New Orleans: Two Fictional Cities on One Real Street

The Quarter does not announce itself so much as close in around me. The streets run in the grid that was drawn when the city was founded in 1718, and the buildings stand close enough that the balconies almost touch overhead, iron lacework throwing shadows across the pavement. I kept looking up, which is a good way to walk into other people, and I walked into a lamppost and apologised to it before I remembered it was a lamppost. In Saint Denis I had ridden past balconies like these on a trolley, or watched them from a street corner while Arthur Morgan waited for someone who was never going to be on time. The resemblance is not a secret.

Commentators have been pointing at it for years, the square, the cathedral, the ironwork, the damp air. But standing under a real balcony, with a real pigeon watching me from it, the resemblance felt thinner and better at the same time. The game had given me a shape. The street had given me weather, and noise, and a pigeon with opinions.

Jackson Square stopped me the way a room stops a person, by being suddenly open after narrow streets. The ground under my shoes changed from pavement to the packed paths of the park, and the trees cut the light into pieces. I sat on a bench that was already warm and looked at the statue of Andrew Jackson on his horse in the middle of the square, and then past it to the white front of St. Louis Cathedral, with the Cabildo on one side and the Presbytere on the other. The square began as a parade ground, the Place d'Armes, laid out in 1721, and it took its current name in 1851 for the general who won the Battle of New Orleans, and the statue went up in

1856. I did not recite any of that to myself while I sat there. I thought about how a square teaches a person to wait. In the game, the square in Saint Denis was a place to pass through on the way to a robbery, a place where a trolley could be hijacked and everything could go wrong at speed.

Here, nobody was in a hurry except a brass band setting up near the fence, and a painter who kept stepping back from a canvas to see if the cathedral had moved. It had not moved. Churches on this site go back to the city's founding years, the present building rising from a Spanish-era church built in 1789 and rebuilt through the 1850s, and it is counted among the oldest cathedrals in continuous use in the country. I went inside for the cool air and the quiet, and I took my hat off without thinking about it, because some habits are older than any game. The light through the windows fell in coloured pieces on the floor, and for a minute I could not remember which century I was supposed to be in, and that confusion felt honest. The game had taught me to look at a cathedral and think about power, about mayors and crime lords and parties where a tip about a trolley station could ruin a gang. The real building taught me something quieter, which was that people had simply kept coming here, through fire and rebuilding and everything after, and kept sitting down.

I walked out of the square toward the river with the taste of coffee still in my mouth, and the air changed again, wider and damper, with the smell of the Mississippi somewhere underneath everything else. The riverfront was not a place where I did anything in particular. I stood and watched the water move past, brown and unhurried, and thought about how both games use a river city as a place where things arrive and disappear. In Saint Denis, the docks and the swamps at the edge of town were where plans fell apart. In New Bordeaux, the wharves and the canals were where territory changed hands.

The real river did not care about any of that. It just kept going past, the way it had when the city was a French port and a Spanish port and an American port in turn, carrying everything and keeping nothing. A bead caught in the branch of a tree above the path swung in the wind, purple and gold, left over from some parade or other, and I thought about how a city leaves its celebrations lying around for months afterward, the way a person leaves a ticket in a coat pocket. I did not pick it up. Some things are better left where the city put them.

Tremé was quieter when I got there, and the quiet felt like a different kind of loud. Congo Square sits at the edge of the neighbourhood, an open patch of ground in what is now Louis Armstrong Park, and I stood on ground where enslaved and free Black people gathered on Sundays in the 1700s and 1800s to drum and dance and trade, a gathering that had become a square in its own right by 1812 and faded by the Civil War, and never really went away as a symbol. There was no drum in my hands and no band playing while I stood there, just wind in the trees and a distant horn from somewhere I could not place. That was enough, and it was also not enough, and both feelings were true at once. I thought about Lincoln Clay coming home to New Bordeaux in 1968, a veteran walking back into a city that had already decided a great deal about him, and about how the game lets street-corner musicians play jazz in its French Ward and in Delray Hollow, the way a city lets music leak out of doorways whether anyone is listening or not.

The game never names Tremé, and I did not pretend it did. But the music in the game and the ground in front of me came from the same long story, the one that runs from those Sunday gatherings through Storyville, the district the city set aside in 1897 and closed in 1917, where Jelly Roll Morton and Buddy Bolden played, and on into every brass band that has marched a New Orleans street since. People like to say jazz was born in one place, in one district, on one night. The ground told a longer story, and I believed the ground.

