New Orleans history -
preservation of an island

A neighborhood organization in any district in New Orleans, must first understand WHY preservation is essential to its future. To understand its future is to have a full and complete knowledge of its past.

The history of New Orleans is as diverse a spectrum as its people today. A curious mix of yesterday and today, with a spicy uniqueness that can be found no where else but here.

Through the French -- who made us "Dixieland" (a term referring to the use of ten dollar paper money on which appeared the word "Dix," French for "Ten." These bills in turn became known as "Dixies" a currency which was indigenous to New Orleans, where "Dixies" were so prevalent. So, the term "Dixieland" historically refers to our city, not the entire Southland.

Through the Spanish, we feel the European influence in the architecture of the "French Quarter," due to the 1788 fire which destroyed the previous French built buildings, the notable exception is the Ursuline Convent. Still to this day, the View Carre (Old Square) is still known as the "French Quarter;" yet it is the Spanish and the Caribbean immigrants who characterized its architecture.

Through the influx of immigrants from the Caribbean who spiced our music and food; Africa that gave us rhythm and added okra; Span's galleries and romantic courtyards, France rich with wine, aristocracy and roux, Italy that added sausage and tomatoes; Canadian-Acadian who gave us Cajun cooking and Zydeco music; the Irish brought fun to the party; Germans who -- believe it or not -- originated "French Bread;" Creoles the aristocratic blacks who could trace their blood lines to Spain or France, and our own Native Americans, and the new Americans -- the culture of New Orleans is an amalgam - a combination of all these elements to achieve the whole. Like our jambalaya (pronounced JUM-bo-lie-ya) which can contain "anything in the kitchen," sausage, vegetables, spices and of course, sea food, cooked and dished up all together, New Orleans has allowed its diversity to mingle, because that's what makes it better!

From the book, New Orleans, Errol Laborde (author of two books on the city, and associate editor & publisher of New Orleans magazine) writes,

"In many ways, New Orleans is an island, with the river curving around one side, Lake Pontchatrain and its marshes on another, and located along the nation's southern rim by the Gulf of Mexico. Like an island it tends to have a style of its own, including its own dialect. Its celebrations, though influenced by places near its borders as well as by the ships passing through, are also distinctive.

In some ways New Orleans might even be considered to be the northernmost isle of the Caribbean, a crescent-shaped piece of territory that seems as though it were pushed from the sea into the womb of Louisiana by some ancient hurricane. As in most Caribbean spots, there is a black majority in New Orleans, though European heritage and white economic power.

Like the Caribbean, it also has a native music form, a tradition of Carnival celebrations, poverty, yet a wealthy social class, voodoo, and a form of cooking that is as hot and spicy as the passions of both the islands and the city. See New Orleans and, in some ways, you see the world.

Like the inhabitants of tropical islands, New Orleans residents have always moved through life at a leisurely pace, and it is that pace that is easily one of the most endearing characteristics. New Orleans has never been in a hurry.

It is this leisure pace that kept New Orleans, unlike the rest of America, from modernizing.

While the rest of America tore down old buildings and plowed across their waterfronts to make way for expressways, New Orleans was content to leave things "just as they always had been."

The truth is that great cities are immortal because there is so much to them worth preserving.

If New Orleans ceased to exist there would be a need to create something to take its place. Most people -- after all -- yearn for an island."