New Orleans ( , , or by
locals, by many non-locals, and in ) is a major U.S.
port and the
largest city in the state of Louisiana
. New Orleans is the center of the
New Orleans Metropolitan Area,
the largest metro area in the state.
New Orleans is located in southeastern Louisiana, straddling the
Mississippi River. The boundaries
of the city and
Orleans Parish are the same.
It is
bounded by the parishes of St. Tammany
(north), St. Bernard
(east), Plaquemines
(south) and Jefferson (south and
west). Lake Pontchartrain
, part of which is included in the city limits, lies
to the north and Lake
Borgne
lies to the east.
The city is named after
Philippe II, Duc
d'Orléans, Regent of France, and is well known for its
multicultural and multilingual heritage,
cuisine, architecture, music (particularly as the birthplace of
jazz), and its annual celebrations and
festivals, particularly
Mardi
Gras. The city is often referred to as the "most
unique"The term "most unique" is grammatically controversial. See
for example:
Merriam-Webster Dictionary of American Usage, Springfield,
MA: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 1994.
Fowler, Henry,
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 2003.
Nicholson, Margaret,
A Dictionary of American English
Usage, New York: Oxford University Press, 1957. city in
America.
History
Beginnings through the 19th century
La Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans) was founded May 7, 1718, by the
French Mississippi Company,
under the direction of
Jean-Baptiste Le
Moyne de Bienville, on land inhabited by the
Chitimacha. It was named for
Philippe II, Duke of
Orléans, who was Regent of France at the time.
His title came from
the French city of Orléans
. The
French colony was ceded to the
Spanish Empire in the
Treaty of Paris and remained
under Spanish control until 1801, when it reverted to French
control.
All of the surviving 18th century
architecture of the Vieux Carré (French Quarter
) dates from this Spanish period. Napoleon sold the territory to the
United States in the
Louisiana
Purchase in 1803. Thereafter, the city grew rapidly with
influxes of Americans, French,
Creoles, Irish, Germans and
Africans. Major commodity crops of sugar and cotton were cultivated
with slave labor on large plantations outside the city.
The
Haitian Revolution of 1804
established the second republic in the Western Hemisphere and the
first led by blacks. Haitian refugees, both white and free people
of color (
affranchis or
gens de couleur libres),
arrived in New Orleans, often bringing slaves with them. While
Governor Claiborne and other officials wanted to keep out more free
black men, French Creoles wanted to increase the French-speaking
population.
As more refugees were allowed in Louisiana,
Haitian émigrés who had gone to Cuba
also
arrived. Nearly 90 percent of the new immigrants settled in
New Orleans. The 1809 migration brought 2,731 whites; 3,102 free
persons of African descent; and 3,226 enslaved refugees to the
city, doubling its French-speaking population.
During the
last campaign of the War of 1812, the
British
sent their
best forces to conquer New Orleans. Despite great
challenges, the young Andrew Jackson
successfully cobbled together a motley crew of local militia, free
persons of color, United States regulars, Kentucky riflemen and
area pirates to decisively defeat the
British troops, led by Sir Edward
Pakenham, in the Battle of New Orleans
on January 8, 1815.
As a principal port, New Orleans played a major role during the
antebellum era in the
Atlantic
slave trade. Its port handled huge quantities of commodities
for export from the interior and imported goods from other
countries, which were warehoused and then transferred in New
Orleans to smaller vessels and distributed the length and breadth
of the vast
Mississippi River
watershed. The river in front of the city was filled with
steamboats, flatboats, and sailing ships. Despite its dealings with
the slave trade, New Orleans at the same time had the largest and
most prosperous community of free persons of color in the nation,
who were often educated and middle-class property owners.
The population of the city doubled in the 1830s and by 1840, New
Orleans had become the wealthiest and third-most populous city in
the nation. Dwarfing in population the other cities in the
antebellum South, New
Orleans had, consequently, the largest slave market. Two-thirds of
the more than one million slaves brought to the Deep South arrived
via the forced migration of the internal slave trade. The money
generated by sales of slaves in the Upper South has been estimated
at fifteen percent of the value of the staple crop economy. The
slaves represented half a billion dollars in property, and an
ancillary economy grew up around the trade in slaves for
transportation, housing and clothing, fees, etc., estimated at 13.5
percent of the price per person. All of this amounted to tens of
billions of dollars during the antebellum period, with New Orleans
as a prime beneficiary.
The
Union captured New
Orleans early in the
American Civil
War, sparing the city the destruction suffered by many other
cities of the
American
South.
During
Reconstruction New
Orleans was within the
Fifth
Military District of the United States. Louisiana was
readmitted to the Union in 1868, and its Constitution of 1868
granted universal manhood suffrage. Due to the state's large
African American population, many
blacks held public office. In 1872, then-lieutenant governor
P.B.S. Pinchback succeeded Henry Clay Warmouth as governor of
Louisiana, becoming the first non-white governor of a
U.S. state, and the last African American
to lead a U.S. state until Douglas
Wilder's election in Virginia, 117 years later. In New
Orleans, Reconstruction was marked by the horrible Mechanics
Institute race riot (1866) but also by the successful operation of
a fully racially-integrated
public school system. Meanwhile,
the city's economy struggled to right itself after practically
grinding to a halt upon the declaration of war in 1861, the
nationwide
Panic of 1873 conspiring to
severely retard economic recovery.
Reconstruction ended in Louisiana in 1877, and white southern
Democrats, the
so-called
Redeemers, succeeded in
stripping power from the
Republican Party and
gradually
circumscribing the only recently-acquired civil rights of African
Americans. In New Orleans, the public schools were resegregated
and remained so until 1960.
New Orleans' large community of well-educated, often
French-speaking free persons of color (
gens de couleur
libres), who had not been enslaved prior to the Civil War,
sought to fight back against the incipient forces of
Jim Crow. As part of their ongoing campaign,
they recruited one of their own,
Homer
Plessy to test whether Louisiana's newly-enacted Separate Car
Act was constitutional.
Plessy duly boarded a commuter train
departing New Orleans for Covington, Louisiana
, sat in the car reserved for whites only and was
arrested. The case spawned by this incident,
Plessy v. Ferguson, was heard by the
U.S.
Supreme
Court in 1896. The court, in finding that
"separate but equal" accommodations were constitutional,
strengthened by effectively consecrating the already-underway Jim
Crow movement. The ruling was a key development in the
nadir of race relations reached
during this period.
Twentieth century
New Orleans reached its most consequential position as an economic
and population center in relation to other American cities in the
decades prior to 1860; as late as that year it was the nation's
fifth-largest city and by far the largest in the
American South.
Though New Orleans
continued to grow in size, from the mid-19th century onwards, first
the emerging industrial and railroad hubs of the Midwest overtook
the city in population, then the rapidly growing metropolises of
the Pacific Coast in the decades before and after the turn of the
20th century, then other Sun
Belt
cities in the South and West in the post-World War
II period surpassed New Orleans in population. Consequently,
New Orleans has periodically mounted attempts to regain its
economic vigor and pre-eminence over the past 150 years, with
varying degrees of success.
By the mid-20th century, New Orleanians were observing with concern
that the city was even ceding its traditional ranking as the
leading urban area in the
South.
