still lives on is the marking of her tomb with chalk in the shape of a cross or an X. The New Orleans Pharmacy Museum preserves antique remedies and apothecary equipment in an 1823 pharmacy building. The Louisiana Children's Museum presents hands-on exhibits, puppet workshops, and storytelling, and includes one of the few interactive math exhibits in a children's museum.
ARTnews magazine has noted that citizens of New Orleans are enthusiastic supporters of the arts. The prestigious New Orleans Museum of Art exhibits works ranging from Renaissance to avant-garde. The Contemporary Arts Center has three galleries and two theaters. It features art exhibits, as well as music, drama, and videotapes in its facility. The new Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden adjacent to the New Orleans Museum of Art in City Park features 42 extraordinary sculptures installed among 100-year-old oaks, mature pines, magnolias and camellias. The sculptures, valued in excess of $25 million, include works by world-renowned twentieth-century artists as Henry Moore, George Rickey, Jacques Lipchitz, and George Segal. The Besthoff Sculpture Garden is open to the public without charge. There are about 150 other art galleries in the city where local, national, and international artists show their work throughout the year.
Scenes of New Orleans history are on display at the Musee Conti Wax Museum. The Cabildo, site of the signing of the Louisiana Purchase, exhibits steamboat artifacts and paintings and Louisiana historical items, as well as Napoleon's death mask. House museums, such as the Gallier House in the French Quarter, carefully restored to its mid-nineteenth-century elegance, and the Pitot House in Bayou St. John, containing Federal period antiques, are available for touring.
Festivals and Holidays
The Nokia Sugar Bowl on New Years' Day is the oldest annual sporting event in New Orleans; besides football, festivities include tennis, yachting, and other events. In spring the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is an extravaganza attracting thousands of musicians, craftsmen, and chefs to New Orleans for ten days of concerts, displays, and revelry featuring blues, gospel, ragtime, Cajun, swing, folk, and jazz performances. During the seven-day Spring Fiesta, plantations, courtyards, and private homes throughout New Orleans can be viewed on special tours. In July, the city hosts Carnaval Latino, the Gulf South's most elaborate Hispanic Festival. From April to October various food festivals in the New Orleans area highlight crawfish, catfish, crab, andouille sausage, strawberries, gumbo, and other delicacies. New Orleans Christmas is a series of special events spanning the month of December.
The most famous of all celebrations in New Orleans—and perhaps in the nation—is Mardi Gras. Rooted in the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, Mardi Gras season begins on January 6, or Twelfth Night. Parades, private balls, and parties continue through Mardi Gras Day, the day before Ash Wednesday, which signifies the beginning of the six-week period of Lent that precedes Easter. Carnival celebrations culminate in rollicking street revelry, formal masked balls, and ritualistic torchlight parades featuring elaborate floats, dancing, lavish costumes, and merriment that infects visitors and residents alike.
Sports for the Spectator
The Louisiana Superdome is home to the National Football League's New Orleans Saints football team; the annual Sugar Bowl football classic and Tulane University's football contests are also played there. The Zephyrs, a farm team of the Houston Astros, play minor-league baseball at Zephyr Field. The New Orleans Arena is home to the Arena Football League's New Orleans VooDoo and the National Basketball Association's New Orleans Hornets.
Consecutive racing schedules at Jefferson Downs and the Fairgrounds racetracks fill the equestrian calendar. Sports spectators can also see tennis tournaments and the Compaq Golf Classic of New Orleans, as well as the annual 10K (6.2 mile) Crescent City Classic road race. In nearby Slidell, the Bayou Liberty Pirogue Races test the skill of boaters skippering dugout canoes known as pirogues. The Ted Gormely Stadium in City Park, refurbished as a state-of-the-art sports facility, hosted the 1992 Olympic Track & Field Triad. The Grand Prix du Mardi Gras is a major league road race held in June in downtown's historic riverfront area. Riverboat gambling is available on the paddleboat vessels "America" and "Queen of New Orleans."
