Camping in the Big Easy

 

I have been to New Orleans several times in the past 40 years. I don’t get tired of seeing the city, and wanted Vicky to.

But, how?

Straightforward solution: Stay at a hotel. Problem: no place for our camper. Most hotels have no parking, and those that do have parking don’t have parking for a tall rig like ours.

Creative solution #1. Stay at a park outside New Orleans, drop the camper, and drive into town each day.Problem: Camping fees, parking fees, gasoline, and hassle. Fighting rush hour traffic twice a day. Oh, what fun.

Creative solution #2: Drive to a parking lot at the airport. Get a cab to a hotel in the French Quarter. Problem: Parking expense, huge cab expense (I couldn’t find hotels that had limos), and HUGE hotel expenses.

Fell into our lap solution: While poking around on Google Maps I noticed an RV park bordering the French Quarter. An RV park? Wow! So I called, and what do you know! It is three blocks off of I-10. Three nights cost about the same as a single night at a hotel, we can sleep in our own beds, eat our own breakfasts, and walk three or four blocks to the French Quarter RIGHT BY A POLICE STATION.

So, dear reader, which solution do you think we chose?

Many nights, when we camp, all we can hear is the soothing sound of water in the river or stream behind our camp site. Other nights we are serenaded by owls or, more usually, by packs of coyotes howling in the distance. Here, we listen to the sounds of police sirens, screaming down the interstate that is only a few feet from the wall of our campground. We are not in a National Forest, are we?

The RV park is right next to the former Iberville housing project. It is one of the more notorious housing projects in the nation, noted for its high crime rate. Interestingly, it is built on the original site of Storyville, the area of New Orleans that in the early 20th century was the red light district.

You may have heard of the song, by the Animals, The House of the Rising Sun ("There is a house in New Orleans....they call the Rising Sun....."), or perhaps you have seen or heard of the film “Pretty Baby,” (the film which propelled Brooke Shields to her 15 minutes of fame) which both have to do with the Storyville area.

The Pretty Baby film, controversial for its time, focused on a real photographer, E.J. Bellocq, a Creole (more about that later) who made extensive photographs of the houses and prostitutes of Storyville.

The history is fascinating. It is named for a councilman whose last name was Story. He proposed an area to keep prostitution away from the rest of the city. In that area were a lot of Victorian homes that not only became houses of prostitution, but where also where jazz was born. Louis Armstrong, for example, as a young man worked at one of those houses.

Storyville was viable for about 20 years, until the US entered WWI, and some official wanted it gone because too many officers were visiting the area (duh). So it was closed, the houses were destroyed, and 25 years later a public housing area was built there.

There are only three structures remaining from that era. All are former bars.

We saw all three. One was right across the street from our RV park.

Yes, it is true. You are not hallucinating. On one of the three remaining structures of this historic area of New Orleans, on a building that was a bar, is now a McDonalds advertisement. Try wrapping your brain around that.

The other structures were a few blocks away. We got a photo of one of them, but were too lazy to walk a few blocks to get the other, although we saw it later in our travels.

 

The city of New Orleans has closed the Iberville Projects, and is in the process of destroying most of the buildings. While this sounds great, since the area was noted as a very high crime area, the other side of the issue is where will people live who work for minimum wage? Certainly I’m not saying people should have to work or $8 an hour, but as long as they have to, how will they get to all of those service jobs in the French Quarter if they live several miles away? These problems are too large for me to get a handle on.

 

Posted with Blogsy