New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS New Orleans, Louisiana, is a semitropical city almost completely surrounded by water. It is located in a crescent-shaped bend in the Mississippi River, which forms most of its western, southern, and northern borders-thus the nickname “Crescent City.” Lake Pontchartrain forms its eastern border. New Orleans is situated below sea level, and the city is protected from flooding by a system of man-made and natural levees-a system that proved inadequate against Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Other New Orleans nicknames are the “Big Easy” and, less glowingly, the “City That Care Forgot.” Poet Andrei Codrescu described New Orleans, his home of twenty years in the late twentieth century, as “a city running a fever 10 months of the year.” The description applies equally well to the climate and the culture: New Orleans is hot. Its folklife is renowned for lively roots music and dance (the category of “roots music” refers to sources of popular music in blues, gospel, jazz, old-time country, Cajun, and zydeco), spicy and imaginative foodways, prominent architecture of Afro-Caribbeaninspired shotgun houses, and pronounced ethnic

combinations drawing on the city’s French, Spanish, Native American, and African heritage. New Orleans is a city of half a million souls whose complexity is reflected in the things important to the majority: faith, family, festivals, food, and music.