There's a lot more to NEW ORLEANS the ''Big Easy,'' the
''city that care forgot'' than its tourist image as a nonstop party
town. At once sordid and sublime, it careers along under an
infuriating doublethink. While having enormous amounts of fun,
you're liable to be repeatedly struck by the divisions between rich
and poor (and, more explicitly, between white and black). Even so,
the city's vitality and joie de vivre are real, buffeted but
not beaten by the vagaries of commercialism and poverty. The
melange of cultures and races that built the city still gives it
its heart; not ''easy,'' exactly, but quite unlike anywhere else in
the States or the world.
New Orleans began life in 1718 as a French-Canadian
outpost. Its prime location near the mouth of the Mississippi
River , however, led to rapid development, as early as the
1720s, its unique demography began to take shape. Despite early
resistance from its francophone population, the city benefited
greatly from its period as a Spanish colony between 1763 and
1800. By the end of the eighteenth century, the port was
flourishing, the haunt of smugglers, gamblers, prostitutes and
pirates. Newcomers included Anglo-Americans escaping the American
Revolution and aristocrats fleeing revolution in France. As in the
West Indies, the Spanish, French and free people of color
associated and formed alliances to create a distinctive
Creole culture with its own traditions and ways of life, its
own patois, and a cuisine that drew influences from Africa, Europe
and the colonies. New Orleans was already a many-textured city when
it experienced two quick-fire changes of government, passing back
into French control in 1801 and then being sold to America
under the Louisiana Purchase two years later. Unwelcome in the
Creole city today's French Quarter the Americans who migrated here
were forced to settle in the areas now known as the Central
Business District (or CBD ) and, later, in the Garden
District . Canal Street, which divided the old city from the
expanding suburbs, became known as ''the neutral ground'' the name
still used when referring to the median strip between main roads in
New Orleans.
Though much has been made of the antipathy between Creoles and
Anglo-Americans, in truth economic necessity forced them to live
and work together. They fought side by side, too, in the 1815
Battle of New Orleans , the final battle of the War of 1812,
which secured American supremacy in the States. The victorious
general, Andrew Jackson , became a national hero and
eventually US president; his ragbag volunteer army was made up of
Anglo-Americans, slaves, Creoles, free men of color and Native
Americans, along with pirates supplied by the notorious buccaneer
Jean Lafitte .
New Orleans' antebellum '' golden age '' as a major port
and finance center for the cotton-producing South was brought to an
abrupt end by the Civil War. The economic blow wielded by the
lengthy Union occupation which effectively isolated the city from
its markets was compounded by the social and cultural ravages of
Reconstruction . As the North industrialized and other
Southern cities grew, the fortunes of New Orleans took a
downturn.
Jazz exploded into the bars and the bordellos around
1900, and, along with the evolution of Mardi Gras as a
tourist attraction, breathed new life into the city. And although
the Depression hit here as hard as it did the rest of the nation it
also, spearheaded by a number of local writers and artists,
heralded the resurgence of the French Quarter , which had
disintegrated into a slum. Even so, it was the less romantic duo of
oil and petrochemicals that really saved the economy
until the slump of the 1950s pushed New Orleans well behind other
US cities. The oil crash of the early 1980s gave it yet another
battering, a gloomy start, but by the end of the century the tide
had begun to turn, and the city now finds itself in relatively
stable condition with a strengthening economy based on
tourism .