Susan: Let’s go to the French Quarter on Sunday. It’s Easter. Everyone will be at home with their families having Easter dinner.
Simon: Good idea! We’ll grab lunch and then get some beignets at Café Du Monde while it’s quieter.
French Quarter: Easter Parade! Gay Easter Parade! Easter Bonnet Contest! Let the parties begin!
We’d been in the French Quarter twice already, but saved a visit to Café Du Monde and Café Beignet for Sunday, when, surely, the area wouldn’t be so jam-packed with tourists and heavy drinkers.
Wrong.
We didn’t know we were wrong when we set off on Easter morning, though, with a few photo ops in mind. First, we wanted to see the oldest fire hydrant in New Orleans, whose technology changed the face of fire-fighting, allowing firefighters to get closer to the blaze and have the ability to pump water right out of the bayou. It took a little doing to find it, but the adorable little hydrant that looks like a character straight out of a Pixar movie was worth the effort.
Easter is all about death and resurrection, so what better place to remember that reality than a cemetery? We did a little drive-through at St. Louis Cemetery 3, which felt like driving along a street in Death City, where all the homes are as quiet as the tomb. Many whose Earthly remains are experiencing eternity here were famous New Orleanians.
Cemetery 1, the oldest in New Orleans, is closed unless you take a sanctioned tour. St. Louis Cemetery 2, famous for being the final resting place of many who succumbed to the 1823 cholera outbreak, is also closed, in part because of vandalism, but, if the used syringes strewn around the sidewalk outside are any indication, there is a bigger problem at play.
Next on our list was the Lower 9th Ward. We’d been there in 2013, eight years after the horrors of hurricane Katrina, and most of the homes were still in terrible shape, with spray-paint markings on them from the searchers who went into each one to find out if they contained victims of the floodwaters, and how many.
Now, nearly 20 years later, the area has mostly recovered. Some devastated buildings and homes still exist, but we only saw one that still had its markings. Some lots remain vacant, but more than anything, new homes have gone up, which was incredibly heartening to see.
In particular, we were interested in seeing the so-called FLOAT House, a low-cost prototype home designed to rise to a height of 12 feet if, God forbid, another flood-related catastrophe struck. It doesn’t work, of course, and it, along with 190 of Make It Right homes funded by the actor Brad Pitt, which rotted and crumbled in the Lower 9th’s high humidity, stand as good-intentions-gone-wrong for people who had already lost it all. A $20.5 million lawsuit settlement in 2022 helped redress the balance.
After our failed food runs in the French Quarter, we admitted defeat before we tried a third time, and headed back to City Park for its Café DuMonde branch, and had mugs of hot coffee and steamy beignets in hand in under two minutes. Sitting in the sun with the sounds of the community around us, we pretended we were locals, and thoroughly enjoyed a happy half-hour being normal people.
Simon had been to the National World War II museum before, but Susan hadn’t, so we set a morning aside to pay a visit. The museum had a new exhibit, Finding Hope In A World Destroyed, highlighting the Holocaust, recovery and rebuilding, Black service men’s reception upon returning home, and The Monument Men, complete with reproductions of stolen artworks.
There was also a mockup of the kitchen in The Secret Annex, where Anne Frank and her family hid. The whole exhibit was quite powerful, and it felt disrespectful to take photos, so we didn’t. Susan had studied the Holocaust in depth since she was in her early 20s, but Simon found the exhibit a bit overwhelming. It took him back to our visits to Auschwitz and Dachau, and the painful reality of those terrible times.
He shook it off with a trip up to Vue Orleans for a 33rd floor overview of the city. Ruthie wasn’t allowed, of course, so she and Susan waited on a park bench while Simon checked out the observation deck.
Vue Orleans is in a building right on the riverwalk, and as luck would have it, a Carnival Cruise Line’s ship, Valor, was just making her way out to sea with a whole new group of passengers. We had actually sailed on her with our three boys many long years ago.
We stayed in the Garden District during our 2013 trip to the Big Easy, an area that, like the French Quarter, is totally reliable. You know what you’re going to see (massive wealth), and we were happy to end our time in New Orleans with a leisurely trip down memory lane.
Veness Travel Media 
certainly looks like a fascinating city and one I would love to visit sometime soon. As always a huge chasm between the lower 9th and the Garden District, the haves and have nots. Even Katrina didn’t seem to treat everyone in the same way.
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