By 1950, Houston
, Dallas
and Atlanta
(along with Seattle
, outside of the South) had surpassed New Orleans in
size, and 1960 witnessed Miami's
eclipse of New Orleans, even as New Orleans'
population was recorded as reaching its historic peak by the 1960
Census. Like most older American cities in this period, New
Orleans' center city commenced losing inhabitants, though the
New Orleans metropolitan
area continued expanding in population - just never as rapidly
as its metropolitan peers in the Sun Belt. While the
port remained one of the largest in the
nation, automation and containerization resulted in significant job
losses. The city's relative fall in stature meant that its former
role as banker and financial services provider to the South was
inexorably supplanted by competing companies in its now-larger peer
cities. New Orleans' economy was always more of a trade-based,
commercial entrepot than manufacturing powerhouse, but the city's
smallish manufacturing sector also shrank in the post-World War II
period.
Despite some economic development successes
under the administrations of DeLesseps "Chep" Morrison
(1946-1961) and Vic Schiro
(1961-1970), metropolitan New Orleans' growth rate consistently
lagged behind the more vigorous Sun Belt cities.
During the later years of Morrison's administration, and for the
entirety of Schiro's, the city struggled to digest the
ramifications of the legal enfranchisement of its sizable
African-American population. New Orleans was very much at the
center of the
Civil Rights
struggle. The
SCLC was founded in
the city, lunch counter sit-ins were held in
Canal Street stores, and a very
prominent and ugly series of confrontations occurred when the city
attempted school desegregation, in 1960. That episode witnessed the
first occasion of a black child attending an all-white elementary
school in the South, when six year-old
Ruby
Bridges integrated William Frantz Elementary School in the
city's
Ninth Ward. The
Civil Rights movement's success in realizing the desegregation of
public facilities and schools, and the enfranchisement of the black
voter, constituted the most significant event in New Orleans' 20th
century history. Though legal equality was established by the end
of the 1960s, a yawning gap in income levels and educational
attainment persisted between the city's white and black
communities. The effects of this gap were amplified by accelerating
white flight, as the city's population
grew poorer and blacker. New Orleans' political leadership, from
1980 onwards firmly in the hands of its African-American majority,
struggled to narrow this gap by creating conditions conducive to
the economic uplift of the black community.
New Orleans became increasingly dependent on tourism as an economic
mainstay, arguably fatally so by the administrations of
Sidney Barthelemy (1986-1994) and
Marc Morial (1994-2002). Unimpressive levels of
educational attainment, high rates of household poverty and rising
crime became increasingly problematic in the later decades of the
century, with the negative effects of these socioeconomic
conditions newly amplified as the United States economy
increasingly rested upon a post-industrial, knowledge-based
paradigm where brains were far more important than brawn.
The turn of the 20th century witnessed one of the earlier episodes
in the ongoing series of energetic recommitments to jump-starting
economic growth on the part of New Orleans' government and business
leaders. The most portentous development during this period was a
drainage plan devised by engineer and inventor
A. Baldwin
Wood and designed to break the surrounding swamp's stranglehold
on the city's geographic expansion. Until then, urban development
in New Orleans was largely limited to higher ground along the
natural river levees and
bayous. Wood's pump
system allowed the city to drain huge tracts of swamp and marshland
and expand into low-lying areas. Over the 20th century, rapid
subsidence, both natural and
human-induced, left these newly-populated areas several feet below
sea level.
New Orleans was vulnerable to flooding even before the city's
footprint departed from the natural high ground near the
Mississippi River. In the late 20th century, however, scientists
and New Orleans residents gradually became aware of the city's
increased vulnerability. In 1965,
Hurricane Betsy killed dozens of residents,
even though the majority of the city remained dry. The rain-induced
flood of May 8, 1995
demonstrated the weakness of the pumping system. After that event,
measures were undertaken to dramatically upgrade pumping capacity.
By the 1980s and 90s, it was worrisomely clear that extensive,
rapid and ongoing
erosion of the
marshlands and swamp surrounding New Orleans had left the city
far more exposed to hurricane-induced catastrophic storm surges
than it had ever before been in its history.
Geography
Elevation of New Orleans
New
Orleans is located at (29.964722, −90.070556) on the banks of the
Mississippi River, approximately
upriver from the Gulf of
Mexico
. According to the
United States Census Bureau, the
city has a total area of , of which , or 51.55%, is land.
The city
is located in the Mississippi River Delta
on the east and west banks of the Mississippi River
and south of Lake
Pontchartrain. The area along the river is characterized
by ridges and hollows.
New Orleans was originally settled on the natural
levees or high ground, along the Mississippi River.
In fact,
when the capital of French Louisiana was moved from Mobile,
Alabama
to New Orleans, the French colonial government
cited New Orleans' inland location as one of the reasons for the
move, as it would be less vulnerable to hurricanes. After
the
Flood Control Act of
1965, the
United States Army Corps
of Engineers built floodwalls and man-made
levees around a much larger geographic footprint that
included previous marshland and swamp. Whether or not this human
interference has caused
subsidence is a
topic of debate.
A study by an associate professor at
Tulane
University
claims:
On the other hand, a report by the
American Society of Civil
Engineers claims that "New Orleans is subsiding
(sinking)":
Vertical cross-section of New Orleans,
showing maximum levee height of
A recent
study by Tulane and Xavier University
notes that 51% of New Orleans is at or above sea
level, with the more densely populated areas generally on higher
ground. The average elevation of the city is
currently between one and two feet (0.5 m) below sea level,
with some portions of the city as high as at the base of the river
levee in Uptown
and others as low as below sea level in the
farthest reaches of Eastern New
Orleans.
In 2005, storm surge from Hurricane Katrina caused catastrophic
failure of the
federally
designed and built levees, flooding 80% of the city. A report
by the American Society of Civil Engineers says that "had the
levees and floodwalls not failed and had the pump stations
operated, nearly two-thirds of the deaths would not have
occurred".
New Orleans has always had to consider the risk of hurricanes, but
the risks are dramatically greater today due to coastal erosion
from human interference. Since the beginning of the 20th century,
it has been estimated that Louisiana has lost of coast (including
many of its barrier islands), which once protected New Orleans
against storm surge. Following Hurricane Katrina, the
United States Army Corps
of Engineers has instituted massive levee repair and hurricane
protection measures to protect the city.
In 2006, Louisiana voters overwhelmingly adopted an amendment to
the state's constitution to dedicate all revenues from off-shore
drilling to restore Louisiana's eroding coast line. Congress has
allocated $7 billion to bolster New Orleans' flood
protection.
National protected areas
Climate
The climate of New Orleans is
humid subtropical (
Koppen climate classification
Cfa), with short, generally mild winters and hot, humid
summers. In January, morning lows average around , and daily highs
around . In July, lows average , and highs average . The lowest
recorded temperature was on February 13, 1899. The highest recorded
temperature was on August 22, 1980. The average precipitation is
annually; the summer months are the wettest, while October is the
driest month. Precipitation in winter usually accompanies the
passing of a cold front.
Hurricanes pose a severe threat to
the area, and the city is particularly at risk because of its low
elevation, and because it is surrounded by water from the north,
east, and south, and Louisiana's sinking coast. According to the
Federal Emergency
Management Agency, New Orleans is the nation's most vulnerable
city to hurricanes. Since 1965, portions of New Orleans have been
flooded by four different storms:
Hurricane Betsy,
Hurricane Georges,
Hurricane Katrina, and
Hurricane Rita.
New Orleans experiences snowfall only on rare occasions. A small
amount of
snow fell during the
2004 Christmas Eve Snowstorm.
On
December 25, a combination of rain,
sleet, and snow fell on the city, leaving some bridges icy. Before
that, the last
white Christmas was
in 1954 and brought . The last significant snowfall in New Orleans
fell on December 22, 1989, when most of the city received of
snow. Also in the morning of December 11, 2008,
snow fell, followed by sleet.
