bigeasy history, culture and bon temps on a two wheel tour of new orleans
words By Kim Cross # Photography by Reuben Krabbe
We had just left the Sazerac bar at the Roosevelt Hotel—the second stop on le Tour de Cocktail—when it became evident why open containers on bikes are legal in New Orleans. Exhibit A: If you’re pedaling, you’re not driving. Exhibit B: Cruisers with back-pedal brakes free your hand for a go-cup. Exhibit C: Walking under the influence can be equally perilous. It was an epic stumble. Drink in hand, I tripped—over the curb, the kickstand…my memory of it remains as muddled as a julep—and began a slow-motion tumble face-first into the hot tar of Baronne Street. One step was not arrest to the momentum. Two steps, I still had time to think, Oh, this is going to end badly. Three, I braced for an asphalt facial. Only after the fourth lurching step did I find myself amazed to be vertical, without spilling a drop of my Ramos Gin Fizz. The Roosevelt doorman gave me a slow-clap. There’s nothing like playing tourist in a town you once called home. To learn more about Crescent City culture, history, and neighborhoods I wish I had explored when I briefly lived here, I cast aside my once-local pride and signed up for a commercial tour. Allergic to anything involving amphibious vehicles or double-decker buses, I settled on a bike tour recommended for the I-don’t-do-tours type. I wasn’t sure what to expect. At the very least, I reasoned, I could create my own breeze in a clime where walking is a watersport. I chose the Confederacy of Cruisers, a small, local company known for its colorful themes (See: the History of Drinking Tour) and a fleet of beach cruisers—the poster bike of NoLa hub culture. The founders are a couple of pre-Katrina locals with a literary bent (their company name is a nod to NoLa-based novel Confederacy of Dunces). And I had heard their meticulously curated guides know their history just as well as they know the best neighborhood bars, po’boy dives, and where Kermit Ruffins is playing when he’s not filming Tremé. I gathered with a half-dozen out-of-towners—none of them avid cyclists—at Washington Square, a small park near the world-class blues bars of Frenchmen’s Street. I swung a leg over a vanilla-colored cruiser with a basket, whitewall tires, and a saddle as big as a barstool. A leggy brunette in her 30s strode up in wedges and abbreviated shorts and introduced herself as our guide. “If I’ve done my job,” Lara Desmond announced, “You’ll understand that it’s not our fault that we’re so weird.” Lara kicked off the Creole tour—the company’s first and most popular—in the shade of live oaks, covering roughly 200 years of New Orleans history in a 10-minute tease: Bienville, the French colonist we
46 / pavedmag.com can thank for discovering this crescent bend in the Mississippi. The city’s rollicking 21day transition from French to Spanish to American rule. What “Creole” means, and how that has changed. Then we rolled off at a pace that lived up to the T-shirt slogan: Not even close to exercise. “Here’s one of my favorite facts about New Orleans,” Lara said as we soft-pedaled past houses the color of Easter eggs. “By 1850, 40 percent of the city was owned by free women of color.” Lara knows how to make history sexy. Her other job—mixologist at the storied R Bar—probably helps. She knows how to read people, and doesn’t mind going off-script to cater to their questions. Even after years of giving this tour, she still does it with a genuine enthusiasm and a quick wit. She seems less like a tour guide and more like that knowledgeable friend-of-a-friend that you want to look up in a town like
this, where some of the best local haunts are hidden in the dark alleys between tourist traps. Lara led us through historic neighborhoods whose charms are lost on tourists who never leave the French Quarter—which is to say: many. Leaving the American quarters (the Garden District and anything north of Canal) to other tours, the Confederacy of Cruisers’ Creole tour explores the faubourgs, the French neighborhoods where change is deliciously slow and the Frenchness is present in everything from architecture to menus to church. Dodging Ponchartrain-sized potholes, we cruised through the Faubourg Marigny, a historic neighborhood of modest 19-century homes. Many were second homes purchased by white gentlemen for their mistresses of color, a 19th century arrangement known as plaçage. Today they are inhabited by artists, musicians, and families who’ve been
