March 19, 2009

New Orleans

Garden District
St. Paddy's Day - New Orleans Style

Gumbo Dinner

Street Cars are running again
Algiers Point Shotgun House

Shopping in New Orleans

Ninth Ward Abandoned House - Flooded to the Attic

Jimmie Rodgers' Original Guitar

Tuesday, we drove into New Orleans. The weather is glorious - not too hot and beautiful blue skies. We parked the car in the Garden District and walked around the area enjoying the architecture and gardens. This area suffered little damage from Hurricane Katrina. We found a block party celebrating St. Paddy’s Day - lots of green beer and people jamming the streets. We took some pictures and moved on.
We rode the St. Charles streetcar to the French Quarter and ate gumbo at the Gumbo Shop.
Wednesday, we used the Garden District again as our base and took the streetcar to the French Quarter. We rode the ferry to Algiers Point across the Mississippi River from downtown. The architecture in this neighborhood had a real Victorian feel to it and the shotgun style houses were much more accessible than the mansions in the Garden District. This neighborhood is being restored and renovated.
We had read and heard a lot about the destruction in the Lower Ninth Ward. Remember that 80% of New Orleans were flooded by the failure of the levees (September 2005). The center of this was the Ninth Ward. We drove through the neighborhood to see for ourselves. We saw some houses had been rebuilt, some still have the markings from the search crews and too many razed lots. Interesting enough, Fats Domino’s home is located in the Ninth Ward and suffered some damage. We did see the Habitat of Humanity new homes and the new neighborhood construction by Brad Pitt. Still a very sad situation but we did see some hopeful signs.
Spike Lee directed a 4 part DVD called “When the Levees Broke”, it is a fascinating and moving documentary.
Today we left New Orleans and headed east to Mississippi. We stopped in Hattiesburg at Camp Shelby to visit the Armed Forces Museum. We drove to Meridian to visit the Jimmie Rodgers Museum - considered to be the father of country music. Jimmie Rodgers, also known as the Singin’ Brakeman, was born and is buried in Meridian. The docent at the museum let us in even though it was closing time, showed us his $750,000 guitar(kept in a safe) and some of the memorabilia.