Cityscape
The
Central Business District
of New Orleans is located immediately north and
west of the Mississippi River, and was historically called the
"American Quarter" or "American Sector," and it includes Lafayette Square. Most
streets in this area fan out from a central point in the city.
Major streets of the area include
Canal Street, Poydras Street,
Tulane Avenue and Loyola Avenue. Canal Street functions as the
street which divides the traditional "
downtown" area from the "
uptown" area.
Every street crossing Canal Street between the Mississippi River
and
Rampart Street, which is the
northern edge of the French Quarter, has a different name for the
"uptown" and "downtown" portions. For example,
St. Charles Avenue, known for its street
car line, is called
Royal
Street below Canal Street. Elsewhere in the city, Canal Street
serves as the dividing point between the "South" and "North"
portions of various streets. In the local
parlance downtown means "downriver
from Canal Street", while
uptown means "upriver from Canal
Street".
Downtown neighborhoods include the French Quarter, Tremé
, the
7th Ward, Faubourg
Marigny
, Bywater
(the Upper Ninth Ward), and the Lower Ninth Ward. Uptown neighborhoods include the
Warehouse District, the Lower Garden
District
, the Garden District
, the Irish Channel
, the University District, Carrollton
, Gert Town
, Fontainebleau
, and Broadmoor
. However, the Warehouse and the Central
Business District, despite being above Canal Street, are frequently
called "Downtown" as a specific region, as in the Downtown
Development District.
Other
major districts within the city include Bayou St.
John
, Mid-City
, Gentilly,
Lakeview
, Lakefront, New
Orleans East, and Algiers
.
Architecture
Houses on Esplanade Avenue
New Orleans is world-famous for its abundance of unique
architectural styles which reflect the city's historical roots and
multicultural heritage. Though New Orleans possesses numerous
structures of national architectural significance, it is equally,
if not more, revered for its enormous, largely-intact (even
post-Katrina) historic built environment. Twenty National Register
Historic Districts have been established, and fourteen local
historic districts aid in the preservation of this
tout
ensemble. Thirteen of the local historic districts are
administered by the New Orleans Historic District Landmarks
Commission (HDLC), while one - the French Quarter - is administered
by the Vieux Carre Commission (VCC). Additionally, both the
National Park Service, via the National Register of Historic
Places, and the HDLC have landmarked individual buildings, many of
which lie outside the boundaries of existing historic
districts.
Many styles of housing exist in the city, including the
shotgun house (originating from New Orleans)
and the bungalow style.
Creole townhouses, notable for their large
courtyards and intricate iron balconies, line the streets of the
French
Quarter. Throughout the city, there are many other
historic housing styles: Creole cottages, American townhouses,
double-gallery houses, and Raised Center-Hall Cottages.
St. Charles Avenue is famed for its large
antebellum homes. Its
mansions are in various styles, such as
Greek Revival,
American Colonial and the
Victorian styles of
Queen Anne and
Italianate architecture. New Orleans
is also noted for its large, European-style Catholic cemeteries,
which can be found throughout the city.
For much of its history, New Orleans' skyline consisted of only
low- and mid-rise structures. The soft soils of New Orleans are
susceptible to subsidence, and there was doubt about the
feasibility of constructing large high rises in such an
environment.
The 1960s brought the World Trade Center New
Orleans and Plaza Tower
, which demonstrated that high rises could stand
firm on New Orleans' soil. One Shell Square
took its place as the city's tallest building in
1972. The oil boom of the early 1980s redefined New Orleans'
skyline again with the development of the Poydras Street corridor.
Today,
New Orleans' high rises are clustered along Canal Street and Poydras Street in
the Central Business District.
Culture and contemporary life
Tourism
New
Orleans has many major attractions, from the world-renowned
French
Quarter and Bourbon Street's
notorious nightlife to St. Charles
Avenue (home of Tulane and Loyola Universities, the
historic Pontchartrain Hotel,
and many 19th century mansions), to Magazine Street, with its many boutique
stores and antique shops.
According to current travel guides, New Orleans is one of the top
ten most visited cities in the United States; 10.1 million visitors
came to New Orleans in 2004, and the city was on pace to break that
level of visitation in 2005. Prior to Katrina, there were 265
hotels with 38,338 rooms in the Greater New Orleans Area. In May
2007, there were over 140 hotels and motels in operation with over
31,000 rooms.
A
CNN poll released in October 2007 ranked New
Orleans first in eight categories, behind only New York City
, which ranked first in 15. According to the
poll, New Orleans is the best U.S. city for live music, cocktail
hours, flea markets, antique shopping, nightlife, "wild weekends",
"girlfriend getaways" and cheap food.
The city also ranked
second for gay friendliness, overall food and dining, friendliness
of residents, and people-watching, behind San Francisco
, California
, Chicago
, Illinois
, Charleston, South Carolina
, and New York City, respectively.
However, among the top 25 U.S. travel destinations as established
by the poll, the city was voted last in terms of safety and
cleanliness and near the bottom as a family vacation
destination.
The French Quarter (known locally as "the Quarter" or Vieux Carré),
which dates from the French and Spanish eras and is bounded by the
Mississippi River, Rampart Street, Canal Street, and Esplanade
Avenue, contains many popular hotels, bars, and nightclubs.
Notable
tourist attractions in the Quarter include Bourbon Street, Jackson
Square
, St. Louis Cathedral
, the French Market (including Café du
Monde
, famous for café au
lait and beignets) and Preservation Hall. To tour the
port, one can ride the
Natchez, an authentic
steamboat with a
calliope, which cruises the Mississippi the
length of the city twice daily.
The city's many beautiful cemeteries and
their distinct above-ground tombs
are often
attractions in themselves, the oldest and most famous of which,
Saint Louis
Cemetery
, greatly resembles Père
Lachaise Cemetery
in Paris
.
Also
located in the French Quarter is the old New Orleans
Mint
, a former branch of the United States Mint, which now operates as
a museum, and The
Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum and research center
housing art and artifacts relating to the history of New Orleans
and the Gulf South. The National
World War II Museum
, opened in the Warehouse District in 2000 as the
"National D-Day Museum", is dedicated to providing information and
materials related to the Invasion of Normandy
. Nearby,
Confederate Memorial Hall, the
oldest continually operating museum in Louisiana (although under
renovation since Katrina), contains the second-largest collection
of Confederate memorabilia in the world.
Art museums in the
city include the Contemporary Arts Center
, the New
Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) in City Park, and the Ogden Museum
of Southern Art
.
New Orleans also boasts a decidedly natural side.
It is home to the
Audubon Nature Institute
(which consists of Audubon Park
, the Audubon Zoo
, the Aquarium
of the Americas, and the Audubon
Insectarium), as well as gardens that include Longue Vue
House and Gardens
and the New Orleans Botanical Garden
. City
Park, one of the country's most expansive and visited
urban parks, has one of the largest (if not
the largest) stands of oak trees in the world.
There are also various points of interest in the surrounding areas.
Many wetlands are in close proximity to the city, including
Honey Island Swamp.
Chalmette
Battlefield and National Cemetery
, located just south of the city, is the site of
the 1815 Battle of
New Orleans.
Entertainment and performing arts
The New Orleans area is home to numerous celebrations, the most
popular of which is
Carnival, often
referred to as
Mardi Gras.
