LowestTravelDeals.com provides
any kind of New Orleans lodging from luxury 5-star hotels to affordable
B&B's and discount motels. Our search system provides a wide
variety of options to provide you with the best New Orleans hotel
deals and rates in a secure and instant transaction. We guarantee
you will find the right New Orleans accommodation that fits your
travel vacation.
There's a lot more to NEW ORLEANS the
''Big Easy,'' the ''city that care forgot'' than its tourist image
as a nonstop party town. At once sordid and sublime, it careers
along under an infuriating doublethink. While having enormous
amounts of fun, you're liable to be repeatedly struck by the divisions
between rich and poor (and, more explicitly, between white and
black). Even so, the city's vitality and joie de vivre are real,
buffeted but not beaten by the vagaries of commercialism and poverty.
The melange of cultures and races that built the city still gives
it its heart; not ''easy,'' exactly, but quite unlike anywhere
else in the States or the world.
New Orleans began life in 1718 as a French-Canadian
outpost. Its prime location near the mouth of the Mississippi
River , however, led to rapid development, as early as
the 1720s, its unique demography began to take shape. Despite
early resistance from its francophone population, the city benefited
greatly from its period as a Spanish colony between
1763 and 1800. By the end of the eighteenth century, the port
was flourishing, the haunt of smugglers, gamblers, prostitutes
and pirates. Newcomers included Anglo-Americans escaping the American
Revolution and aristocrats fleeing revolution in France. As in
the West Indies, the Spanish, French and free people of color
associated and formed alliances to create a distinctive Creole
culture with its own traditions and ways of life, its own patois,
and a cuisine that drew influences from Africa, Europe and the
colonies. New Orleans was already a many-textured city when it
experienced two quick-fire changes of government, passing back
into French control in 1801 and then being sold to America
under the Louisiana Purchase two years later. Unwelcome in the
Creole city today's French Quarter the Americans who migrated
here were forced to settle in the areas now known as the Central
Business District (or CBD ) and, later,
in the Garden District . Canal Street, which
divided the old city from the expanding suburbs, became known
as ''the neutral ground'' the name still used when referring to
the median strip between main roads in New Orleans.
Though much has been made of the antipathy between
Creoles and Anglo-Americans, in truth economic necessity forced
them to live and work together. They fought side by side, too,
in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans , the final
battle of the War of 1812, which secured American supremacy in
the States. The victorious general, Andrew Jackson
, became a national hero and eventually US president; his ragbag
volunteer army was made up of Anglo-Americans, slaves, Creoles,
free men of color and Native Americans, along with pirates supplied
by the notorious buccaneer Jean Lafitte .
New Orleans' antebellum '' golden age
'' as a major port and finance center for the cotton-producing
South was brought to an abrupt end by the Civil War. The economic
blow wielded by the lengthy Union occupation which effectively
isolated the city from its markets was compounded by the social
and cultural ravages of Reconstruction . As the
North industrialized and other Southern cities grew, the fortunes
of New Orleans took a downturn.
Jazz exploded into the bars and
the bordellos around 1900, and, along with the evolution of Mardi
Gras as a tourist attraction, breathed new life into
the city. And although the Depression hit here as hard as it did
the rest of the nation it also, spearheaded by a number of local
writers and artists, heralded the resurgence of the French
Quarter , which had disintegrated into a slum. Even so,
it was the less romantic duo of oil and petrochemicals
that really saved the economy until the slump of the
1950s pushed New Orleans well behind other US cities. The oil
crash of the early 1980s gave it yet another battering, a gloomy
start, but by the end of the century the tide had begun to turn,
and the city now finds itself in relatively stable condition with
a strengthening economy based on tourism .
