The City of New Orleans

(This love song to her home town by Catharine Cole was published in the New Orleans Picayune Feb. 19, 1889.)

 I offer you an omelet soufflé, a palm-leaf fan and a rose!

It makes not the slightest difference what one’s first impression is of this quaint and sunny old city lying half asleep, blinking, as it were, under her luminous skies, luxuriously lounging on the elbow of the great yellow river. In the end one is sure to conclude that when she spoke, when first her tender message was breathed into the ear, it was an invitation something like this: I offer you a palm-leaf fan, an omelet soufflé and a rose!

It is early in the morning, late in the season and young in the year, but it is the time of all times when this old half-French, half-Spanish town of ours, with her beautiful women and foreign ways, her odd, grim houses and lovely rose gardens, pink and bloomy, is at her best. A sky more blue than the lid of Italy is overhead, and against it are lined the dull gray belfries, the leaping steeples and gilded crosses of her sanctuaries. Roses blossom on her iron balconies, a very balustrade of bloom is at the ledge of her red tiled roofs in the musty French Quarter, the perfume of the sweet olive interpenetrates all her shady spaces, and the sense of a new, different and foreign life impresses the stranger.

The very tankle of hr street-car bells has a novel and enticing sound, and in a little while one realizes that one has come here to enjoy life, to get closer to nature and to human nature, to be glad about the beauty of things and to melt the heart in the shining of the warm sun; to see a city tendriled with tropic vines and framed in with roses, and a life all set to the music of singing birds. Of what account is it, the current price of wheat, or the stock calls on the Exchange? Rather let us know what opera is to be sung tonight, and shall we take lodgings in an entresol of the French quarter, or in one of the big, sad, southern-looking hotels, or in a rose-grown cottage of the Garden District?

New Orleans is unlike any other American city. Her very name is a souvenir of gayeties; her breath is sweet as a willow copse in June, and something about her always makes one think on the opera and the bal masque, the carnival, the palm-leaf fan, the omelet soufflé and the rose. She is not to be known in a day, and she will unfold herself slowly, petal by petal, growing in charm each day as Venice does—surely not to be comprehended in an eye-flash.

When you started forth from that beautiful frozen North where there are icicles for daggers and snowbanks for roses, and often gray skies pent with rain, you tucked an organdy gown down into your trunk and you thought how, when you came South, you would perhaps wear a red rose at your belt and pin a velvety bunch of Parma violets at your throat. But I do not believe you realized the possibility of other charms than climate as belonging to the old southern city, sprawling like a Victoria Regia with its petals dipped in the opaline lakes and the great yellow river.

In truth, she does float like a lily on her lakes, and she lifts to the skies a wondrous charm of old red roofs and old churches, narrow streets, and curious shops, and a strange and genial life. The dwarf palms, the Spanish daggers, the green latanias piercing the gloom of her dusky environment of cypress swamp make one think of an invasion of Chinese ladies uprising from the other side of the world. And in her narrow courts and dim old churches we find old world charms, and in the roses on her balconies all the spicy perfumes of Araby.

Entering New Orleans with her southern homes, her gorgeous blooms, her superstitions, her southern ways, her prosperous life, her fine hospitality and her picturesque localities, her churches and cemeteries, is not for the pastime of a tourist who does a city between the rising up and the going down of the sun, and a continent in ten days. She does not too freely reveal herself to an importunate one, and it is only by dint of delightful dwelling and idle outings that you may come to know her well, and how sweet and sunny and genial she can be. Only in this way may you find out that in her shops are fabrics and confections native alone to New Orleans or Paris. Only in this way may you get at the legends of her historical mansions, the hue of her convents and cemeteries and churches, the customs of her old sweet Creole days.

The aesthetic attractions of New Orleans are inexhaustible; they grow upon one as the charm and geniality and lovableness of the town and the people grow upon one. At the end of a week you like the place; at the end of ten days you pace her streets wearing her rose colors on the lapel of your coat, singing the music of her opera house—the music of Verdi, and Gounod and Meyerbeer—and at the end of a month you will swear by her Spanish daggers, by the beautiful eyes of her women, by the rose upon your balcony.

