"Birth of the Cool"

New Orleans, LA
Louisiana State Museum Cabildo/Arsenal and Presbytere
701 Chartres Street, Jackson Square
Saturday, July 7, 2001

That afternoon, I ended my pleasant stay in New Orleans with an unplanned visit to the Louisiana State Museum Cabildo/Arsenal in the heart of Jackson Square.  Adjoining the Presbytere on 701 Chartres Street, the Cabildo was once a city hall for the Sala Capitular, a legislature that overturned an earlier decision at the expense of Homer A. Plessy, a light-complexioned Black man, in an 1892 ruling concerning desegregation in public transportation.  Ascending the plush, red-carpeted stairway leading to the legislators' chambers, I studied the framed oil paintings and masks posted on the red-painted walls.  Before I studied the exhibits chronicling the events that gave shape to Reconstruction, including the Colfax Riot on Easter Sunday 1873, I studied numerous artifacts, including a pirogue, vintage photographs, and an oil painting of the commercial ship Yndia on the ground floor.  According to a video presentation on the same floor, New Orleans is reportedly a "gumbo" of African-American, European, South American, and Native American influences.  Each group brought their indigenous foods and built their own institutions, giving New Orleans (and the state of Louisiana) a multifaceted identity.  Enslaved Africans grew and harvested guingumbo (okra), the French invented the roux (oil-flour mixture for thickening soups and sauces) and file powder (ground sassafras for spicing foods), and Native Americans devised clever ways to trap game and gather crops.  Not a bad day at the Museum for $5!

This was taken from my New Orleans 2001 notebook.  Every now and then, I like to revisit life-changing and meaningful events in my travel notebooks kept over the years, whether it is a walk down Atlanta's historic Auburn Avenue in the hot sun (July 1994) or a walk to the Louvre and the Orsay on an icy cold and rainy afternoon in Paris (February 2010).  Retracing my steps, if not physically, helps me see what travel is about...or what it should be about.