Carnival officially begins on the
Feast of the Epiphany, also known as the
"
Twelfth Night." Mardi Gras
(
French for "Fat Tuesday"), the
final and grandest day of festivities, is the last Tuesday before
the
Catholic liturgical season of
Lent, which commences on
Ash
Wednesday.
The largest of the city's many music festivals is the
New Orleans Jazz &
Heritage Festival. Commonly referred to simply as "Jazz Fest",
it is one of the largest music festivals in the nation, featuring
crowds of people from all over the world, coming to experience
music, food, arts, and crafts. Despite the name, it features not
only jazz but a large variety of music, including both native
Louisiana music and international artists. Along with Jazz Fest,
New Orleans'
Voodoo Experience
("Voodoo Fest") and the
Essence
Music Festival are both large music festivals featuring local
and international artists.
Other major festivals held in the city include
Southern Decadence, the French Quarter
Festival, and the
Tennessee
Williams/ New Orleans Literary Festival.
In 2002, Louisiana began offering tax incentives for film and
television production. This led to a substantial increase in the
number of films shot in the New Orleans area and brought the
nickname "Hollywood South." Films which have been filmed or
produced in and around New Orleans include:
Ray,
Runaway
Jury,
The Pelican
Brief,
Glory
Road,
All
the King's Men,
Déjà
Vu,
Last
Holiday,
The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button, and numerous others.
In 2006, work began
on the Louisiana Film & Television studio complex, based in the
Treme neighborhood. Louisiana began to offer
similar tax incentives for music and theater productions in 2007,
leading many to begin referring to New Orleans as "Broadway
South."
New Orleans has always been a significant center for
music, showcasing its intertwined European, Latin
American, and African cultures. New Orleans' unique musical
heritage was born in its pre-American and early American days from
a unique blending of European instruments with African rhythms.
As the
only North American city to allow slaves to gather in public and
play their native music (largely in Congo
Square, now located within Louis Armstrong Park
), New Orleans gave birth to an indigenous music:
jazz. Soon,
brass
bands formed, gaining popular attraction that still holds
today. The city's music was later significantly influenced by
Acadiana, home of
Cajun and
Zydeco music, and
Delta
blues.
New Orleans' unique musical culture is further evident in its
funerals. A spin on the tradition of military brass band funerals,
traditional New Orleans funerals feature sad music (mostly dirges
and hymns) on the way to the cemetery and happier music (hot jazz)
on the way back. Such traditional musical funerals still take place
when a local musician, a member of a club,
krewe, or benevolent society, or a noted dignitary has
passed. Until the 1990s, most locals preferred to call these
"funerals with music", but visitors to the city have long dubbed
them "
jazz funerals".
Much later in its musical development, New Orleans was home to a
distinctive brand of
rhythm and
blues that contributed greatly to the growth of
rock and roll. An example of the New Orleans'
sound in the 1960s is the #1 US hit "
Chapel of Love" by
the Dixie Cups, a song which knocked
The Beatles out of the top spot on the Billboard
Hot 100. New Orleans became a hotbed for
funk
music in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the late 1980s, it had
developed its own localized variant of
hip
hop, called
bounce music. While
never commercially successful outside of the
Deep South, it remained immensely popular in the
poorer neighborhoods of the city throughout the 1990s.
A cousin of bounce,
New Orleans hip
hop has seen commercial success locally and internationally,
producing
Lil Wayne,
Master P,
Birdman,
Juvenile,
Cash Money Records, and
No Limit Records. Additionally, the wave of
popularity of
cowpunk, a fast form of
southern rock, originated with the
help of several local bands, such as
The Radiators,
Better Than Ezra,
Cowboy Mouth, and
Dash
Rip Rock. Throughout the 1990s, many
sludge metal bands started in the area. New
Orleans' heavy metal bands like
Eyehategod,
Soilent
Green,
Crowbar, and
Down have incorporated styles such as
hardcore punk,
doom
metal, and southern rock to create an original and heady brew
of swampy and aggravated metal that has largely avoided
standardization.
New Orleans is the southern terminus of the famed
Highway 61.
Media
The major daily newspaper is the
The Times-Picayune, publishing since
1837. Weekly publications include
The Louisiana Weekly and
Gambit Weekly. Also in wide
circulation is the
Clarion
Herald, the newspaper of the
Archdiocese of New
Orleans.
Greater New Orleans is the 54th largest
Designated Market Area (DMA) in the U.S.,
serving 566,960 homes. Major television network affiliates serving
the area include:
.
Two
radio stations that were
influential in promoting New Orleans-based bands and singers were
50,000-watt WNOE-AM (1060) and 10,000-watt
WTIX-AM (690). These two stations competed
head-to-head from the late 1950s to the late 1970s.
WWOZ, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Station, broadcasts, 24
hours per day, modern and traditional jazz, blues, rhythm and
blues, brass band, gospel, cajun, zydeco, Caribbean, Latin,
Brazilian, African, bluegrass, and Irish at 90.7 FM and at
www.wwoz.org.
WTUL, a local college radio station (Tulane University), broadcasts
a wide array of programming, including twentieth-century classical,
reggae, jazz, showtunes, indie rock, electronic music, soul/funk,
goth, punk, hip hop, New Orleans music, opera, folk, hardcore,
Americana, country, blues, Latin,
cheese, techno, local, world, ska, swing and big band, kids shows,
and even news programming from DemocracyNow. WTUL is listener
supported and non-commercial. The disc jockeys are volunteers, many
of them college students.
Louisiana's film and television tax credits have spurred some
growth in the television industry, although to a lesser degree than
in the film industry.
K-Ville, a
cop drama series set in post-Katrina New
Orleans, aired on the
Fox
Network in 2007.
Filming of the X-Men Origins: Wolverine took
place in the city in early 2008 (although most of the filming took
place in Australia and New Zealand
).
Food
New Orleans is world-famous for its food. The indigenous cuisine is
distinctive and influential. From centuries of amalgamation of the
local Creole, haute Creole, and New Orleans French cuisines, New
Orleans food has developed. Local ingredients, French, Spanish,
Italian, African, Native American, Cajun, and a hint of Cuban
traditions combine to produce a truly unique and easily
recognizable Louisiana flavor.
Unique specialties include
beignets (locally
pronounced like "ben-yays"), square-shaped fried pastries that
could be called "French doughnuts" (served with
café au lait made with a blend of
coffee and chicory rather than only coffee);
Po'
boy and Italian
Muffuletta
sandwiches; Gulf oysters on the half-shell, fried oysters, boiled
crawfish, and other
seafood;
étouffée,
jambalaya,
gumbo, and
other Creole dishes; and the Monday favorite of red beans and rice.
(
Louis Armstrong often signed his
letters, "Red beans and ricely yours".) Another New Orleans
specialty is the
Praline (locally pronounced
as /ˈprɑːliːn/, not /ˈpreliːn/), a candy made with brown sugar,
granulated sugar, cream, butter, and pecans.
Dialect
New Orleans has developed a distinctive local dialect of
American English over the years that is
neither
Cajun nor the stereotypical
Southern accent, so often
misportrayed by film and television actors. It does, like earlier
Southern Englishes, feature frequent
deletion of the post-vocalic
"r".
This dialect is quite similar to New York "Brooklynese", to
people unfamiliar with either. There are many theories to
how it came to be, but it likely resulted from New Orleans'
geographic isolation by water and the fact that the city was a
major immigration port throughout the 19th century. As a result,
many of the ethnic groups who reside in Brooklyn also reside in New
Orleans, such as the
Irish,
Italian (especially Sicilians), and
German, among others, as well as a
very sizable
Jewish community.
