Waking up on the morning of our sixth day and still feeling full from our gluttony the night before at the Gumbo Shop, we made our way to Louis Armstrong Park, just a six minute bus ride down the street from our rental apartment. New Orleans generally isn’t known for its parks, and coming as a visitor from a city called Minneapolis that frequently ranks highly when it comes to its parks, the parks here in NOLA, like Crescent Park that we visited on our first day, can seem a bit underwhelming.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t seek them out, though, as they are charmingly wonderful in their own right. Armstrong Park welcomes you with a great, white arch, and on it is written in bold, san-serif typeface, ARMSTRONG, and at night the letters light up by way of a bunch of little white bulbs, emblazoning the arch in a brilliant celebration of a fine musician whose work would leave the world grey without it.
Within the park is Congo Square (formerly Place de Negres), where slaves used to gather on Sundays, their day off, to make music together and sell homemade goods. There are also a number of sculptures to admire in the square, including statues of Charles “Buddy” Bolden and Louis Armstrong himself, in addition to a gorgeous sculpture made to look like stacked, symmetrical cubes and designed with colorful mosaics of green, purple, and gold, and inset within that, old, black-and-white photos of areas of New Orleans.
Also, don’t miss taking a look at the Mahalia Jackson Theatre for Performing Arts, which is situated at the northwest end of the park, a large facility named after the gospel singer herself, and which houses the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, the New Orleans Ballet Association, the New Orleans Opera Association, and Broadway Across America touring productions.
Following Armstrong Park, we made our way to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, the oldest and most famous of all the cemeteries in New Orleans. The earliest deaths we came across, however, were only in the early 1800s (however, my research afterwards discovered that there are deaths as early as the later 1700s), so not terribly old, but old nonetheless. You can definitely still appreciate the cemetery’s age, however, as there are some tombs that have crumbled away to only the red bricks that originally encased the dead, while others marked with a plaque that indicates “Perpetual Care” are continually watched after by the Catholic Church, and so are in better shape than some of the others.
While visiting this particular cemetery, don’t forget to catch a glimpse of Nicholas Cage’s ridiculous pyramid-shaped, white monstrosity of a tomb, a tomb that is awaiting his body when he dies, and a tomb that people kiss, as evidenced by makeup stains left behind. There is also the tomb of Voodoo priestess, Mary Laveau, her tomb vandalized by countless triple Xs of different colors that must periodically be removed.
Our next stop was brunch at a restaurant called Atchafalaya, where I enjoyed a plate called the Boudreaux that came with sunny-side up eggs, alligator sausage, jalapeño corn bread, breakfast potatoes, and Creole hollandaise. Amy had a plate called eggs Atchafalaya, which came with poached eggs, fried green tomatoes, jumbo lump crab, hollandaise, and brunch potatoes. She also enjoyed a Bloody Mary, too, which you can prepare at their bloody bar, buffet style.
As if it needs saying at this point (if you’ve read all my posts on NOLA in succession), the food at Atchafalaya was absolutely fantastic! And just so we’re clear, all the restaurants we’ve visited so far should be on your list, too!
We moved on from here to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, where they had a special exhibit dedicated to Brooklyn-born artist Jean-Michel Basquiat called, Basquiat and the Bayou. Just some background about him first:
He originally gained notoriety in the 1970s when he was a part of SAMO (i.e. Same Old Shit), a graffiti art group that wrote brief, satirical statements around Manhattan’s Lower East Side. By the 1980s, he was exhibiting his paintings at high-profile museums. In addition to his art, he was also a musician, forming rock band, Gray, and he also starred in Glenn O’Brien’s independent film, Downtown 81. Sadly, he died in 1988 at the age of 27 due to a heroine overdose.