The Garden District was a different kind of walk, slower, under oaks, past houses set back behind iron fences with gardens in front of them instead of courtyards hidden behind them. The neighbourhood grew on former plantation land in the early 19th century for wealthy Americans who arrived after the Louisiana Purchase, people who wanted distance from the Creole Quarter and room to build, and it became the City of Lafayette in 1833 before New Orleans annexed it in

1852. I liked the shade and I distrusted the prettiness in equal measure, which is probably the correct response to a street built on that much money. At the gates of Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, established in 1833, I stopped, because the gates were where the walk stopped too. The cemetery had been closed to the public for years, with tours returning through a preservation group, and I stood outside looking at the rows of above-ground tombs through the ironwork, the white and grey boxes stacked like small houses, and thought about the other cemetery I knew, the one in Saint Denis where Arthur and John cleared out grave robbers for a crime lord who was holding a small boy.

That cemetery was fiction and this one was not, and the difference mattered. The real tombs were not a mission location. They were the reason the city's burial customs look the way they do, above ground because the water table is high and because French, Spanish, African, Caribbean and Creole traditions all shaped the practice, and they held people who had lived through yellow fever and war and everything the Garden District's pretty fences were built to keep at a distance. A gate that does not open is also a kind of honesty. It says that some places are not for wandering through, and that standing outside and paying attention is a complete act on its own.

By late afternoon my feet were complaining in the specific way that means I had walked far enough and not yet far enough, and I went looking for food the way a tired person does, without a plan and with strong opinions. The beignet in the morning had been the opening note. The po'boy in the afternoon was the argument. It came on the long French loaf, crusty outside and soft inside, filled with fried shrimp, and I ate it standing up because sitting down would have meant admitting the day was over. The sandwich was born in the 1929 streetcar strike, when Bennie and Clovis Martin, former streetcar conductors who had opened their French Market coffee stand in 1922, fed striking workers for free, and the call of "here comes another poor boy" stuck to the sandwich itself. I thought about that while I ate, about food invented for people who could not pay, and about how a city remembers a strike by naming a sandwich after it, which is both generous and insufficient, and both of those things at once.

Later, over a bowl of gumbo, dark and slow, thickened the way West African, French, Spanish and Native traditions taught the city to thicken a stew, with okra or filé in its ancestry, I listened to a band I could not see. The sound came from the direction of Frenchmen Street, thin at first and then fuller, a trumpet finding its way through the evening air. In Mafia III, music does the same work, leaking out of doorways in 1968, licensed songs from the period mixed with jazz on street corners, the soundtrack of a city on the edge of a violent year. In Saint Denis, music was thinner, a piano somewhere behind a door. Here it was just there, unowned, in the air between buildings, and I did not need to know the name of the club or the set list to know what it was doing. It was keeping the street company.

I did not think about what I was wearing until the walk was nearly over, which is usually when it matters. My shirt still had sugar on it. My shoes were dusty. And I kept touching the small iron fleur-de-lis on a gate I had passed, the stylised lily that shows up all over this city, on fences and flags and souvenirs, a mark of its French past that the city kept long after the French left. Next time I come back, I want to wear that mark instead of just noticing it. A small fleur-de-lis pendant, something that can be worn every day and does not announce itself from across the street, feels like the right weight for this city, a quiet signal rather than a costume.

And because Lincoln Clay's New Bordeaux is 1968 in my head, and because 1968 men in films and photographs wear hats without thinking about it, I would add one hat, and only one: a simple dark wool fedora, the kind of hat that keeps the sun off and makes a person stand a little straighter, worn outdoors and taken off indoors, in a cathedral above all. That is the whole kit. No replica weapons, no costume pieces that belong in a display case, and nothing worn inside a museum or a historic house that asks for it to be left at the door, since the house rules come first wherever they are posted. This article contains affiliate links. If a purchase is made through one of those links, a commission may be earned at no extra cost. Prices and stock are as shown on the Amazon page.

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I left New Orleans the way I had arrived, with sugar still somewhere on my shirt, and the two fictional cities still in my head, quieter now. The real city had not replaced them. It had just given them somewhere to stand, a square and a cemetery gate and a patch of ground where people once drummed on Sundays, and a sandwich named for men who could not pay.

I did not finish the walk. There were streets I never turned down, a gate I never passed through, a band I never saw. The trumpet was still going when I turned the last corner, and I never found out where it was coming from, and I am still not sure I want to know.