Description
Built on a swamp, below sea level, in hurricane alley. For three hundred years, every reasonable person has explained why New Orleans should not exist. New Orleans has responded by throwing a party. In 1699, a seventeen-year-old named Bienville identified the one spot where a city might be attempted — a crescent bend where the Mississippi approached Lake Pontchartrain closely enough to create a shortcut for commerce. The location was terrible for habitation and perfect for trade. He spent nineteen years fighting to build there. Enslaved Africans from Senegambia arrived with musical traditions that would change the world. A brutal slave code contained one provision that was actually enforced: Sundays off. In that legally protected space, at a dusty field called Congo Square, the foundation of jazz was being practiced every Sunday afternoon. The city burned to the ground on Good Friday, 1788 — 856 of its 1,100 buildings destroyed because Catholic law forbade ringing the bells to sound the alarm. It was rebuilt in brick and stucco. The French Quarter is actually Spanish. We trace the Mississippi Bubble, the Louisiana Purchase, Buddy Bolden — the cornetist who pioneered jazz and never recorded a single note — Louis Armstrong's journey from the Battlefield to global fame, and Storyville, the red-light district where jazz found its first paying audiences. Then August 29, 2005. The levees failed. Eighty percent of the city underwater. Thirty thousand trapped in the Superdome. A nation asking where the help was. The people returned anyway. And sixteen years to the day after Katrina, Hurricane Ida struck with even stronger winds. The $14.5 billion post-Katrina levee system held. The impossible city has decided, once again, to exist. Laissez les bon temps rouler.