there for generations. We braked to admire candy-colored shotgun houses (so named because you could open the front and back doors and shoot a bullet straight through) and learned why they were built that way, stacked room to room, with no hallways: “Everything was designed to keep you cool in the summer.” We saw the nation’s oldest WWI monument, the Bywater Art Lofts, and the only Catholic Church in the country with an official Jazz Mass. We learned about pirates, Prohibition, Napoleon. We contemplated race relations at the spot where Homer Plessy—of Plessy v Ferguson—deliberately got himself arrested by sitting in the whites-only section of a streetcar in 1892. We stood near a levee and watched passing ships towering overhead, a sight that makes you understand—in a disturbing, non-theoretical way—that New Orleans is a sunken bowl of land surrounded by water. We learned
how to read the search-andrescue symbols spray-painted on Katrina homes, and left there by residents as a symbol of solidarity, strength, and survival. This is now the macabre New Orleans tattoo of choice. We learned what makes a po’boy a po’boy (the crusty baguette), how to order one “dressed’, how they got the name (they were brought to poor striking workers to keep them on the picket line), and where to get one (Johnny’s Po’Boy on St. Louis, between Decatur and Chartres). Stop No. 12, three-quarters of the way through the 3-hour tour, was a pleasant layover where we tasted the unsung legacy of Irish immigrants: the neighborhood bar. Well off the tourist track, Marie’s Bar in the Marigny is noteworthy in that it is ordinary. Every neighborhood has a Marie’s—a place where neighbors catch up on with friends, watch the Saints, or ogle a new baby. It is antithetical to the sticky-
Don’t write this off as just another booze cruise
It’s history in disguise...
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floored Bourbon Street bars that will sell you a “yard of beer” or a Hurricane-flavored daiquiri in a cup the size of a Big Gulp. As my eyes adjusted from the mid-day sun to the cool darkness of Marie’s, I noticed the local news flickering on the TV behind the bar. On a weather map, an angry-looking tie-dyed blob swirled across the Gulf of Mexico. It appeared to be aimed right at New Orleans. “Uh-oh,” I said to the bartender, a friendly, lithe woman wielding a shaker. “That doesn’t look good.” “What’s that?” she said. “That tropical storm,” I said, nodding at the TV. “Oh,” she said, glancing over her shoulder with genuine surprise. “I hadn’t even noticed.” This is why they call it the Big Easy. As the bartender shook my Bad Ass Bloody Mary—Marie’s signature drink, a spicy liquid
salad with two olives, celery, green beans, pickled okra, and several shakes of black pepper— I got to talking with the local at my elbow, a friendly older man with weathered skin and a curious accent. He introduced himself as “Mr. Mack—but they call me PawPaw.” “I’m not from New Orleans,” PawPaw said. “I’m from up north.” “Where’s that?” I said, trying to place his accent. “Nachitoches,” he said. “Up between Shreveport and Alexandria.” This makes perfect sense, actually, if you consider New Orleans “the northernmost city of the Caribbean,” as the Confederacy of Cruisers founders do. It runs on its own time. Its reality is relative and open to interpretation. It is a place where serendipity reigns and the best moments of a tour are those that wander off-script. In the Tremé we stopped
in front of St. Augustine, the country’s oldest black Catholic church, where free people of color once bought pews for slaves so they could all worship together. It’s known for its annual Jazz Mass and a regular Sunday Mass that sounds more like Gospel. The church is on DeLille Street, named after a nun who is up for Canonization as New Orlean’s newest saint. Someone wanted to know which nuns. Lara shrugged and hollered at the AfricanAmerican priest walking by. “Hey Father!” she yelled. “What order did Henriette DeLille belong to?” “Sisters of the Holy Family,” he said without breaking stride. Near the end, we passed a Segway tour (led by a dude in a red shirt that helpfully spelled out GUIDE) and a doubledecker bus with a narrator squawking nasally over a megaphone. Both underscored just how right it feels to experience
