Thirty Days of Why I Love New Orleans

Let the Dead Sleep

Thirty Days of Why I Love New Orleans

My book, Let the Dead Sleep , begins a series that highlights New Orleans. My protagonists--Danni Cafferty and Michael Quinn--are both from the city. They live and work in the city, love it, know it, and, naturally, want to keep it safe from harm!

Well, I love the city, too. I've never lived there, but I spend a great deal of time there. I have since I was a small child.

So, today's "Why I Love" goes to the city itself.

New Orleans practices what I think of as living history daily. The French Quarter is filled with fantastic architecture—all being used today as restaurants, shops, hotels, homes, and what have you. While it's called the French Quarter, a lot of the architecture is actually

Spanish. That's because of the fires. But, I'm setting the mule before the carriage.

Native Americans lived in the area for hundreds of years before the first European explorers and fur traders began arriving in the late 1600s. 1718 brought the official founding of Nouvelle-Orléans by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. In 1722 it became the capitol of French Louisiana, but a hurricane came and wiped out most of the houses that had existed at the time. They'd been described as hovels, so, maybe the hurricane—despite the damage and the horror—helped out history a bit.  Because, after all that damage and horror, Bienville set about to create the grid that remains the boundary of the French Quarter or Vieux Carre today. In 1763, with the British victorious in the Seven Years War, the land was ceded to the Spanish--and thus the Spanish rule. That didn't work out so well--a lot of the settlers, no matter where they came from, wanted it all back under French Rule. They drove the Spanish governor out in the Bloodless Revolution.

Ahha! The Spanish were not about to give up--a year later, they were back, and five of the ringleaders were executed and others were forced to pledge their loyalty to Spain. Next, great fires ripped through the city, the first being the Great New Orleans Fire of 1788 followed by another awful fire in December of 1794. Over a thousand buildings were destroyed.

After these fires--and while the Spanish were still in control--the city began to rebuild with brick.  The cemetery, St. Louis #1, opened in 1789. While it’s true that flooding could cause bodies to float through the city, the style of the cemetery was, scholars argue, decidedly Spanish.

Rule got a little tricky and confusing. In 1795, the Spanish granted the United States "right of deposit." That meant the U.S. could use the port facilities. And then, in 1800 Spain and France signed the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso. It was so secret that many of the city’s residents wouldn’t know about it for years. It returned New Orleans to French rule, but only when the French were ready for a transfer of power and it wasn't to be for long. Then, as we know, Napoleon sold Louisiana (which included many other states or pieces of states!) to the United States.  

By then, of course, the "English"--some real English and many Americans--were trickling in and there was a magnificent mixture of cultures and people.

However, from that time on, the beautiful city of New Orleans was American. Fantastic architecture was already in place and more was to come. The Garden District became part of the City of New Orleans back in 1833. Parcels of land were sold and since the “French” were in the Quarter, the “English” had to be somewhere. Both areas are unique, beautiful, and incredible.

The Haitian Revolution that began in 1791 brought people—white and black, slave and free—to New Orleans and introduced incredible culture, including the Voodoo for which the city is so famous. Bad times were destined, of course. The Civil War came along, but the city was in the hands of the Union by 1862. And, as we all know, in our own day and age, the city was devastated by Katrina and the summer of storms and cast into further despair by the oil spill. But one thing about NOLA—the city is resilient! I was there yesterday and it was amazing to see the amount of people once again flocking the streets, making driving and walking a mad dash for survival, and most of all—appreciating the fantastic city.

My favorite description of the city as a whole is that which denotes her as “a gem of decaying elegance.” Now, trust me—not everything is decaying. There’s work constantly going on and many places are just plain elegant. Others are just plain fun. Some—like Lafitte’s Bar—lets you feel that you are, indeed, living history.

So, day one of loving New Orleans—she’s just a great city. There are all kinds of neighborhoods to visit extending beyond the French Quarter and the Garden District. There are the haunted cemeteries, the great Cities of the Dead, from St. Louis to Lafayette to those beyond the city limits. There is a bustling CBD, or Central Business District.

Oh, there are bayous and parks and national heritage sights and more. There is an excellent aquarium. There are so many places to go; there are carriage rides that must be taken, ghost tours, history tours, vampire tours! There is the Mighty Mississippi and there are paddle steamers and magnificent plantations just down the road and . . . .

The city, the beautiful city itself, is a gem.  Just sit at Café Du Monde as others have since 1862 and watch the pageantry at Jackson Square or the abundance of people in the city as they pass by. See the beautiful buildings of Jackson Square, the cathedral, the Cabildo, the Presbytere . . . .

Ah. Those are for another day!

