-- A New Yorker's Love Song for NOLA

by Michael Jahn

I've lived in New York City for over 30 years, most of that in Manhattan, and like many Big Apple lifers thought that it was the center of the universe and that I could live nowhere else. I felt that despite the ravages of Wall Street, wealth, and 1,000-percent rent increases, the outward exile of musicians and artists to the point where they can't even afford to live in Brooklyn anymore, that there was nowhere else for me. New York, specifically the jagged Cambrian boulder known as Manhattan, was my forever love.

And then I set foot in NOLA, an acronym that if you haven't heard it stands for New Orleans, Louisiana. Its other names are more familiar - the Big Easy, the Crescent City, the City that Care Forgot, and I might add "the city that can't decide if it's in the southern United States or northern Costa Rica."

I set one foot in the town and said "oh yeah, I can do this." It was the same way I felt on climbing up on the Cambrian boulder in 1966. You know about the music and the voodoo and the jazz funerals and the food and the booze and Dr. John and all that, and you can throw in Coco Robicheaux, who I only missed a few week ago because I couldn't afford to get across the Lake Ponchartrain bridge to Covington to catch his gig. You know all that or can look it up.

Did I mention that annual spring party that instills in so many permanent residents the fervent desire to spend a few days with the relatives in Baton Rouge? You know about that one, too.

I want to talk about NOLA's groove and what's in the air and how people feel about life and their city.

If New York is the capitol of the known universe, as it thinks of itself, New Orleans is capitol of a parallel, antimatter universive that floats just to the left of Andromeda.

Listen to me. New Orleans is the Greenwich Village that I recall from the mid-sixties. It's hip and musical and artistic and friendly and supportive - more like demanding - of eccentricity. There's a mellow groove that anyone possessed of an artistic sensibility will find irresistable. It's friendly and possessed of a terrific civic pride. No one loves their town the way NOLA people love theirs and they're out there every day promoting it, especially now that it was nearly taken away.

You want an emblem that's more to the point than the fleur-de-lis that's so ubiquitous it's on their professional football team's uniforms? (There ain't no apple on the New York Giants' helmets.) Take the streetcar, and I'm thinking here of the Canal Street Streetcar, and if you want to be even more specific, the Red Line.

The streetcar tells you why the town is called "the Big Easy." That title implies that the pace of life is slower in New Orleans than elsewhere, and let's think for the moment of New York. This is true enough. But nearly everywhere is slower than in New York. Even in L.A. it's slower, even in Washington, DC, and even in Chicago, which comes the closest to Manhattan in terms of testosterone frenzy.

I haven't been to Key West, but I imagine that it's slower there than in anyplace where Jimmy Buffett doesn't reside. Resort towns don't count.

The words "the Big Easy" don't mean slow so much as they mean family and caring. And the streetcar is emblematic, far better than the fleur-de-lis or the silhouetted black guy leaning against a lamppost playing the sax. It ambles along slower than any vehicle save for any vehicle save those cruising for parking spots at the mall. It moves along a wide strip of flat concrete in the middle of the street. The tracks are set into the concrete. Police cars sometimes amble down the same path. So do people with shopping carts and baby carriages. The streetcars, built prominently in 1923 and open to the elements, amble along at something like three miles an hour, slow enough that you can cross in front of it on foot, like ten feet in front of it, and not get run over because the streetcar will stop.

There are official stops every few blocks, but you just might get picked up anywhere.

If you cross in front you might get yelled at, but what do you expect? However the yelling will come from the operator, who is sitting in the front looking out a big open window, and he or she will say "what's the matter with you today? What are you doing out here at ten in the morning. What did you, lose your job again. How's your brother?" And the tourists in the car are slack-jawed at the fact that the driver has not only stopped for you but has lapsed into conversation and soon might add "get on and sit down and I'll drive you to work."

Last week the driver of a car I was on stopped to ask a woman pushing a baby carriage how her kid was. And none of the passengers minded, nor would they mind, because they live in the Big Easy where cooing at a baby is more important than getting to work on time.

