The St. Charles Avenue Streetcar Line is the oldest surviving interurban-urban passenger rail transport system in the U.S.

New Orleans—or “Nawlins” as many locals call it—has a rich artistic, cultural and historic legacy. These 12 intriguing facts serve as a testament to the mystery and magic of the “crescent city” that will host ATS 2010.

1. A New Orleans gossip columnist coined the city’s nickname the “Big Easy” in the 1970s, writing that if New York is called the “Big Apple,” then New Orleans should be called the “Big Easy.”
2. The historic French Quarter, which has the exact grid of the original town of New Orleans in 1722, boasts one of America’s greatest clusters of authentic Spanish, colonial and antebellum structures.
3. The Louisiana Purchase—a real estate transaction in 1803 between Napoleon Bonaparte and President Thomas Jefferson—gave the U.S. control of the critical port of New Orleans. Land outside New Orleans, which extended from Louisiana to Oregon and doubled U.S. territory, was practically a throw-in by the French. Jefferson paid $15 million for the land, approximately three cents per acre.
4. New Orleans’ musician Buddy Bolden reputedly blew the first notes of “jass”—as jazz was initially called—on his coronet sometime in the early 1890s. European brass instruments offered new interpretation of West African tribal drumbeats, French and African American music, spirituals and even field hollers.
5. Some scholars have suggested that New Orleans “shotgun” houses—one room wide and two to four rooms in length with no hallways—evolved from ancient African “long-houses” built by refugees from the Haitian Revolution. Its peculiar name may have come from a legend that a shot fired at such a house would whiz through without hitting anything…or anyone.
6. The historic St. Charles Avenue Streetcar Line (1835) is the oldest surviving interurban-urban passenger rail transport system in the U.S. The line was named into the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and has been declared a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark.
7. A high water table in New Orleans requires that residents be buried above ground. Ornate monuments cluster like small communities, earning the city one of its many nicknames, “City of the Dead.”
8. The city’s massive pumps and canals drain New Orleans’ annual rainfall, which measures between 60 and 100 inches. The total miles of canals above and below ground exceed that of Venice, Italy.
9. New Orleans has more than 35,000 structures on the National Register of Historic Places. Uptown, the City’s largest historic district, boasts nearly 11,000 buildings, 82 percent of which were built before 1935.
10. More than 40 museums call New Orleans home, in addition to a world-class zoo, urban park, aquarium and children’s museum. The city is also the home of esteemed medical research facilities and seven institutions of higher learning.
11. The city is known worldwide for its annual carnival that culminates with an elaborate Mardi Gras celebration. “Mardi Gras” is French for “Fat Tuesday,” which refers to the last night of eating fat-laden foods before the ritual fasting of Lent, a Catholic time of prayer and sacrifice, begins. Originating in southern Europe, Mardi Gras was introduced to New Orleans in the late 17th century.
12. Literati who have made New Orleans their home include Tennessee Williams, Walt Whitman, Truman Capote, Lillian Hellman, Walker Percy, Anne Rice and William Faulkner. ATS 2010 attendees can visit the houses where many of these writers lived.