One of the strongest varieties of the New Orleans accent is
sometimes identified as the
Yat dialect,
from the greeting "Where y'at?" This distinctive accent is dying
out generation by generation in the city itself, but remains very
strong in the surrounding parishes.
Less visibly, various ethnic groups throughout the area have
retained their distinctive language traditions to this day.
Although rare,
Kreyol
Lwiziyen is still spoken by the
Creoles. Also rare, an archaic
Louisiana-Canarian Spanish dialect is spoken by the
Isleño people, but it can usually only be heard
by older members of the population.
Sports
New Orleans' professional sports teams include the
New Orleans Saints (
NFL), the
New Orleans Hornets (
NBA), and the
New Orleans Zephyrs (
PCL). It is also home to the
Big Easy Rollergirls, an all-female
flat track roller
derby team, and the
New Orleans
Blaze, a
women's football team.
A local group of investors began conducting a study in 2007 to see
if the city could support a
Major
League Soccer team.
The
Louisiana
Superdome
is the home of the Saints, the Sugar Bowl, and
other prominent events. It has hosted the
Super Bowl a record six times (
1978,
1981,
1986,
1990,
1997,
2002) and will host again in
2013.
The New Orleans
Arena
is the home of the Hornets and many events that
aren't large enough to need the Superdome. New Orleans is also
home to the Fair Grounds Race Course
, the nation's third-oldest thoroughbred
track. The city's Lakefront Arena
has also been home to sporting events.
Each year New Orleans plays host to the
Sugar
Bowl, the
New Orleans Bowl and
the
Zurich Classic, a
golf tournament on the
PGA Tour. In
addition, it has often hosted major sporting events that have no
permanent home, such as the
Super Bowl,
ArenaBowl,
NBA All-Star Game,
BCS National Championship
Game, and the
NCAA Final
Four.
Economy
New Orleans is home to
one of the
largest and busiest ports in the world, and
metropolitan New Orleans is a
center of maritime industry. The New Orleans region also accounts
for a significant portion of the nation's
oil refining and
petrochemical production, and serves as a
white collar corporate base for onshore and offshore
petroleum and
natural gas production. New Orleans is a center
for higher learning, with over 50,000 students enrolled in the
region's eleven two- and four-year degree granting institutions.
A top 50
research university, Tulane University, is located in New Orleans' Uptown neighborhood. Metropolitan
New Orleans is a major regional hub for the
health care industry and boasts a
small, globally-competitive manufacturing sector. The center city
possesses a rapidly growing, entrepreneurial
creative industries sector, and is, of
course, renowned for its
cultural
tourism. Greater New Orleans, Inc. (GNO, Inc.)
[8634] acts as
the first point-of-contact for regional economic development and is
slotted between Louisiana's Department of Economic Development and
the various parochial business development agencies.
New Orleans came into being to act as a strategically-located
trading entrepot, and it remains, above all, a crucial
transportation hub and distribution center for waterborne commerce.
The
Port of New Orleans is the
5th-largest port in the United States based on volume of cargo
handled, second-largest in the state after the
Port of South Louisiana, and
12th-largest in the U.S., based on value of cargo. The Port of
South Louisiana, also based in the New Orleans area, is the world's
busiest in terms of bulk tonnage and, when combined with the Port
of New Orleans, it forms the 4th-largest port system in volume
handled. Many shipbuilding, shipping, logistics, freight forwarding
and commodity brokerage firms either call metropolitan New Orleans
home or maintain a large local presence. Examples include
Intermarine, Bisso Towboat,
Northrop Grumman Ship Systems,
Trinity Yachts,
Expeditors
International, Bollinger Shipyards, IMTT, International Coffee
Corp, Boasso America, Transoceanic Shipping, and Silocaf. The
largest coffee-roasting plant in the world, operated by Folgers, is
located in
New Orleans
East.
Like
Houston, New Orleans is located in proximity to the
Gulf of
Mexico and the many oil rigs that lie just
offshore. Louisiana ranks fifth in oil production and eighth
in
reserves in the United States.
It is
also home to two of the four Strategic Petroleum Reserve
(SPR) storage facilities: West Hackberry in Cameron
Parish
and Bayou Choctaw in Iberville
Parish
. Other infrastructure includes 17 petroleum
refineries with a combined crude oil distillation capacity of
nearly , the second highest in the nation after Texas.
Louisiana's numerous
ports include the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port
(LOOP), which is capable of receiving ultra
large oil tankers. Given the quantity of oil importing,
Louisiana is home to many major pipelines supplying the nation:
Crude Oil (
Exxon,
Chevron,
BP,
Texaco,
Shell, Scurloch-Permian, Mid-Valley,
Calumet,
Conoco,
Koch Industries,
Unocal,
U.S. Dept. of Energy, Locap);
Product (
TEPPCO Partners, Colonial,
Plantation, Explorer, Texaco, Collins); and
Liquefied Petroleum Gas (Dixie,
TEPPCO, Black Lake, Koch, Chevron,
Dynegy,
Kinder Morgan Energy
Partners,
Dow Chemical
Company, Bridgeline, FMP, Tejas, Texaco, UTP). Several major
energy companies have regional headquarters in the city or its
suburbs, including
Royal Dutch
Shell,
Eni and
Chevron. Numerous other energy producers
and oilfield services companies are also headquartered in the city
or region, and the sector supports a large professional services
base of specialized engineering and design firms, as well as an
office for the federal government's
Minerals Management
Service.
The city is the home to a single
Fortune
500 company:
Entergy, a power generation
utility and nuclear powerplant operations specialist.
In the wake of
Hurricane Katrina, the city lost its other Fortune 500 company,
Freeport-McMoRan, when it merged
its copper and gold exploration unit with an Arizona company and
relocated that division to Phoenix, Arizona
. Its McMoRan Exploration affiliate remains
headquartered in New Orleans. Other companies either headquartered
or with significant operations in New Orleans include: Pan American
Life Insurance, Pool Corp,
Rolls-Royce, Newpark Resources,
AT&T, TurboSquid, iSeatz,
IBM, Navtech, Superior Energy Services,
Textron Marine & Land
Systems, McDermott International, Pellerin Milnor,
Lockheed Martin, Imperial Trading, Laitram,
Harrah's Entertainment,
Stewart Enterprises, Edison Chouest Offshore,
Zatarain's,
Whitney National Bank,
Capital One, Tidewater Marine,
Popeyes Chicken &
Biscuits,
Parsons
Brinckerhoff,
MWH Global,
CH2M HILL and Energy Partners Ltd.
Tourism is another staple of the city's economy. Perhaps more
visible than any other sector, New Orleans' tourist and convention
industry is a $5.5 billion juggernaut that accounts for 40 percent
of New Orleans' tax revenues. In 2004, the hospitality industry
employed 85,000 people, making it New Orleans' top economic sector
as measured by employment totals. The city also hosts the World
Cultural Economic Forum (WCEF).
The forum, held annually at the New Orleans
Morial Convention Center
, is directed toward promoting cultural and economic
development opportunities through the strategic convening of
cultural ambassadors and leaders from around the world. The
first WCEF took place in October 2008.
The
federal
government has a significant presence in the area.
NASA
's
Michoud
Assembly Facility
is located in New
Orleans East and is operated by Lockheed Martin. It is a large
manufacturing facility where the external fuel tanks for the space
shuttles are produced.