Since he was African American, you can see that much of his work draws from the inequities of oppressive power structures that aren’t limited to only race, but also class, he himself remarking that his work is “80% anger.” One painting on display, Exu, seemed quite angry indeed, and painted just months before his death. It is a depiction of a Yorùbá deity of the same name, and the deity is a personification of death. At the center of the painting is a horned head crimsoned in red that is attached to a vague semblance of a body. Surrounding it are numerous eyes, forever staring out of the frame, with several spears pointing upwards, and at the feet of Exu are several rolled tobaccos. While the style is clearly Basquiat (raw, frenetic explosions of color, heavy lines that meander about and suggest the shapes they want to be, and everything generally done in a carefully planned messiness), this painting seemed to turn all of those elements up to 11.
One particular painting that struck a chord with me was Procession, which to me seemed to be a clear depiction of second lining, which has its roots in funeral processions, and that we partook in on our second day here in New Orleans. It was a painting of five black men, the head man brightly colored in orange and blue clothes and holding up high a skull, representing the person they are processing for, and the remaining four men are painted in solid, black silhouettes with bright, white eyes, arms out-stretched in solemn celebration.
Also on display at the exhibit were his Zydeco (a tryptic with an accordion player prominently at the center, the player painted in a way that looks like the person is in black face), King Zulu (a bold, blue painting honoring Louis Armstrong who reigned as King Zulu in New Orleans’s oldest African American krewe, Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club), and CPRKR (a tombstone-like tribute to Charles Parker) in addition to Natchez, Untitled (Cadmium), Back of the Neck, and Embittered.
Please read John d’Addario’s article on the exhibition, Basquiat in the American South, which will help you appreciate the paintings on display even more.
Following the exhibit, we made our way through the other floors of the Ogden, but I have to admit that sometimes museums feel like places that people pretend to enjoy. I can stay concentrated on everything on display for about an hour, but then my attention starts to wane. We quickly walked by artists including David Butler, B.F. Perkins, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Clementine Hunter, Rev. Howard Finster, John McCrady, Benny Andrews, and Will Henry Stevens in addition to countless others. All the art on display was powerful and intriguing in their own right, but I’d rather view each of them for an hour on separate occasions and during their own, special exhibitions curated specifically for them.
By this point in the day, it was time for dinner, but unfortunately the weather took a turn for the not-so-desirable. We had been enjoying temperatures in the upper teens, but on this day of all days the highs hovered in the upper single digits and it was rainy and it was windy. Now, I understand that back home in Minneapolis you were experiencing temperatures much lower, but I now sympathize with people who live in New Orleans who complain about temperatures that we would welcome any day. It’s all a matter of perspective, really. If one day you’re enjoying a comfortable 20 degrees and it drops to 8 the next day, it will feel quite cold. Conversely, if you were battling a bitter -4 and the next day it’s 8, it’ll feel quite warm.
Even still, after drinks at a restaurant called American Sector (connected to the World War II Musuem), we braced for the cold wind, and we made our way down the #12 streetcar to a donut shop called District Donuts, where we enjoyed two large donuts, one was a king donut, prepared in a way as to resemble its sister, the king cake, and then we went onwards to a restaurant called Jacques-Imo’s, where I enjoyed a fried chicken dinner with red beans and rice and corn macque chow and Amy had a Cajun bouillabaisse of oysters, shrimp, and assorted fish with country greens and smothered cabbage. Why we had the donuts before and all this food, perplexes me, as we were so full of food yet again, barely having room for beers at the nearby Maple Leaf Bar (the inside of which smelled like my father’s tack shop that houses his horses’ harnesses, a kind of oily, musty, sweaty smell with a hint of old hay and dry manure).
But what food at Jacques-Imo’s! I am fast running out of superlatives to describe all the most decadent dining we’ve experiencd so far in New Orleans. It is just all so, so good, the greatest foods I’ve had quite possibly ever! Nothing so far has disappointed, and I highly recommend that you go to all the places we’ve visited to so far on our trip to NOLA.
Sadly, our days here are quickly coming to an end. Just two posts remain of our adventures, and neither of us want to return home.