Shall it be Arcady or Bohemia? A dewy land set with Cherokee roses in the sweet suburb of Carrolton or an entresol in the Rue Royal? The New Orleans of Madam Delphine, or the New Orleans of Charles Dudley Warner? It is all here. The purple wisteria is threaded through the branches of the magnolia trees, the roses are red on the sunny walls and lie primly sweet against the pink-plastered sides of the pent-roofed cottages in the heart of Frenchtown; the culture and charm of good society, the brilliancy of fashionable life, the amusement of the theater and opera, the zest of foreign tongues, the inexhaustible charm of a city that is like no other city in the world.

A fine and world-famous old opera house, a season of brilliant French opera. A carnival, equaling the Romans in splendor and characteristic gayety, the parade and pomp of the firemen’s celebration, the solemn and picturesque ceremonials of the Lenten season, a feature of every Catholic community; the unique attractions of a Cotton Palace—these are such notorious bids for favor, such well-published invitation cards to the city, that it is hardly necessary to speak of them.

There are famous old restaurants with chefs who are shrined as saints in the memories of gourmets; there are the bizarre attractions of the markets, the pictuersque stalls piled with pineapples and pompanos, cauliflowers, and calico tiers and bandanas; there are the luggers laden with golden oranges and bananas; there are streets electric-lighted and paths where only the firefly winks in flame. In the public parks you may have a rose, at the market stall a cup of French coffee burned on a charcoal burner, in the opera house the music of Rigaletto or Les Huguenots, in the church the chanted mass and perfume of incense, in the ballroom beautiful eyes and a pink domino, and everywhere the breath of the sweet olive, the soft breathings of the sweet salt wind from the Mexican sea, and overhead the luminous, radiantly blue and tender sky.

For the artist, the invalid, the idler, the writers, the rich woman of fashion, the man of the world, the busy workers taking a vacation, New Orleans is the very king, queen, and all the royal family of winter resorts. The picturesqueness of southern scenery and the southern character are at their best in this city. Behind the pink and yellow stucco and the brick and mortar crust of tall houses in the French quarter are veritable bits of virgin forest, fragments left over from the bois doré of olden times. In the second-hand shops are mahoganies that have sheltered the knees of princesses of the blood royal. In the many courts and upon the trailing vines, and by pink and green water jars, fortune for the artist sits and awaits his coming.

The sleepy charm of the courtly Creole, the dialect of the Negro, all are here. The sleepy charm of the public parks invites one’s soul to a loafing day in the sunshine. A promise of health breathes down from the blue, and go where one will, one cannot get beyond the song of uncaged birds, the beauty of clambering roses, the sense and cheerfulness and gayety of light-hearted southern life.

As a winter resort, this city offers advantages and inducements peculiar to it alone. Its climate is delightful, its social life and culture are unexcelled, its attractions are varied as are the attractions of any great city. Less than an hour’s ride distant are the health-giving forests of pine, the white beaches of the Mexican Gulf, the quaint little fishing villages and seaside resorts of the Gulf Coast. The Teche and the Acadian country is at our very door; famous hunting grounds are near at hand; the scenic beauty of the brown Tchefuncta River is a city’s suburb; Mexico streams this way, and when one wearies of New Orleans itself, it is a point of departure for many wonder lands.

I never walk along that most fascinating of fashionable thoroughfares, Canal Street, with its thousand and one familiar faces—for even the faces of a huge city, the composite face of its floating population, grow familiar in time—that I am not reminded to regret that I can have no first experience of it all. The jostle of people, the beautiful street manners of our public, the courtesy and good humor, the brilliant dressing of the women, the everlasting blare of music, the constant processions and celebrations, the peddlers and loafers, the venders of hot roasted chestnuts, the amber-hued, turbaned dispensers of pink pralines and yellow stage planks with a rosebud for lagniappe, the mural adornments in the way of fat French flower-women—forty and scant of breath—the wheezing hand organs—how delightfully it must impress one seeing and hearing it all for the first time.