The Michoud facility lies within the
enormous New Orleans Regional Business Park, also home to the
National Finance Center,
operated by the United States Department of
Agriculture
(USDA), and the Crescent Crown distribution
center. Other large governmental installations include the
U.S.
Navy's Space and Naval Warfare
Systems Command, located within the University of New Orleans
Research and Technology Park in Gentilly, NAS New Orleans
, the future headquarters for the Marine Force
Reserves, slated for Federal City in Algiers and the U.S.
Fifth
Circuit Court of Appeals.
Demographics
New Orleans contains many distinctive
neighborhoods.
As of the
census of 2000, there were 484,674
people, 188,251 households, and 112,950 families residing in the
city. The
population density was
. There were 215,091 housing units at an average density of . The
racial makeup of the city was 67.25%
African
American, 28.05%
White, 0.20%
Native
American, 2.26%
Asian, 0.02%
Pacific
Islander, 0.93% from
other races,
and 1.28% from two or more races. 3.06% of the population were
Hispanic or
Latino of any
race.
The last population estimate before Hurricane Katrina was 454,865,
as of July 1, 2005. A population analysis released in August 2007
estimated the population to be 273,000, 60% of the pre-Katrina
population and an increase of about 50,000 since July 2006. A
September 2007 report by The Greater New Orleans Community Data
Center, which tracks population based on U.S. Postal Service
figures, found that in August 2007, just over 137,000 households
received mail. That compares with about 198,000 households in July
2005, representing about 70% of pre-Katrina population.
A 2006
study by researchers at Tulane University and the University
of California, Berkeley
determined that there are as many as 10,000 to
14,000 illegal immigrants, many
from Mexico
,
currently residing in New Orleans. Janet Murguía, president and chief
executive officer of the
National Council of La Raza,
stated that there could be up to 120,000 Hispanic workers in New
Orleans. In June 2007, one study stated that the Hispanic
population had risen from 15,000, pre-Katrina, to over
50,000.
A recent article released by
The
Times-Picayune indicated that the metropolitan area had
undergone a recent influx of 5,300 households in the later half of
2008, bringing the population to around 469,605 households or 88.1%
of its pre-Katrina levels. While the area's population has been on
an upward trajectory since the storm, much of that growth was
attributed to residents returning after Katrina. Many observers
predicted that growth would taper off, but the data center's
analysis suggests that New Orleans and the surrounding parishes are
benefiting from an economic migration resulting from the
global financial
crisis of 2008–2009.
Religion
New Orleans is notably absent from the
Protestant Bible
Belt that dominates religion in the
Southern United States. In New
Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast area, the predominant
religion is
Catholicism. Within the
Archdiocese of
New Orleans (which includes not only the city but the
surrounding Parishes as well), 35.9% percent of the population is
Roman Catholic. The influence of Catholicism is reflected in many
of the city's French and Spanish cultural traditions, including its
many parochial schools, street names, architecture, and festivals,
including
Mardi Gras.
New Orleans also famously has a presence of its distinctive variety
of
Louisiana Voodoo, due in part to
syncretism with Roman Catholic beliefs,
the fame of voodoo practitioner
Marie
Laveau, and New Orleans' distinctly Caribbean cultural
influences. Although the exotic image of Voodoo within the city has
been highly promoted by the tourism industry, there are only a
small number of serious adherents to the religion.
New Orleans' pre-Katrina population of 10,000
Jews has now dropped to 7,000.
In the wake of
Katrina, all New Orleans synagogues lost members, but were able to
re-open in their original locations, except for Congregation Beth Israel
, the oldest and most prominent Orthodox synagogue in the New Orleans
region. Beth Israel's building in Lakeview was
destroyed by flooding, and it is currently in temporary quarters in
Metairie
.
Hurricanes
Hurricane Katrina
An aerial view from a United States Navy helicopter showing
floodwaters around the entire downtown New Orleans area
(2005).
By the time
Hurricane Katrina
approached the city at the end of August 2005, most residents had
evacuated. As the hurricane passed through the
Gulf Coast region, the
city's
federal flood
protection system failed, resulting in the worst
civil engineering disaster in American
history. Floodwalls and
levees constructed by
the
United States
Army Corps of Engineers failed below design specifications and
80% of the city flooded.
Tens of thousands of residents who had
remained in the city were rescued or otherwise made their way to
shelters of last resort at the Louisiana Superdome or the New Orleans
Morial Convention Center. Over 1,500 people died in Louisiana and
some are still unaccounted for. Hurricane Katrina called for the
first mandatory evacuation in the city's history, the second of
which came 3 years later with
Hurricane
Gustav.
Hurricane Rita
The city was declared off-limits to residents while efforts to
clean up after
Hurricane Katrina
began.
The approach of Hurricane Rita in September 2005 caused
repopulation efforts to be postponed, and the Lower
Ninth Ward
was reflooded by Rita's storm
surge.
Post-disaster recovery
The Census Bureau in July 2006 estimated the population of New
Orleans to be 223,000; a subsequent study estimated that 32,000
additional residents had moved to the city as of March 2007,
bringing the estimated population to 255,000, approximately 56% of
the pre-Katrina population level. Another estimate, based on data
on utility usage from July 2007, estimated the population to be
approximately 274,000 or 60% of the pre-Katrina population. These
estimates are somewhat smaller than a third estimate, based on mail
delivery records, from the Greater New Orleans Community Data
Center in June 2007, which indicated that the city had regained
approximately two-thirds of its pre-Katrina population.
The New Orleans cityscape as of 2007
Several major tourist events and other forms of revenue for the
city have returned. Large conventions are being held again, such as
those held by the
American
Library Association and
American College of
Cardiology. College football events such as the
Bayou Classic,
New
Orleans Bowl, and
Sugar Bowl returned
for the 2006–2007 season. The
New
Orleans Saints returned that season as well, following
speculation of a move.
The New
Orleans Hornets returned to the city fully for the 2007–2008
season, having partially spent the 2006–2007 season in Oklahoma
City
. New Orleans successfully hosted the
2008 NBA All-Star Game and
the
2008 BCS
National Championship Game. The city hosted the first and
second rounds of the
2007 NCAA Men's
Division I Basketball Tournament. New Orleans and Tulane
University will be hosting the
Final Four
Championship in 2012.
Major events such as
Mardi
Gras and the
Jazz & Heritage
Festival were never displaced or cancelled.
Government
New Orleans has a
mayor-council
government. The city council consists of five council members,
who are elected by district and two at-large councilmembers. Mayor
Ray Nagin was elected in May 2002 and was
reelected in the
mayoral election of May 20,
2006.
The Orleans Parish Civil Sheriff's Office
serves papers involving lawsuits and
provides security for the Civil District Court and Juvenile Courts.
The
Criminal
Sheriff, Marlin Gusman, maintains the parish prison system,
provides security for the Criminal District Court, and provides
backup for the
New Orleans
Police Department on an as-needed basis.
The city of New Orleans and the
parish of Orleans operate as a
merged city-parish government. Before the city of New Orleans
became co-extensive with Orleans Parish, Orleans Parish was home to
numerous smaller communities. The original city of New Orleans was
composed of what are now the 1st through 9th wards. The city of
Lafayette (including the Garden District) was added in 1852 as the
10th and 11th wards. In 1870, Jefferson City, including Faubourg
Bouligny and much of the Audubon and University areas, was annexed
as the 12th, 13th, and 14th wards.
Algiers, on the west bank of the Mississippi, was also
annexed in 1870, becoming the 15th ward. Four years later,
Orleans Parish became coextensive with the city of New Orleans,
when the city of Carrollton was annexed as the 16th and 17th
wards.