Mini Ice-Age and Waking the Dead

            In theory, the mini ice-age might be the reason St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated far and wide.

By the mid-eighteen-hundreds, the potato—a New World crop—had become big in Ireland. It ^th. Imagine life without the parades—and green beer, of course. (My mom was born in Dublin so it’s all pretty cool to me!)

had become so big, in fact, that the country was dependent on in. By 1849—tail end of the mini ice-age, since most scientists agree it ended about 1850—the land was so ravaged and decimated that the potatoes were growing black and inedible. In starving droves, the Irish were forced to immigrate to survive. As we know, the Irish came to the United States in massive numbers. And thank the Lord! While they went through a pretty wretched period at first (read Gangs of New York—yes, read the book, though I was a fan of the movie, quite different!) they began to settle in quite nicely as the decades rolled by and we began to pick on whatever new immigrants from different countries began to flock in and it was their turn to be ostracized. Yes, bring us your poor and wretched . . . we’ll bitch about them and forget we’re a nation of immigrants, but hey! Back on track here. So the Irish came and we have delightful celebrations every March 17

So maybe another reason to party in this country isn’t so important. But many or our leaders are of Irish descent, um, hm—like Kennedy! And Obama apparently can go back as well. Maybe Congress could actually agree on something if they were just to figure out that many of them were of Irish descent!

Oh, well. Still digressing here!

And on that note, the first President of the Republic of Ireland was an American. Yup. An Irishman (via his mom,) but born in the US of A, which meant, that when he was caught with a number of men who were hanged for their rebellion, he was spared the noose—no one wanted the Americans getting up in arms against what was going on. So Eamon de Valera lived to be the first pres. Lots of connection here—and maybe because of the weather.

Who knows just what else might have had to do with the extreme cold? Not that the shift was that big—just big enough to ruin crops and keep snow on the ground. Enough to make people really, really hungry.

But here’s to the point of the story—and we’re going to backtrack a little. On April of 1815 the volcano at Mt. Tambora on the little island of Sambawa erupted. The eruption was by far the worst of the nineteenth century although it’s presumed that it wasn’t noted as much as the later eruption of Krakatoa because by the time that top was blown, the telegraph was shooting news all over the place—the Facebook of the age.

But Mt. Tambora was about 12,000 feet high—the eruption knocked off 4,000 feet to bring it down to 8,000. That’s a lot of footage to lose—and a lot of dirt and ash and matter flying around in the air. It’s hard to estimate the deaths with the tsunamis created-much less being there at the initial impact.

The volcanic sky began to travel, right around the globe.

The year 1816 was not a good one in the states. It wasn’t that they were having the coldest days ever—it was that the cold wouldn’t go away. (Kind of like this year, 2014. I just left Chicago. Damn!) Spring hinted of an arrival—and then just went away.

The sky was eternally overcast. Add the fallout into the air and you had one cold year without much sun penetrating down to earth.

But, good things came of it.

1816.

Writers at the time could be a Bohemian lot. Take Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and John Polidori. They were hanging around Geneva, Switzerland and were known to take lovely holidays. Now on these holidays the group usually did fun things—outside. They loved to boat on the lake, take hikes, and, in general, play games and enjoy the great outdoors! But when they arrived, it was cold. It was dark. It was the year without a summer.  

And sitting around by the fire one cold wretched night at the Villa Diodati, they began to tell ghost stories. And as they told ghost stories, they decided that writing was something that could be done indoors. Since it was eternally gloomy, day often turned to night with little being different. There were eternal shadows surrounding them. Gray hung over the lake like a miasma of death and waiting.

Lord Byron proposed they all write a ghost story.

Well, couple that with Mary’s upbringing—a feminist mother, a father who liked to entertain the brightest minds of his day—and the fact that she was very up on recent experiments with electricity and the concept of “galvanism” and “re-animating” corpses, and you have a story.

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was born, no pun intended.

Without the mini ice-age, this wonder of the literary world might not exist. Hundreds of actors, film-makers, producers, and what have you might not have had jobs over the decades upon decades since. And writers playing upon the first chills they felt while reading it might not have created their new works of fiction. If you want to get down to it—people might not have been frightened into the backseats at drive-ins and who knows? Some of us might not have even existed!

While it’s fanciful to take it too far, it is amazing what the weather can cause and create and how it has influenced history. A story is a small part of it, of course.

But, apparently, that mini ice-age influenced me. Waking the Dead begins in Geneva, Switzerland, with Mary and her crew—and an ardent admirer of them all who painted with colors rather than a pen. But his creation of that summer makes it present day New Orleans and into the lives of Danni Cafferty and Michael Quinn. I hope you’ll enjoy my take on the year without a summer!