How I envy the sealskin-coated tourist just arrived from Duluth or Penobscot, like a polar bear, panting, transported to the tropics. How I envy this one threading a path between the cotton bales and sugar barrels, sniffing the sugary odors, hearing the greasy, easy Negro lingo. Everything contains a subtle suggestion of a Southland conveyed by the hue of oranges, the perfume of violets, the swift smile of velvet eyes.

To such a one every full-throated, pink-cheeked, shaven Frenchman, laughing and gesticulating, with a red pink on his coat that shows at a distance like the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor, may be Faust of the French opera. Every handsome woman with black eyes may be a belle Creole, or the queen rose in the garden district of girls. The shimmering fabrics in the shop windows suggest pineapple organdies from Norma, the grotesque masques, the coming carnival with its Rex and queen, its confetti and pageants. Yet, after all who can so love the town as one who knows the mosses on its old manses by heart, who knows the haunts of the working people, the best place for omelet soufflé, the only place for Italian macaroni, the garden where the most roses are?

The electric light shows the way to the opera, the French market, the cathedral, the Cotton Palace, but out of the thoroughfare is a tiny café where the coffee might be bottled and sold for perfume. At the fringe of the town are convents that once were grand plantations still under the April snows of the orange blossoms. The long narrow black tunnels of entrances to houses in Frenchtown give one open beauties, and pictures of most foreign-looking life.

The song birds of the opera live here; the violet vendor has there her beds of purple bloom, and yonder the praline maker concocts her rose-leaf conserves, or peels pecans for your after-dinner café noir. A poet dwells in this big house and across the way a ghost lives. A king once slept and snored in yonder haunted room, and not far away is the palm tree of Pere Antoine.

I look one way and see the salt-crusted funnel of an Indian steamer, or the red sail on the catboat of a Barataria oysterman; I look the other way, and pressed up by the dingy houses and the graveyard walls by the Old Basin I see the charcoal schooners from the Mississippi bayous, their sails trailing like the broken wings of a gull. The air is warm and moist, it kisses the skin with a caress as tender as the touch of love. It is a whisper of the Southland and its breath is that of roses.

A silver rod, old faded goldenrod, grown gray with age, self-planted on the pent-roof of Madam John's tumbling cottage, trembles in the wind, and at this early hour a plump market woman goes clacking by in her wooden sabots. A streetcar bell tankles and then the car comes to a halt and waits politely while a would-be passenger rushes back into her house for something she has forgotten.

Up in the Garden District, where the big southern mansions are, their verandahs and columns and gateways trellised with jessamine vine, all is sunshine and flowers. One may wander down the quiet streets, the shade trees arching overhead as if this were some country lane in an English shire, and never weary of the view nor lose the impression that this is New Orleans, the king, queen and all the royal family of winter resorts.

And with all her products and her commerce, her busy marts and her fine buildings, her opera and theaters, and her balls and routs, who desires that she shall offer you anything better than an omelet soufflé, a palm-leaf fan and a rose?

CATHARINE COLE

Notes:   ENTRESOL: The mezzanine floor of a building, containing apartments. VICTORIA REGIS: A South American water lily. BAL MASQUE: Masked ball. MADAM DELPHINE: a New Orleans socialite notorious for torturing her slaves in the 1830s.  CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER:  Warner (1829-1900) was a writer and journalist who wrote, in 1889, that New Orleans was "shabby and tumble-down," but "I liked it from the first."  He thought the town "one of the most interesting places in the republic."   LUGGERS: Small, single-sail boats used for transportation on Louisiana’s rivers, bayous, and bays. BOIS DORÉ: Golden woods. STAGE PLANKS: Creole ginger cakes. PERE ANTOINE: Pere Antoine (1748-1829) served at St. Louis Cathedral under Spanish, French, and American rule. He reportedly planted a date palm tree in old New Orleans that survived until Catharine Cole’s time. MADAM JOHN’S COTTAGE: A historic French quarter house, built in 1789, at 632 Dumaine St.  It is now a National Historic Landmark.