St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square is an important part of the history of New Orleans. It was first known as Place d’Armes when the city was founded.

While New Orleans continues to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina, the vast majority of the city has returned to the level of brilliance that has always defined the Crescent City.

The French, Spanish, Acadians, Africans and American Indians combine to create a rich ethnic blend that is exemplified in New Orleans jazz, French and Spanish architecture, Cajun and Creole cuisine, festivals, river ports and flavorful history.

Culture and art 

The first operas in America were performed in New Orleans in the 1790’s, when the Spanish-style townhouses of the French Quarter and the exquisite Greek Revival mansions of the Garden District were built.

Restaurants offered foods of many cultures, as well as distinct Cajun and Creole cuisines. Ante-bellum New Orleans was the musical hotbed of the nation, and artists and craftsmen from around the world immigrated to the vibrant port. Visitors of all classes enjoyed the luxuries, and perhaps the decadences of “the city that care forgot.” Residents reveled in cultural and recreational opportunities far beyond what most cities of New Orleans’ size could offer. New Orleans was the cultural capital of the South.

Today, New Orleans is undergoing a creative renaissance and reclaiming that title. The city boasts world-class museums, including Smithsonian affiliates, the National World War II Museum and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Artist studios and galleries line the streets of the French Quarter/Marigny, Warehouse/Arts District and Magazine Street. Performing arts groups, their shows and the venues that host them speckle the map. All around the city, historic neighborhoods are being revitalized by architectural restoration and gentrification.

The city has been—and continues to be—a favorite muse for an incredible legacy of artists, artisans, performers, musicians, writers and chefs.

Music 

In the 18th century, the French and Creole residents of the Big Easy lived for musicales, balls accompanied by string orchestras and picnics set to Old World brass bands. Considered the new Paris, La Nouvelle Orléans built the first opera house and had a full, French opera that traveled back and forth from Paris. In the 19th century, proceeds form public balls helped finance the first full-time opera company. Whatever has changed over the last three centuries, the musical heritage remains.

The classics are still going strong in an ensemble of companies and programs, such as the Delta Festival Ballet, New Orleans Opera and Musical Arts Society. In 1991, the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra was the only full-time, player-managed symphony orchestra in the country.

The city’s penchant for jazz dates back to West Indian slaves of African descent. On Sunday afternoons, slaves socialized in Congo Square, which is now part of Louis Armstrong Park on Rampart Street. In Congo Square, they would perform tribal dances and chants with stirring rhythms to African percussions. It has been suggested that Charles “Buddy” Bolden was among the onlookers at the Square and that he mixed those tribal and Creole elements with African-American ragtime and spirituals, folk songs, the blues and even the cries of the street vendors who once filed the Vieux Carré. Some time in the Gay 90’s, Buddy put his cornet to his lips and blew hot notes and cool tunes that became the music we call jazz. He’d invented an American original and a worldwide phenomenon.

History: Vintage 1718 

The party didn’t start right away. Like a good wine, it took a while to mature after the initial fermentation. When the Sieur de la Salle explored the Mississippi in 1682, he claimed all lands drained by the river for France and named the territory for the reigning royal, King Louis XIV.

The Louisiana Territory of 828,000 square miles extended from the Mississippi to the Rockies, and the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. Eventually, French, Spanish, English, independent, Confederate and Union flags would all fly over Louisiana.

In 1718, when Sieur de la Bienville founded a strategic port city five feet below sea level near the juncture of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, it had to be reclaimed from a swamp. The new city , or ville, was named La Nouvelle Orléans for Philippe, Due d’Orléans, and centered around the Place d’Armes (later known as Jackson Square ). It was confined to the area we now call the French Quarter or Vieux Carré, which means Old Square.

The society that settled on the bend of the Mississippi was French in origin and at heart.

Even so, in 1762, either because he lost a bet or because the royal coffers were exhausted, Louis XV gave Louisiana to his Spanish cousin, King Charles III.

In 1788, the city went up in flames, incinerating over 850 buildings. New Orleans was still recovering when a second fire in 1794 destroyed 200 structures.

From Spain, Louisiana was ceded back to France and was finally sold by Napoleon to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. At about four cents and acre, the purchase, which doubled the size of the country, was one of the greatest real estate bargains in history.

After the sale, Americans arrived en masse. Unwelcome in the Creole enclave of the French Quarter, they settled across Canal Street in the Central Business District.

1812: War and Peace 

Louisiana joined the Union and New Orleans became the state capital. The New Orleans, the first steamboat to navigate the Mississippi successfully, came to the city from Pittsburgh. The voyage inaugurated the booming cotton and tobacco river trade that soon transformed the port of New Orleans into the second wealthiest city (after New York) in the nation.

The War of 1812 began, culminating in the Battle of New Orleans, three years later. In 1815, British troops attacked New Orleans and tried to persuade pirate Jean Lafitte to join them. Instead, Lafitte offered his men and guns to the commander of the U.S. troops, General Andrew Jackson. On the morning of January 8, a polyglot band of 4,000 militia, frontiersmen, former Haitian slaves and pirates outfought 8,000 British veterans at Chalmette Battlefield, just a few miles east of the French Quarter. Only eight Americans died. English casualties exceeded 2,000.

Port City 

During the 18th and 19th centuries, New Orleans dominated the Caribbean as the most active port city and trade destination for island crops like sugar cane, rum, tobacco and fruit.

Thousands of refugees arrived from the Caribbean following the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804. Following the revolution, thousands more gens de couleur libres, or free people of color, arrived in New Orleans. Most were from Senegambia, now the area in Central Africa known as Benin. Their presence effectively doubled the size of the city.

The New Paris 

By the mid 1800s, the city in the bend of the river had become the fourth largest in the nation and one of the richest, dazzling visitors with chic Parisian couture, fabulous restaurants and sophisticated culture.

Society centered around the French Opera House, where professional opera and theater companies played to full houses. In fact, more than 400 operas premiered in the Crescent City during the 19th century.

Cultural Gumbo 

Under French, Spanish and American flags, Creole society coalesced as Islanders, West Africans, slaves, free people of color and indentured servants poured into the city along with a mix of French aristocrats, merchants, farmers, soldiers, freed prisoners and nuns.

New Orleans was, for its time, a permissive society where educated gens de couleur libres were master builders who developed elegant Creole architecture and chefs who developed the city’s sophisticated Creole cuisine.

Creole is a chameleon term. It’s a variety of tomato, an exotic cuisine and a poetic architectural style.

It also refers to people, but the definition varies, depending on whom you ask. One thing is true of Creoles everywhere: they have always been colonials (vs. European immigrants). The original New Orleans Creoles were thoroughbred French, who were the first generation to be born in the colonies. The word Creole derives from the Spanish criollo or the Portuguese crioullo (again, depending on whom you ask), which distinguished a person born in the colonies from an immigrant or an imported slave. In present-day New Orleans , there are people of various combinations of French, Spanish, West Indian and African ancestry who proudly call themselves Creoles.

Cajuns, on the other hand, are descended from a specific group of Catholic, French-speaking trappers and farmers exiled from Nova Scotia by the ruling English Protestants in 1755. About 10,000 eventually settled in Southwest Louisiana, in what is now called Acadiana. Some later came to New Orleans neighborhoods like Westwego. Over a million people of Cajun descent live in Louisiana.

Longfellow immortalized their story of loss and exile in his epic poem, “Evangeline.” But Canada’s expulsion was Louisiana’s gain; Cajuns brought us their joie de vivre, lively music and famed cuisine.