History, people, fables and critical essays on the 24/7 life of the French Quarter. “The great music of the city is…when you say good morning and good evening.” (Mr. Jerome Smith)
As you may have heard, Market Umbrella will be starting another year-round Crescent City Farmers Market in the French Market this fall, slated to open Wednesday, October 15 from 2-6pm. To this end, we are currently in the process of accepting new vendor applications for this exciting new Wednesday afternoon market.
We will be hosting 2 meetings for farmers, fishers, and food producers interested in becoming vendors with us: Wednesday, Sept 3 at 5:30pm at the CCFM offices (200 Broadway, suite 107) and Saturday, Sept 6 at noon, in the Saturday market space at 700 Magazine Street. This meeting will inform prospective new vendors about the market and the process for applying and vendor selection.
Great exhibit at the Historic New Orleans Collection’s Laura Simon Nelson Galleries of photographer Richard Sexton’s details of Caribbean life. It includes New Orleans, Colombia, Haiti, Ecuador and of course Cuba. The exhibit is designed well, with the New Orleans scenes hung next to their Caribbean counterpart, both photos sharing the exact same architectural or at least many composite details.
The exhibit reminds one that the Caribbean face of New Orleans is most likely another reason for its emotional distance from the rest of America. Those places have no great hold on the American imagination, as seen in the lack of the same architectural styles of Washington DC, or in Savannah or even San Antonio.
America turned its back after its imperialism was slowed by Bolivar, Castro and others and left little New Orleans (and Miami too) without any older sisters to sit with, remembering the past.
On viewing this exhibit, I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes from those dark days of 2005 post-levee break reconstruction, said by a well known Cuban architect in a piece in The Atlantic. Andrés Duany, a co-founder of the Congress for New Urbanism, and a persistent advocate for traditional small-town design, gets to the essence of New Orleans as a Caribbean city said then:
“When I originally thought of New Orleans, I was conditioned by the press to think of it as an extremely ill-governed city, full of ill-educated people, with a great deal of crime, a great deal of dirt, a great deal of poverty,” said Duany, who grew up in Cuba. “And when I arrived, I did indeed find it to be all those things. Then one day I was walking down the street and I had this kind of brain thing, and I thought I was in Cuba. Weird! And then I realized at that moment that New Orleans was not an American city, it was a Caribbean city. Once you recalibrate, it becomes the best-governed, cleanest, most efficient, and best-educated city in the Caribbean. New Orleans is actually the Geneva of the Caribbean.”
And for those that remember the old Tally Ho Restaurant that was here at the corner of Chartres and Conti, it is a treat to walk through the gallery and remember the ghosts of past grits and red beans had at that counter….
2014 is the 43rd Annual Southern Decadence celebration.However, 2014 brings us the 40th annual Sunday afternoon parade, as there was no official parade in 1972, 2005 (Hurricane Katrina) and 2008 (Hurricane Gustav).
Food We at People United for Armstrong Park are excited about the amazing local food options we have put together for Season 6 of Jazz in the Park, which starts September 4, 2014. Join us at Jazz in the Park and enjoy some delicious food from the following vendors:
Mello D’s Catering, LLC chicken Pasta, Apple Cobbler, Merliton Dressing sides: white beans, loaded mash potatoes
Lil Dustin’s Italian Ice Italian Ice in several different flavors and deep fried oreos
A & L Catering Services crab cake with crawfish sauce, chicken and sausage Jambalaya, shrimp and crawfish fettuccine, seafood sausage (alligator, crawfish and shrimp) on a bun
Ms. Dee’s Catering red beans and rice, fried chicken, hot dogs and homemade chili, file’ gumbo sides: french fries, salad
NOLA Foods ghetto burger, jerk chicken, ribeye steaks, BBQ shrimp
Ms. Ackie’s Meal on Wheels snowballs, nachos and cheese, yaka-mein and hot tamales.
(2013 post is below and shows how delicate the funding and support for this wonderful series is in constant peril; take a second to write to your council and mayor to let them know how much you enjoy the activities there.)
People United for Armstrong Park needs your help now more than ever to keep the spirit of Congo Square alive! Jazz in the Park’s future in danger as City fees double: Armstrong Park’s Nola for Life program suspended, musicians cut
Today (10/10), major programming cuts will take effect as the fees imposed on Jazz in the Park by the City of New Orleans double. Most notably, the at-risk trainees of Armstrong Park’s Nola for Life-funded Event Production Program (EPP) will lose hours. Additionally, the 2-4pm musical act has been cancelled and Thursday will be the final second line at Jazz in the Park from 4-5pm. If city fees remain at their new level, organizers say the spring series will only feature one performer per event instead of the four acts that currently perform weekly. Additionally, the event founders (themselves unpaid volunteers) have been forced to cover city fees through a personally-guaranteed emergency line of credit.
Jazz in the Park is produced by People United for Armstrong Park, a volunteer-led Treme-based non-profit now in its second year. Since the spring of 2012, PUfAP has produced 30 free public concerts, featuring more than 100 local performers and bringing over 70,000 residents and tourists into the newly renovated Armstrong Park. In four seasons, PUfAP has trained and hired 20 community members in need, many of them public housing residents, unemployed and with criminal records. All told, Jazz in the Park events provide weekly employment opportunities to over 100 community vendors, musicians and staff.
Fees levied on the free event have increased 100% this year and 1000% from 2012. Sadly, it will be those who depend on their Armstrong Park jobs the most that will pay the greatest toll. “There is no fat to cut,” says Founder Emanuel Lain Jr., “we are cutting into bone at this point.” Jazz in the Park provides its high-quality cultural programming on a bare-bones budget – approximately 80% lower than those of the concerts at Lafayette Square.
Through its community programming, PUfAP has significantly improved the perception and reality of Armstrong Park, Rampart Street and the Treme neighborhood. Their goal is to transform Armstrong Park into a premier hub of the city’s cultural economy by honoring the cultural traditions of Congo Square.
“People United for Armstrong Park has made Armstrong Park a real park instead of an under-used landscaped backdrop for the City’s performing venues. Jazz in the Park brings together such a diverse group of people – it is unlike any other event in the city,” says Treme resident Dabne Whitmore.
Richard Sexton’s Creole World: Photographs of New Orleans and the Latin Caribbean Sphere (THNOC 2014) continues to garner praise and attention.
The New York Review of Books recently featured the tome on its website. Writer Nathaniel Rich began with a quote from 19th-century travel writer Lafcadio Hearn about New Orleans: “While it actually resembles no other city upon the face of the earth, it owns suggestions of towns in Italy, and in Spain, of cities in England and in Germany, of seaports in the Mediterranean, and of seaports in the tropics.” The review goes on to say that “there’s no better illustration of this than the photographs of Richard Sexton.”
The concept behind Sexton’s Creole World project was also the subject of an lengthy article in the Miami New Times. Sexton discussed the similarities between New Orleans and Miami with the paper prior to a book signing and presentation in Coral Gables, saying that “New Orleans was the lone historical example of kind of a Creole-Caribbean place getting assimilated into the United States and an Anglo-Saxon culture with a different history. New Orleans is the historical example (of that); Miami is the modern example.”
The exhibition is on view at the Laura Simon Nelson Galleries for Louisiana Art at 400 Chartres Street, through December 7.
Malcom, one of the organizers, led a group of about 100 protestors from the cathedral to the river amphitheater, where they stopped for speeches, and then marched to the 1st District Police Station and eventually staged what organizers called a “die-in” or “lie-in.”
French Quarter block by block 
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