New Orleans' government is now largely centralized in the city
council and mayor's office, but it maintains a number of relics
from earlier systems when various sections of the city ran much of
their affairs separately. For example, New Orleans has seven
elected tax assessors, each with their own staff, representing
various districts of the city, rather than one centralized office.
A constitutional amendment passed on November 7, 2006, will
consolidate the seven assessors into one by 2010.
Federal representation
The
United States Postal
Service operates post offices in New Orleans.
The New Orleans Main
Post Office is at 701 Loyola Avenue in the Central
Business District.
Crime
New Orleans' violent crime rate is high compared with other cities
in the United States. Homicides peaked at 421 in 1994, a rate of 86
per 100,000 residents. The homicide rate rose and fell year to year
throughout the late 1990s, but the overall trend from 1994 to 1999
was a steady reduction in homicides. From 1999 to 2004, the
homicide rate increased. New Orleans had the highest homicide rate
of any major American city in 2002 (53.3 per 100,000 people) and
again in 2003 (275 homicides).
Violent crime is a serious problem for New Orleans residents, but
far less of a problem for tourists. As in other U.S. cities of
comparable size, the incidence of homicide and other violent crimes
is highly concentrated in certain low-income neighborhoods, such as
housing projects,
that are sites of open-air drug trade. The homicide rate for the
entire
New Orleans
metropolitan area was 24.4 per 100,000 in 2002.
After Hurricane Katrina, media attention focused on the reduced
violent crime rate following the exodus of many New Orleanians.
Conversely, a number of cities that took in Katrina evacuees had a
significant increase in their murder rate. Houston, for example,
had a 25% increase in murders from the previous year. Captain
Dwayne Ready stated, "We also recognize that Katrina evacuees
continue to have an impact on the murder rate." Police have not
kept records of how evacuees have affected crime rates other than
homicide. As more residents return to New Orleans, the trend is
starting to reverse itself, although calculating the homicide rate
remains difficult given that no authoritative source can cite a
total population figure.
There were 22 homicides in July 2006, the same as the monthly
average for the city from 2002 until Hurricane Katrina. There were
161 homicides in 2006.
On Thursday, January 11, 2007, several thousand New Orleans
residents marched through city streets and gathered at City Hall
for a rally demanding police and city leaders tackle the crime
problem. Mayor
Ray Nagin said he was
"totally and solely focused" on addressing the problem. The city of
New Orleans implemented checkpoints starting in early January 2007
from the hours of 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. in high-crime areas and, as of
January 20, 2007, they had made over 60 arrests and issued more
than 100 citations.
Although
the city has lost more than 40% of its pre-Katrina population, it
has recaptured an infamous unwanted title, as the nation's "murder
capital", according to the FBI
. By November 2007, local media reports
claimed homicides had already eclipsed the previous year's numbers.
The city recorded a total of 209 homicides in 2007.
New
Orleans was once again the United States murder capital, and 3rd
leading city in the world, in 2008. Its murder rate is
estimated as 67 per 100,000 by its police department and 95 per
100,000 by the FBI.
Education
Schools
New Orleans Public
Schools (NOPS) is the name given to the city's public school
system. Pre-Katrina, NOPS was one of the area's largest systems
(along with the
Jefferson Parish public school
system). In the years leading up to Hurricane Katrina, the New
Orleans public school system was widely recognized as the lowest
performing school district in Louisiana. According to researchers
Carl L. Bankston and Stephen J. Caldas, only 12 of
the 103 public schools within the city limits of New Orleans showed
reasonably good performance at the beginning of the twenty-first
century. Following Hurricane Katrina, the state of Louisiana took
over most of the schools within the system (all schools that fell
into a nominal "worst-performing" metric); many new charter schools
have been started since the storm, educating 15,000. Presently, the
majority of public school students in the NOPS system attend
charter schools, the highest percentage in the nation. The last
couple years have witnessed massive gains in student achievement,
as outside operators like
KIPP, the Algiers Charter School
Network, and the Capital One - University of New Orleans Charter
School Network have assumed control of dozens of schools.
In addition to a number of nationally-respected private secular
schools, the
Greater New
Orleans area has approximately 200 parochial schools, the vast
majority run by the
Roman Catholic
Archdiocese of New Orleans. The longstanding prevalence of
decent-quality, affordable parochial school education has
historically been both a cause and a consequence of metropolitan
New Orleans' comparatively mediocre public school systems. Because
so many middle class students have been enrolled in Catholic
schools, middle class support for public education has been
relatively weak. At the same time, the historically
middling-to-poor quality of the region's public school systems,
especially NOPS, often prompts middle class families to educate
their children in private or parochial schools.
Nonetheless, metropolitan New Orleans, and the NOPS system in
particular, is currently engaged in the most promising and
far-reaching public school reforms in the nation, reforms aimed at
decentralizing power away from the pre-Katrina school board central
bureaucracy to individual school principals and charter school
boards, monitoring charter school performance by granting
renewable, five-year operating contracts permitting the closure of
those not succeeding, and vesting choice in parents of public
schools students, allowing them to enroll their children in any
school in the district.
Colleges and universities
A large
number of institutions of higher education exist within the city,
including Tulane
University and Loyola
University New Orleans, the city's major private
universities. These universities also administrate the
city's three professional schools, Tulane University School of
Medicine, Tulane University Law School
and Loyola University
New Orleans College of Law. The
University of New Orleans is a
large public research university in the city.
Dillard University, Southern University at New
Orleans and Xavier University of
Louisiana are among some of the leading historically black
colleges and universities in the United States (Xavier being the
only predominantly black Catholic university in the U.S.) Louisiana State
University School of Medicine is the state's flagship public
university medical school, which also conducts research.
Our Lady of Holy Cross
College,
Notre Dame Seminary
and the
New
Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary are several smaller
religiously affiliated universities. Other notable schools include
Delgado Community College,
the
William
Carey College School of Nursing, the Culinary Institute of New
Orleans,
Herzing College, and
Commonwealth University.
Libraries
There are
numerous academic and public
libraries and archives in New Orleans, including Monroe Library
at Loyola University, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane
University, the Law Library of Louisiana, and the Earl K. Long
Library at the University of New Orleans.
The
New Orleans Public
Library includes 13 locations, most of which were damaged by
Hurricane Katrina. However, only four libraries remained closed in
2007. The main library includes a Louisiana Division housing city
archives and special collections.
Other
research archives are located at the Historic New Orleans
Collection and the Old U.S. Mint.
An independently operated lending library called
Iron Rail Book Collective
specializes in radical and hard-to-find books. The library contains
over 8,000 titles and is open to the public. It was the first
library in the city to re-open after Hurricane Katrina.
Transportation
Streetcars
New Orleans has three active
streetcar lines.
The
St. Charles line is
the oldest continuously operating streetcar line in America and
each car is a historic landmark. The Riverfront line runs parallel
to the river from Esplanade Street through the French Quarter to
Canal Street to the Convention Center above Julia Street in the
Arts District. The Canal Street line uses the Riverfront line
tracks from the intersection of Canal Street and Poydras Street,
down Canal Street, then branches off and ends at the cemeteries at
City Park Avenue, with a spur running from the intersection of
Canal and Carrollton Avenue to the entrance of City Park at
Esplanade, near the entrance to the New Orleans Museum of
Art.
