We are in the street, having just turned down Magazine. Ahead of us, a brass band plays, their lively, boisterous music filling the air. My newly-married friends swagger and dance at the front, the bride waving her white parasol. Neighbors lean out of their balconies, watching our procession. People poke their heads out of shops and restaurants, cheering and clapping. And it feels that these streets and structures were made just for these expressions of celebration and joy, for all kinds of folks to easily join in, too.

I have only been here a handful of times. I have had only the slightest taste of what this place has to offer and always I am left wanting more. 

I remember arriving here once at four in the morning on the night train, spending the weekend roaming the streets, sipping Sazeracs and absinthe, smoking a cigar and listening to the doleful blues down on Tchoupitoulas Street.

I have traversed many a city block, charted the course of Bayou St. John up to the Fair Grounds, biked St. Charles Avenue out to Audubon Park and watched the Mississippi laze its way past from the levee, stood on Frenchmen in Marigny at three in the morning and taken it all in. 

Even now, I am ready to return—to sit for a spell under a slowly-rotating fan on a porch or in a dim old bar, to keep drinking in this strange, enchanting place. 

Most of this city—this low-slung crescent—sits in a bowl, below the brown water of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. Up on the levee, you can imagine the water pouring in, covering block after block. The inevitable deluge.

The big one is coming. The big one has already come. This fickle river will once again have its day. At any moment, it could change its course, leap its banks. The pumps fail, the levee breaks. A city in a constant state of anticipation.

This is the city of empty lots and muddy cracked sidewalks. The city of sprawling live oaks, their outstretched arms draped in Spanish moss. The city of walled gardens, hidden patios, blooming magnolias. Mansions and shotguns. Wide boulevards and ancient streetcars. Purple-gray thunderheads breaking in the late afternoon. Curbs and corners, sidewalks and stoops, front porches and garages all come alive, an open-air function hall where there is always a reason to celebrate. 

This is a place of ferment, of culture churning. A place that is growing and changing before our very eyes. Where norms are inverted. Where the spirit of carnival reigns eternal. Where jazz itself emerged from the fray—frenzied jubilation in the face of persistent adversity. 

Its shape reflects and cultivates this vital spirit. 

A grid was cut into this crescent, extending the outlay of the Vieux Carré—creating a city of rectangular blocks. The blocks are never too long; there are many ways to traverse from one place to another—to bump into old familiar faces or try taking a less-traveled path.

The lots are long but not terribly wide, and there is substantial variation in this concentration. This is the stuff of a great city: instead of monotony, we are greeted by something different every couple dozen feet—almost always with a porch—a congregation of welcoming faces.

It is a dizzying abundance: townhouses and entresols, shotguns and double shotguns, Creole cottages and bungalows coalescing into more than the sum of their parts. A disordered order. Rhythm and variation. 

Together, the structures and streets work in concert, exuding a certain grace, making space for us all to stand and sit and see each other in close proximity, to mingle. 

The crescent itself, the city crammed into a slice of land between the river and the lake forces that concentration, physically bringing folks together. 

But was it not forced labor that wrought so much of this? Laid out these streets? Set these cornerstones?

I struggle with beatifying these buildings and blocks, made under the directions of immoral people in a deeply unjust system, by the hands of those who had precious little say in the matter.

I think of the lingering wounds from the legacies of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, urban renewal as I wander the city. A nondescript plaque declares the site of an old slave exchange on Chartres Street, one of over fifty sites spread across New Orleans. I ride the antique streetcar down St. Charles Avenue and think that it is likely that this vehicle itself once had segregated sections. I walk in the cool shade of the live oaks in Audubon Park, where Black residents were once not permitted to sit on benches, where the City once let the wading pool sit empty for seven years rather than allow it to be integrated.

Let us praise not the buildings or the streets but those who built them, who lived in the midst of this, who strove and sweat and suffered and sang in this sweltering crescent. 

Congo Square is a small plaza above North Rampart and the Vieux Carré. There are benches shaded by the boughs of old live oaks. A man in a red cowboy hat sits in his wheelchair, playing a djembe. Tour groups wander. Teenagers quarrel. Crows call. 

A red sign proclaims the square’s history: how the Houmas first gathered here to celebrate the harvest, how enslaved Africans would come together here on their Sundays off to mingle and dance and sell, how the music they made and remembered and cultivated here has since become so much more—the very bedrock of jazz, of Mardi Gras parades and second lines. 

How what would come to define this raucous, resilient city first happened here. 

In that jazz we can find that selfsame transcendent spirit—notes that leap from the page, away from the rote melody, into something living and ephemeral, difficult to capture into words, never before played, never to be played again. 

It is a music born out of hardship, struggle, and pain. It is something syncretic, molded by memory and community and collision. Endurance in the face of endless setbacks. Beauty created in spite of it all. A transfiguration.

And, here in Congo Square, the man in the red cowboy hat drums on.