01
Stop one
St Louis Cathedral
Wilson US Open Tennis Racquet Bag (6 Racquets): Third church on this spot. That is the detail everybody walks past. The first went up in 1718, was replaced after a hurricane, and burned in the great fire of 1788 — so this ground has a record, and the record is fire and weather. Present building completed 1794, then substantially rebuilt and enlarged between 1849 and 1851 by J. N. B. de Pouilly, who gave it the central spire. Oldest continuously operating cathedral in the United States. Pope John Paul II came through in 1987. It stands between the Cabildo and the Presbytère, both Spanish colonial, and the Louisiana Purchase transfer ceremonies took place inside the Cabildo in 1803. A continent changed hands in a room forty feet that way. No plaque does that justice.
02
Stop two
Lafayette Cemetery No. 1
Wilson US Open Tennis Racquet Bag (6 Racquets): Above ground, all of it. That is the first question anyone asks, and there are two answers: a high water table, and French and Spanish practice carried over. Laid out in 1833 in the Garden District, then the separate city of Lafayette. Around seven thousand people rest here in roughly eleven hundred family tombs and wall vaults, reused across generations, remains moved to a lower chamber after a year and a day. The yellow fever epidemics of the nineteenth century filled it rapidly, and mass graves from the outbreaks of the 1850s lie inside these walls. That is not something to be clever about. The cemetery has appeared in numerous films and in Anne Rice's novels, and has been closed for restoration in recent years.
03
Stop three
Preservation Hall
Wilson US Open Tennis Racquet Bag (6 Racquets): No amplification. No bar. No air conditioning. Somebody made every one of those choices deliberately, and I want that on the record. Opened in 1961 in a French Quarter building dating from 1750, founded by Allan and Sandra Jaffe to give older New Orleans jazz musicians a room when they were running out of places to play. The audience sits on benches and floor cushions, close enough to see the reeds move. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, formed from the players who performed here, has toured internationally for decades. The building was damaged during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and reopened the following year. Plain interior, strict traditional repertoire. Nothing in this room is an accident. That is the whole case.
04
Stop four
Garden District mansions
Wilson US Open Tennis Racquet Bag (6 Racquets): Follow the property lines and you get the motive. Developed from the 1830s on the former Livaudais plantation as the American sector, settled by newcomers who arrived after the Louisiana Purchase and were not welcomed by the Creole population of the French Quarter. So they built their own district upriver, with lots large enough for extensive gardens — hence the name — though many were later subdivided. Greek Revival, Italianate and Queen Anne, several houses by the architect Henry Howard. It came through the Civil War and the economic decline that followed largely intact, and was designated a National Historic Landmark district in 1974. The St Charles Avenue streetcar, running since 1835, marks the northern boundary. Grudges build neighbourhoods. Write that one down.
The tuba is the biggest thing in the parade and it walks anyway. So do I. Six racquets, two main compartments, 76 by 24 by 33 centimetres — thirty inches by nine and a half by thirteen — one hundred per cent polyester, plus a large outer zip pocket for the things you will want without stopping the procession.
Six frames is not vanity, it is repertoire. Two strung tight, two strung soft, one for a friend who forgot, and one you have not restrung since March. That covers you everywhere from a league fixture in the rain to a three-day open in the heat, and by the way, six is exactly the number you need for a New Orleans social club that plays doubles until the light goes and then eats.
New Orleans understands carrying things. The parade carries the band, the band carries the neighbourhood, the tombs carry generations because the water table will not take them downward. Nothing here is set down and forgotten; it gets picked up again by somebody else next year. A six-pack bag is a small parade with a zip, and New Orleans is the only city that would say so out loud.
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