Sports for the Participant
New Orleans's 1,500-acre City Park offers four golf courses, a two-tiered driving range, 48 tennis courts, rental canoes and paddleboats, and riding stables. Six other public parks also maintain public golf, tennis, and similar facilities.
Popular water sports such as wind surfing, sailing, and boating are possible year-round on New Orleans-area lakes and through the region's lush bayous and marshlands. The delta has always been a prime area for deep-water and freshwater fishing, crawfishing, crabbing, and shrimping, in addition to seasonal duck and deer hunting.
Shopping and Dining
Canal Street has historically been a center in New Orleans for department stores and specialty shops, and the locale continues its tradition with such retail and office developments as One Canal Place and the nearby Riverwalk, which features not only shops but restaurants, cafes, bars, and magnificent views of the Mississippi River. At once-famous Jackson Brewery, now a marketplace, shops, entertainment, and Louisiana food specialties lure visitors. In the French Quarter, handicraft, antique, and candy stores draw buyers from around the country. Accessible via the St. Charles Street streetcar, Magazine Street's clusters of small shops begin in the Garden District and extend for more than three miles of antique shops and art galleries.
For more than 160 years the long, narrow French Market across from Jackson Square in the French Quarter has furnished area cooks with exotic spices, fresh produce, and cheeses at stalls encompassing coffee houses and craft shops as well. Shops retailing health food, books, brassware, perfume, and other specialty items are also popular among visiting and resident consumers.
New Orleans, dubbed the nation's culinary capital, considers cooking and dining to be art forms. Local chefs excel in variety while specializing in unique Cajun and Creole cuisines. Creole cooking, originally the region's urban gastronomic style, combines several elements: the French provincial talent for incorporating a wide variety of ingredients into its repertoire, the Spanish taste for zest, the Choctaw affinity for herbs and spices, the African understanding of slow cooking, the American Southern tradition, and subsequent ethnic infusions. Creole cuisine is perhaps best exemplified by its complex sauces with Mediterranean and Caribbean inflections. Cajun cuisine, on the other hand, originally the region's rural cooking style, is more robust and savory and is typified by such dishes as boudin, a smoky pork sausage; crawfish etouffe, a tomato-based stew of small lobster-like crustaceans served over rice; boiled crawfish liberally seasoned with cayenne pepper; or blackened redfish, a highly seasoned fillet of fish charred in a hot skillet.
Cajun and Creole elements are combined in the cuisine of present-day New Orleans, where diners at the more than 3,000 restaurants find numerous local specialties: jambalaya, a spicy blend of shrimp, ham, tomatoes, vegetables, and rice; andouille, a salty sausage; gumbo, from an African word meaning okra, now signifying a thick soup; red beans and rice, traditionally a washday recipe featuring kidney beans; dirty rice, pan-fried leftover rice cooked with giblets, spices, and onions; mirliton, a vegetable pear cooked like squash; plantains, large starchy bananas served as a side dish; seafood, from oysters Rockefeller and shrimp Creole to boiled crab and broiled pompano; and the po' boy, a fried sandwich on crusty French bread typically featuring oysters but possibly instead featuring roast beef, crab, or shrimp. Diners in New Orleans are likely to encounter eggplant, avocados, yams, and mangoes in the regional cuisine as well. Sweet offerings typical of the Crescent City include pecan pralines, bread or rice pudding with caramel or whiskey sauce, and beignets—square, fried doughnuts sprinkled with powdered sugar. Coffee in New Orleans is brewed strong and sometimes blended with roasted chicory root or chocolate, and it can be served as cafe au lait—half hot milk—or cafe brulot—mixed with spices, orange peel, and liqueurs and set aflame. Residents and visitors alike find dining in New Orleans to be an event in itself.
Visitor Information: The New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau, 2020 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70130; telephone (504)566-5011 or (800)672-6124