In the continuity of a city which has a historical past, there is much secular consolation for the transitoriness of human life. To the true city-born, city-bread heart, nothing less than the city itself is home, and nothing less than the city family;

Grace King. New Orleans: The Place and the People (1895)

Vieux Carré

Some might say that the city of New Orleans, specifically the French Quarter or Vieux Carré, is, and always has been, the quintessential cultural tourism city. Whether in New Orleans for leisure or business, the modern day visitor experiences an "otherness" that has changed, but has not been lost through the centuries.

New Orleans was originally settled in the area now known as the French Quarter, or Vieux Carré. After the Louisiana purchase, when the new "American' immigrants began settling in New Orleans, they avoided the French Quarter, settling instead to the west of the Quarter in Faubourg St. Mary or what became known as the American sector. The Vieux Carré continued to be the home for the established Creole culture.

Christine M. Boyer describes the Vieux Carré situation during the 1870s, "By the 1870s it had become a melancholic symbol of ruin and decline for both the antebellum south and the Creole culture. An Illustrated Visitors' Guide in 1879 shows images of the French Quarter withdrawing into the mouldy corners of a romantic ruin." She posits that this nostalgic mood actually was the beginning of a self conscious construction of Creole New Orleans.1

A nationwide audience had access to the primarily fictional accounts of New Orleans architecture and Creole culture by George Washington Cable appearing in The Century Magazine and Scribner's Magazine. "He popularized the aura of local color hanging over New Orleans’ architectural atmosphere and had diffused the sharpness of its imagery in picturesque ruinous forms."2 Cable's fabrications included architectural sites like the Old Absinthe House of 1790 and Madame Laturie's Haunted House, both of which have since been created to meet the expectations of visiting tourists.

Today, these fabrications have become part of the district's history, and the Vieux Carré has become the tourism jewel to a city that now depends on tourism. In 1895, Grace King called St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 "the mother cemetery, the Vieux Carré of the dead; as confused and closely packed a quarter as the living metropolis."3

Opening text: Christine M. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), p. 325.

1. Ibid. 325.

2. Ibid. 325

3. King, Grace. New Orleans: The Place and The People, (New York: Macmillan and Co.) 1895, 401.