This don't happen on the avenue, Fifth Avenue, people. Or on Sunset Boulevard or on South Wabash.

Okay, the hurricane. Yes, the hurricane. They survived it and, being entrepreneurs in the traditional art of substance abuse, promote a drink named the Hurricane. There are various recipes, but the one I saw most recently mixed four ounces of dark rum with an equivalent amount of orange and pineapple juice and some grenadine. You don't want to have more than one unless you can take the next day off.

You also don't want to be a young woman flashing her breasts on Bourbon Street in exchange for a string of cheap beads unless you don't mind it being on the Internet forever. Not everything that happens in New Orleans stays in New Orleans, though a goodly amount does.

What survived the hurricane (the storm, not the drink)? If you are a tourist, businessman, or casual visitor, just about everything. As an older white man said, uncharitably, "everything that matters survived." Which is to say that many of the poorer neighborhoods did not. But just walking around the Central Business District, the French Quarter, the waterfront (ironically enough), and the Garden District you might say "what hurricane?"

But in the pages of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, every third story is about picking up debris or rebuilding, and it's been over two years. And if you wander away from "the Quarter" and over to the Warehouse Arts District and look at some of the warehouses that really are warehouses, you might notice that many of them have been painted up to about five or six feet off the ground. This is a bit creepy once you have figured out the owners are covering up high water marks.

And the hurricane remains in the form of tee shirts, the inevitable tee shirts - "FEMA: Fix Everything My Ass," "NOPD: Not Our Problem, Dude," "I was in New Orleans During Katrina and all I Got was a Plasma TV," and, more elegantly, "Make Levees, Not War."

And the word "rebuild" is everywhere.

This is necessary, of course. A lot remains to be done. The poor are hurting. The musicians are hurting. The real estate market is way constricted and getting uncomfortably New Yorkish. A year before the hurricane someone told me about a two-bedroom apartment in the French Quarter that rented for $600 a month. Telling this to a cabbie on the way to the airport, my discovery was scoffed at and I was told that I could get one for $250 in a different neighborhood, one that doubtless has since washed out into the Gulf of Mexico.

As for the one in the Quarter, as of last week it was $1800 a month, the shortage of housing is so acute. And in October I dropped in on an outdoor party/street fair and a developer showed me fancy color brochures for a condo he is putting up in the middle of the Warehouse Arts District. He showed me the floor plan of a two-bedroom apartment for $350,000. "You might want to pick up one of these," he said, as if suggesting I buy a beignet at Café du Monde.

Go ahead and do it, buy a condo. Get something on the second floor or higher. The levees are still a question mark.

By the way, and the reputation notwithstanding, beignets are overrated. They are heavy plain donuts with confectioner's sugar thrown on them.

There is no snappy ending to this story except to say that NOLA is a gem among world cities, proof that you can have artistry, imagination, family, friendliness, and pride in the middle of a major American city. Or northern Costa Rican city. Go there. Throw a couple of bucks at a street musician (better than at one of the horrid rock bands you will hear on Bourbon Street), get sick on beignets and hurricanes oh, and, what the hell, flash your boobs and get immortalized on YouTube. Buy one of the really classy tourist tee shirts, like the one that reads "I got Bourbon-faced on Shit Street." Maybe don't.

Go to the Market Café at Decatur and St. Philip and nab a catfish po'boy for $10 and listen to the free music. Volunteer to build houses and clean up. Try out the streaming audio at the Rajun' Cajun (http://www.klrzfm.com), and get a room at the Day's Inn French Quarter, which may stay at $59 a night six blocks from Bourbon Street at least until it is renovated following Katrina, renamed the Canal Street Hotel, at which point I presume the room rate will at least double. So what if the phones don't work and there's plaster dust in the room and nowhere to hang your clothes and, like me, you may have to scavenge a wastebasket out of an even-more-unfinished room.

You're on the streetcar line, the Red Line, and the car ambles by every fifteen minutes and the conductor will stop for you and take you for a ride, stop and coo at babies, and point out the restaurant where Bill Clinton eats (second floor, last table on the right by the window).

And you'll understand what they mean by "the Big Easy."