The city's streetcars were also featured in the
Tennessee Williams play,
A Streetcar Named
Desire. The streetcar line to Desire Street became a bus
line in 1948. There are proposals to revive a Desire streetcar
line, running along the neutral grounds of North Rampart and St.
Claude, as far downriver as Poland Avenue, near the Industrial
Canal.
Hurricane Katrina destroyed the power lines supplying the St.
Charles Avenue line. The associated levee failures flooded the
Mid-City facility storing the red streetcars which normally run on
the Riverfront and Canal Street lines. Restoration of service has
been gradual, with vintage St. Charles line cars running on the
Riverfront and Canal lines until the more modern red cars are back
in service; they are being individually restored at the RTA's
facility in the Carrollton neighborhood. On December 23, 2007,
streetcars were restored to running on the St. Charles line up to
Carrolton Avenue. The much-anticipated re-opening of the second
portion of the historic route, which continues until the
intersection of Carrolton Avenue and Claiborne Avenue, was
commemorated on June 28, 2008.
Buses
Public transportation in the city
is operated by the
New Orleans Regional
Transit Authority ("RTA"). There are many
bus routes connecting the city and suburban areas. The
RTA lost 200+ buses due to
Hurricane
Katrina, this would mean that there would be a 30-60 minute
waiting period for the next bus to come to the bus stop, and the
streetcar took until 2008 to return, so the RTA
placed an order for 38
Orion VII
Next Generation clean diesel buses, which arrived in July 2008. The
RTA has these new buses running on
biodiesel. The
Jefferson Parish Department of
Transit Administration operates Jefferson Transit, which provides
service between the city and its suburbs.
Roads
New Orleans proper is served by
Interstate
10,
Interstate 610
and
Interstate 510. I-10 travels
east-west through the city as the
Pontchartrain Expressway. In the
far eastern part of the city,
New
Orleans East, it is known as the Eastern Expressway. I-610
provides a direct shortcut for traffic passing through New Orleans
via I-10, allowing that traffic to bypass I-10's southward curve.
In the
future, New Orleans will have another interstate highway, Interstate 49, which will be extended from its
current terminus in Lafayette
to the city.
In addition to the interstate highways,
U.S. 90 travels
through the city, while
U.S. 61 terminates in the city's downtown center.
In addition,
U.S. 11 terminates in the eastern portion of the
city.
New
Orleans is home to many bridges, the tolled Crescent
City Connection
is perhaps the most notable. It serves as
New Orleans' major bridge across the Mississippi River, providing a
connection between the city's downtown on the eastbank and its
westbank suburbs.
Other bridges that cross the Mississippi
River in the New Orleans area are the Huey
P.
Long
Bridge, over which U.S. 90 travels, and the
Hale Boggs
Memorial Bridge
, which
carries Interstate 310.
The
Twin Span
Bridge
, a five-mile (8 km) causeway in eastern New Orleans, carries I-10
across Lake
Pontchartrain. Also in eastern New Orleans, Interstate 510/LA 47 travels across the Intracoastal Waterway/Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet
Canal
via the Paris Road Bridge
, connecting New
Orleans East and suburban Chalmette
.
The
tolled Lake Pontchartrain Causeway
, consisting of two parallel bridges are, at long,
the longest bridges in the world. Built in the 1950s
(southbound span) and 1960s (northbound span), the bridges connect
New Orleans with its suburbs on the north shore of Lake
Pontchartrain via Metairie.
Airports
The
metropolitan area is served by the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International
Airport
, located in the suburb of Kenner
. New Orleans also has several regional
airports located throughout the metropolitan area.
These include the
Lakefront
Airport
, Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base New
Orleans (locally known as Callendar Field) in the suburb of
Belle Chasse and "Southern Seaplane", also located in Belle
Chasse. Southern Seaplane has a runway for wheeled planes
and a water runway for seaplanes. New Orleans International
suffered some damage as a result of Hurricane Katrina, but as of
April 2007, it contained the most traffic and is the busiest
airport in the state of Louisiana and the sixth busiest in the
Southeast.
Rail
The city is served by rail via
Amtrak.
The
New Orleans Union Passenger
Terminal
is the central rail depot, and is served by three
trains: the Crescent,
operating between New Orleans and New York City; the City of New Orleans, operating
between New Orleans and Chicago; and the Sunset Limited, operating through New
Orleans between Orlando, Florida, and Los Angeles,
California. From late August 2005 to the present, the Sunset
Limited has remained officially a Florida-to-Los Angeles train,
being considered temporarily truncated due to the lingering effects
of Hurricane Katrina. At first (until late October 2005) it was
truncated to a San Antonio-to-Los Angeles service; since then (from
late October 2005 on) it has been truncated to a New Orleans-to-Los
Angeles service. As time has passed, particularly since the January
2006 completion of the rebuilding of damaged tracks east of New
Orleans by their owner, CSX Transportation, the obstacles to
restoration of the Sunset Limited's full route have been more
managerial and political than physical.
With the strategic benefits of both a major international port and
one of the few double-track Mississippi River crossings, the city
is served by six of the seven
Class I
railroads in North America:
Union Pacific Railroad,
BNSF Railway,
Norfolk Southern Railway,
Kansas City Southern Railway,
CSX Transportation and
Canadian National Railway. The
New Orleans Public Belt
Railroad provides interchange services between the
railroads.
Recently, many have proposed extending New
Orleans' public transit system by adding light rail routes from downtown, along Airline
Highway through the airport to Baton Rouge
and from downtown to Slidell
and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Proponents of this idea claim that these new routes would boost the
region's economy, which has been badly damaged by
Hurricane Katrina, and serve as an
evacuation option for hospital patients out of the city.
Algiers Ferry
The
Canal Street Ferry connects
the heart of New Orleans with the neighborhood of Algiers Point on
the other side of the Mississippi River. This service has been in
continuous operation since 1827. Pedestrians ride for free, while
automobiles are charged a fee. Service is from 6 am until
midnight.
Sister cities
New Orleans has eleven
sister
cities:
- Caracas
, Venezuela
- Durban
, South
Africa
- Holdfast Bay
, Australia
- Innsbruck
, Austria
- Juan-les-Pins
, France
- Maracaibo
, Venezuela
- Matsue,
Shimane, Japan
- Mérida, Yucatán
, Mexico
- Pointe-Noire
, Republic of the Congo
- San Miguel de Tucuman
, Argentina
- Tegucigalpa
, Honduras
Nicknames
The city's several nicknames are illustrative:
- Crescent City alludes to the course of the Lower Mississippi River around and
through the city.
- The Big Easy was possibly a reference by musicians in
the early 20th century to the relative ease of finding work there.
It also may have originated in the Prohibition era, when the city
was considered one big speak-easy due to the inability of the
federal government to control alcohol sales
in open violation of the 18th
Amendment. The term was used by local columnist Betty
Gillaud in the 1970s to contrast life in the city to that of
New York
City. The name also refers to New Orleans' status
as a major city, at one time "one of the cheapest places in America
to live" and came into popular usage throughout the United States
in the wake of the 1987 film, The Big Easy, which was set in New
Orleans.
- The City that Care Forgot has been used since at least
1938, and refers to the outwardly easy-going, carefree nature of
many of the residents.
- America's Most Interesting City appears on welcome
signs at the city limits.
- Hollywood South is a reference to the large number of
films, big and small, shot in the city since 2002.
- The Northernmost Caribbean City is a reference from
The Boston Globe, as well
as other travel guides due in part to the similarities of culture
with the Caribbean islands.
- Paris of the South
See also
References
External links
(part)
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