New Orleans on a bike. Tour or no tour, the Big Easy is better by bike. For one thing, driving here sucks. The streets are narrow (I once got “doored” while driving a car) and parking is dreadful (I have been towed twice: once after midnight, and once in front of a convent.) If you can figure out how to navigate in a city shaped like a croissant, where parallel streets converge and main thoroughfares might in certain months be blocked for hours by a parade, good luck finding a parking spot. And then there are the layers of texture you miss when you’re driving by at 35 miles per hour in a shell of metal and glass. The glittering beads dripping from trees, sun-bleached since some distant parade. The graffiti that could pass for art. The way the sun back-lights the Spanish moss cascading from gnarled live oaks. The heat waves rising from the asphalt along with the distinc-
tive odor that is, if not pleasant, singularly New Orleans. The chitchat with locals who wave from their porches at strangers. They do not wave at strangers in cars. The Confederacy of Cruisers was founded on these intangibles. “We wanted to create a tour that we would actually take. It was either some crusty historian or a guy with fangs talking about vampires,” says co-founder Lycia Ferguson. “We wanted to show people that New Orleans is so much more than boobs and Bourbon Street.” Lycia and founder Jeff Shyman were independent travelers who abhorred the idea of group tours. Until one trip when, traveling in Peru, they reluctantly decided to take one. Their guide’s honest and authentic passion for his culture became the highlight of their trip. They thought, “Why can’t we do this at home?” Once back in New Orleans, Jeff enrolled in history courses
to understand the city’s intoxicatingly complex past. He bought 5 Schwinn cruisers and, lacking a place to store them, locked them street signs. The rest of the business lived in Lycia’s 1987 Ford Bronco II. Jeff led every tour for nearly a year. Lycia took over the books. Word spread. They added more tours that could only be done in New Orleans. Like the History of Drinking tour, which includes a little swiveling cupholder, so your go-cup won’t spill as you rattle over the cobblestones. Don’t write this off as just another booze cruise. It’s history in disguise, unveiling the rich drinking traditions of the city where bars never close, from the invention of the first cocktail— the Sazerac—to the banning and unbanning of Absinthe (new recipes omit wormwood, thought to cause insanity), to the well-practiced technique of days-long debauchery: Eating
copiously and remembering, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Cassady Cooper, who leads the culinary, Creole, and Ninth Ward tours, is a Wiki on wheels who read 35 books before taking his first group out. A dyed-inthe-linen local whose family has lived here since the late 1700s, he is a member of the St. Anthony Ramblers, one of the marching groups that parade through the Quarter on Fat Tuesday, dressed like Halloween, and led by a brass band. If he does not have the answer to your question, he knows how to find it. Cassady’s stops on the delightful culinary tour are catered to the appetite of each group, but standards include barbecue shrimp at Liuzza’s By the Track, fried chicken and gumbo at Little Dizzy’s—“some of the best Creole soul food in Tremé”—and the surf-and-turf po’boy (fried shrimp and roast beef) at Parkway. “I wanted to make a tour
about how we ate when I grew up,” Cooper says, “because the culture of New Orleans food is changing.” Now in their 6th year, the Confederacy of Cruisers has expanded into a shop with local art and a rental business called A Bicycle Named Desire. The name is not gratuitous. The shop can be found at 632 Elysian Fields, the address of Stanley and Stella’s apartment in the Tennessee Williams play. To reach it, Stella’s sister, Blanche Dubois, was told to take a streetcar named Desire, transfer to one called Cemeteries, and get off at Elysian Fields. Which could only happen here. In one of my favorite lines from that play, Blanche says, “Don’t you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour— but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands—and who knows what to do with it?” I can think of a thing or two.